Council aiming to never repeat ‘mess’ along river escarpment
The city is shelling out an estimated $28 million to fix a crumbling slope that threatened homes in the southeast neighbourhoods of Douglasdale and Mckenzie Lake, leaving city councillors questioning how to prevent the past from repeating itself.
A council committee heard a public report about the cost of stabilizing the slope along the Bow River pathway for the first time Tuesday.
Work began in 2018 to shore up a key 3.5-kilometre section of pathway, and city officials said all the money put toward the project was necessary to solve the problem, which threatened upwards of 24 homes.
“How are we making sure this never happens again?” Coun. Evan Woolley asked, calling the price tag an “astonishingly large” amount of money.
Mayor Naheed Nenshi had a similar reaction. “How did we end up in this mess?” he said.
Council heard that it’s likely that too much time has passed to recover any money from the neighbourhood developer, but city officials said the process of approving development along slopes and escarpments has since changed.
Nenshi said while the city knows rainfall led to erosion that made the slope unstable, it’s less clear why potential problems weren’t flagged during the development process.
“I’ve asked that I get some assurances that as we are developing new communities in the future, we are taking into account that development — buildings, homes — have to be well back from these types of escarpments,” he said.
Council previously looked at other options behind closed doors, and Nenshi said the stabilization work, with an initial budget of $25 million, was the least expensive. A city official told council that “letting the slope fail naturally” would have cost much more.
Nenshi said it’s “pretty much common sense” that development in the future shouldn’t happen near the edge of an escarpment.