County of Warner has concerns with expansion of Twin River Natural Area
The reeve of the County of Warner says his council is not in favour of redesignating and expanding the Twin River Heritage Rangeland Natural Area without certain caveats being added into the mix.
“The Milk River area has serious water security problems,” says Reeve Ross Ford. “With the International Joint Agreement on the Milk River and St. Mary, the infrastructure where the diversion (down to the United States) takes place is 100 years old, and a lot of it needs to be replaced. If it ever failed, this area would be out of water, basically. There have been numerous studies done on the Milk River in regards to storage, and one of the studies identified the site on the grazing reserve where the two rivers come together as the best location for onstream storage (a dam).”
Ford suggests the government should potentially do a 4,000-acre offset where the land needed for the dam is taken out of the Twin River Heritage Rangeland Natural Area agreement for that use, and local landowner Audrey Taylor’s 4,000 acres, the main local leaseholder wanting the expansion of the natural area, is added in.
Otherwise to expand the natural area, and not allow for this kind of water caveat where the rivers meet for onstream storage, is not in anyone’s best interests among those living in the area, Ford would suggest, not even Taylor’s.
“Audrey Taylor is only one leaseholder; there are 19 in total,” Ford says. “She doesn’t speak for everybody.”
The other aspect of this discussion Ford would like to see addressed is the serious risk of grassfires in the natural area, and the difficulties County of Warner firefighters already have accessing the region due to past government decisions.
“The other concern we have as a municipality is we are required to fight fires in that region, but they (the government) have closed all the road allowances citing environmental concerns into that area so we are not able to get in there,” he says, pointing to the fact out-of-control wildfires in an area with few access roads and water storage problems may represent an even larger environmental concern.
“Some of things a government does, doesn’t make a lot of sense sometimes, but they are not on the ground and a lot of the people who are making the decisions are in Edmonton in an office somewhere ... They talk about consultation, but their idea of consultation is we come and tell you what we are going to do.”