WESTLOCK – Westlock County received $131,33.24 less than what they had hoped for in a five-year-old claim to the Disaster Recovery Program (DRP) of Alberta, a shortfall that will be covered as part of the municipality’s 2022 operating surplus.
At the March 28 regular meeting, finance director Peggy Hardinge told councillors that they recently received a final report from the DRP regarding the $444,484.98 claim they made in 2018 for bridge and road repairs following that spring’s “rapid snow melt” which led to “a flood event.”
Her report notes that payments and adjustments have been processed by the county in the amount of $313,151.74, leaving a balance of $131,333.24, while the DRP’s final report advised that “their review is now complete, and no additional funds will be received.”
She goes on to state that “most of the portion of the claim” that was not funded was for “bridge repairs deemed to be part of mitigation and non-mandatory enhancement per the engineer's report” — she clarified that the damage to the bridge was pegged at $254,000 and the DRP covered $117,000. Following a 7-0 vote of council, the $131,33.24 will be covered as part of a $946,9000 surplus from the 2022 operating budget.
In questions from councillors, CAO Tony Kulbisky noted that via this program “the province never reimburses the municipality 100 per cent” and that county administration of the day “was hoping” that all, or at least a “bigger chunk” would have been covered.
“This is obviously way, way, way before my time, but what I would suspect is that when this application was made there was probably hopefulness that the full amount would be covered by the province and clearly it wasn’t,” Kulbisky said.
“This council has to deal with making the adjustment so that the part that was ineligible all along is now being rectified through your 2022 operating year-end surplus and it won’t impact reserves.”
While councillors voted 7-0 to accept the bill, Coun. Stuart Fox-Robinson asked administration for more information on the process, what work was done and “perhaps, maybe, we made a mistake in the process and what we can learn from it” — Kulbisky noted he’ll be sending a follow-up e-mail directly to councillors to answer those questions.
“I think the fact that we have a $131,000 expense here, I think $131,000 is enough of an amount for council to receive a detailed explanation … $131,000 is a chunk of money,” he said.
“What would concern me then is that we had this event, had an engineer’s report and we then applied to the DRP for ‘X’ amount of money and here we are basically five years later finding out that they’re not going to cover a portion of it, and we’ve actually done the work.”
