The Sturgeon River contains too little oxygen and too much phosphorus to support most species of fish and aquatic life. The fact those water quality findings, released as part of NAIT’s ongoing study of the river’s watershed, hardly come as a surprise to anyone in St. Albert is a damning condemnation of the lack of leadership shown for our city’s greatest natural asset. And while city hall continues to wait for more data from NAIT plus yet another round of conclusions through its own State of the Sturgeon River report, the rest of us continue to get impatient and wonder just how long the issue can be put off before repairing the damage takes centuries if not longer.
Three words can be used to describe city hall’s focus on the river issue: delay, delay, delay. The river’s decline via pollutants and sedimentation has been visually apparent over the past few decades and chronicled by several provincial studies and city reports. Between 1986 and 2003 some 16,000 cubic metres of sediment, much of it from road sanding, found its way into the river. That gunk is coming from storm sewers inside the city, the annual equivalent of 150 tandem dump trucks worth of grit. Those figures were taken from the city’s 2004 stormwater management master plan, a document that offered a key solution to sedimentation problems by proposing the construction of 23 hydrocarbon grit interceptors and settling ponds over 10 years. The first was built by city hall the year before the study came out and was estimated to remove the same amount of sedimentation as what we put into the river.
In the subsequent seven years almost as much dust has gathered on that report as grit making its way into the river. Just one grit interceptor has been built — the settling pond west of the Boudreau Bridge. The rest of that time has seen successive councils dither on the grit interceptor program, passing the buck due to the sizeable, though not insurmountable, $10-million cost of the program. Despite the 2004 stormwater plan’s findings, council was also asked to wait for an analysis of which interceptor was more effective — the concrete style at city hall or the pond. Those studies weren’t cheap either and took three years, at one point prompting Mayor Nolan Crouse to utter: “It feels like an analysis-paralysis [situation].” By now council knows the pond-style interceptors are preferred because they not only remove grit but also filter out chemicals. Since then council has approved just $2.4 million for interceptors, with another $2 million for sediment removal called for in 2013. The rest of the 10-year capital plan is silent on the matter.
Given the history of inaction in the face of reasonable solutions, perhaps it’s unrealistic to expect the current council to improve city hall’s track record on the sedimentation file. City hall has pointed to successes through the two interceptors and catch basin cleaning program, which nets about 86 per cent of the grit going into the river. That’s not good enough, especially when basic problems are ignored like the pile of sand that lands on the frozen river every time a plow clears snow from one of the city’s bridges. The problem has been documented — even pointed out to city council by environmentalist Elke Blodgett — yet it takes the NAIT study to prompt city officials into taking action?
The water quality in the Sturgeon River clearly is not just St. Albert’s problem, but we can show leadership and be part of the solution with other municipalities and levels of government. We can control the amount of dirt and chemicals that navigate their way into the watershed in our borders. Every single member on council listed the Sturgeon River as a priority during last fall’s election campaign — heck, Crouse even used the river as an example of the type of amenities St. Albert offers that justifies the higher level of property taxes. By all means, wait for one more study in the state of the river report. But we’re getting tired of waiting, especially when the answers are ignored because they’re an inconvenient truth.
