I would like to begin by thanking the City of St. Albert for including BLESS as a stakeholder in the process of developing a Riel Recreation Park Master Plan as well as the city's contractor Gibbs Brown and Johansson for facilitating the workshops.
The workshops were for the most part productive and inclusive. We do, however, have concerns with the outcome -- the master plan that will be presented to council later this evening.
In early stakeholder meetings, the city's engineering and environmental staff indicated their intent was to route stormwater from the new recreation park south into the east bay of the city's Riel stormwater facility. There were several reasons why we were every pleased to hear that was going to happen.
The new recreational park will of course be situated on the city's old landfill site. One of the primary purposes of developing the site is to mitigate the long-standing problem of leachate from the old dump migrating into the Sturgeon River by installing capping material over the dump contents to avoid infiltration and reduce the amount of leachate being generated. Unfortunately, eliminating infiltration to the greatest extent possible will significantly increase the rate of stormwater runoff from the site. Although the calculations haven't yet been done, city engineers have said the rate of runoff will very likely exceed the recommended rate of 2.5 litres per second per hectare outlined in both the City's Stormwater Management Master Plan and the Big Lake Basin Study produced by Associated Engineering.
The high runoff rate would be partially mitigated by routing stormwater from the entire site into the Riel treatment facility to control the rate of release into the watershed. It would also help prevent pollutants such as automobile oil, gas, antifreeze and road salts from the proposed new roads, parking and RV lots from being flushed directly into the river.
Unfortunately, city engineers have changed tack and are now proposing to route stormwater from one third of the site directly into the Sturgeon River. We have already experienced the deleterious effect of high runoff rates from St. Albert streets on the Sturgeon River. We are aware of the extreme costs of retrofitting oil and grit separators to compensate for inadequate stormwater planning of prior eras. It clearly makes economic sense to recognize stormwater impacts up front in new developments and to plan to minimize those impacts to the greatest extent possible instead of retrofitting expensive structures for mitigation after the fact.
The proposed budget for the Riel Recreational Area that will be put before you tonight has nothing in it to mitigate the effects of routing stormwater from one third of the new development directly into the river. City engineers have said the effects of running all that increased stormwater directly into the river are inconsequential. They are not. Decisions made in planning this park will have effect decades into the future. The development will significantly increase the current rate of runoff from the area. Development with new roads and parking lots will introduce a new source of pollutants into the Sturgeon River. The time to deal with such impacts is now, in the planning stage, not ten or twenty years from now after the site has been developed and the costs of stormwater mitigation have increased exponentially.
Council should be aware that the federal funding part of the CAMRIF grant, should the grant be successful, mandates adherence to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. The federal Act requires, as a minimum, that an environmental screening of the same sort that was done for the West Regional Road be conducted. The process is designed to identify potential environmental impacts of development projects up front, before approval and release of federal funds. It therefore makes sense to effectively address the impact of stormwater runoff on the Sturgeon River early in the process of planning for Riel Recreational Park.
We ask that council instruct administration to revisit the plan that will be put before you tonight with the objective of eliminating all uncontrolled stormwater release into the Sturgeon River and include the costs of doing so in the projected budget for the new development.
Dave Burkhart, on behalf of the Big Lake Environment Support Society and the Sturgeon River.
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| Riel Recreational Park Drainage Plan |
| Drainage Map created by the City of St. Albert |