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Lumby Flood Recovery Costly

Aug 17, 2017 | 10:39 AM

Lumby is facing a heavy load in dealing with flood recovery.

It cost over 2 and a half million dollars to deal with the flooding.

The province is covering most of that but the village could still be on the hook for over 400 thousand dollars, maybe as much as a half million.

Mayor Kevin Acton says much of that will come from federal gas tax revenue it received that was going to be used for other projects.

“So, what we’ll do is we’ll in fact cancel those projects and the money that was set aside for those projects will go towards covering the cost of the flood mitigation.”

Acton says they’ll also dip into reserves to the tune of about 90 thousand dollars.

The projects include sidewalk maintenance and new sidewalks as well as a much-needed cemetery master plan.

“because our poor cemetery on the outskirts of town is just dug up by moles and thinks are cracking and weeds are taking over. The guys work really hard to try and take care of it, but without a master plan and putting some money into it, it’s a challenge.”

Mayor Acton says much needs to be done to plan for the future.

“We’ve just put together the bid for the work to do to set out the terms of reference for the study that needs to be done to decide how we’re going to deal with the flood waters.”

He says he wants people to understand it could be a year or two before everything is in place.

“For sure, I would say it will be next summer before I would even suggest somebody start planting something on their berm because we might have to come in and change the shape of them or add to them or take away from the. There’s still some engineering to do there.”

Acton says he’d hate to see somebody go and spend a bunch of money that may end up being wasted.