City could save millions in the long run with some water wise ways now: CAO

By Timothy Schafer

Becoming wise in the ways of water now could save the city up to $15 million later on, says the City of Grand Forks chief administrative officer.

Doug Allin said if the knowledge isn’t gained now on how to preserve and enhance the city’s aquifer, it could cost taxpayers up to $15 million — plus ongoing costs of operation and maintenance — for construction of a water treatment plant on the river if the aquifer failed in the future.

“Right now there are people doing all kinds of things to risk the aquifer and we are not doing anything about it,” he said. “We have to educate the community how to protect these things.”

The health and understanding of the city’s aquifer — a body of permeable rock that can contain or transmit groundwater — is the key component of a pilot project now underway at city hall, the Municipal Natural Assets Initiative, one of five such projects now taking place across Canada.

Last week city council received a peek into the project which began last summer to look at natural features such as wetlands and how it protects city infrastructure, the water supply and water quality.

This all feeds into asset management and how the city can optimize its natural assets that keep appreciating in value, said city engineering technologist, Graham Watt, and how it might work into financial reporting.

The study centres around the significant oxbow that runs throughout the city, and examines how the big water system buffers storm water in the city, and how it protects the river in a way that the city could never afford to build, said Watt.

“It’s incredibly a big challenging project. In a way we are building the blocks of data,” he said.

The data will also allow the city to analyze the impacts of development on storm water runoff and find solutions to offset it.

Once complete, the entire plan will be incorporated into the city’s Official Community Plan, and will reduce the financial impacts to the residents of the community, said Allin.

“(At that point) it will no longer be part of a project, it will become the way we operate,” he said. “It’s an ongoing process. It will become a way for us to protect it for the future.”

The city cannot amortize and replace a river, said Allin, but it can preserve the aquifer which helps the river.

“If we look after our aquifer for a long period of time, we don’t need to treat that water to remove organics out of it, we only have to treat it from an Interior Health perspective to make sure there is no bacteria in the water that could make people sick,” Allin told council.

“We have a luxury, we have to learn to look after it, nurture it and that is what this information is doing for us.”

Right now the key work is pulling together all of the hydrological input data for the project for the analysis, and developing work plans for going through the analysis, said Watt.

“This really lock steps with the work we are doing in the department to look at the sustainable community plan process,” he said.

The next few months will pull together data on how the wetlands are working for the city, and how much capacity does the wetland around the oxbow allow for hydrology. After starting to see how it might work, Watt said the city will run a hydrologic model in spring to test its theories.

The project wraps up late next summer.