Some local competition for provincial flood money

By Collin Gallant on August 26, 2017.

Municipal Affairs Minister Shaye Anderson visited Medicine Hat this week, but how often can you say the real intrigue may have taken place in Bow Island?

There, the distinctively bearded MLA met with members of a Regional Drainage Committee, who are proposing $150 million in flood and drought mitigation projects.

It’s a big group, made up of irrigators and local governments across the deep south, including Medicine Hat, which causes a sort of diplomatic juggle for a city that’s own berm plan is competing for provincial funds.

Local city Councillor Les Pearson, a regional committee delegate, summed up his position and the current council tact in talks with the province.

“Medicine Hat supports in principle the goals of the Regional Drainage Committee, but our first priority is our own berms in our own city,” he told the News.

City officials tell the News this week that their ‘ask’ during the yearly application period for the flood project funding will be about $15 million. That involves new construction and reimbursement for work already paid for by reserve funds.

Those applications go to the Alberta Community Resilience Program, technically administered by Parks and Environment, but there are a few ministries involved from Transportation to Agriculture to Municipal Affairs.

“Everything happens in a municipality, and that’s why I’m meeting with a bunch of different groups,” Anderson told the News on Wednesday.

“Down here some big ones are irrigators who have some big issues that they have been talking with (Ag minister Oniel) Carlier about. I speak frequently with him about these types of things.”

Also to note: The regional committee wishlist of dam, canal and reservoir expansions, includes several projects the city has a stake in seeing move ahead.

There is a $25-million “priority” expansion of the Murray Lake Reservoir — which threatened to burst in 2011. Spillway work worth $13 million would better link reservoirs to the South Saskatchewan River, reducing the amount of water entering the Seven Persons Creek in times of trouble.

Sports shorts

A sharper wit might say Bill Yuill is snapping up hockey franchises like they were baseball teams.

The Medicine Hat-based mogul, who at one time owned enough minor baseball clubs to serve as an entire development chain for a major league franchise, added to his hockey holdings this week.

Yuill’s Consolidated Sports Holdings, Inc. this week became a majority shareholder in the Peoria (Illinois) Rivermen of the Southern Professional Hockey League. That’s an independent circuit that gobbled up the team after the American Hockey League left town in 2013.

That brings the number to five of mainly independent hockey clubs in Yuill’s stable, including the Everett Silvertips of the WHL.

On the baseball side, he has four entries in a California collegiate wood bat circuit that is similar to the loop of the local Mavericks.

In somewhat related news, the Helena Brewers (which were the Medicine Hat Blue Jays before 2002) are on the move again.

Owner D.G. Elmore will put the club in Colorado Springs in 2019, when his Triple-A team there — the SkySox — relocate to San Antonio.

Helena had posted the Pioneer League’s worst attendance since at least 2005.

A look ahead

The last week of summer shows no official committee business before council next gathers on Sept. 5. That Tuesday, following Labour day, also the first day of classes in major local districts.

100 years ago

With a Union government expected to contest an upcoming election, Nelson Spencer, the city’s Conservative MLA, had withdrawn as a Federal Tory Party candidate, the News reported on Aug. 23, 1917.

Spencer’s note came in a cable from Europe, where he was serving as commander of the 175th “Medicine Hat” Battalion.

Elsewhere, the so-called “Laurier Liberals” were forming to oppose the joint Tory-Liberal campaign.

And, yet even more intrigue, Ottawa papers reported that Alberta Liberal Premier Arthur Sifton was reported as having arrived in that city the day that Public Works Minister Robert Rogers resigned as a protest to the coalition.

In the region, hail in Alderson broke every west-facing window in the town west of Medicine Hat.

The town of Estuary, Sask, virtually burned to the ground on Aug. 29, despite special water tank cars hauled in by the CPR. Two days later the fire was only being contained at a lumberyard, after it had razed 14 businesses.