A city councillor hopes the province will give a local watershed group some $350,000 to do research on the Sturgeon watershed.
City council signed off on a motion Monday to allow the Association of Summer Villages Lac St. Anne Counties East Administration to seek a $350,000 grant from the province for a trio of studies by the Sturgeon River Watershed Alliance. Sturgeon and Parkland County are expected to pass similar motions later this month.
The Sturgeon River Watershed Alliance is the regional group meant to set policies to preserve wetlands and water bodies in and around the Sturgeon River.
The group wants to do studies of the region’s water use, water quality and natural areas in order to get some policy recommendations, said Coun. Gilles Prefontaine, chair of the alliance’s steering committee.
“The watershed as a whole is much greater than the Sturgeon River,” he said. Although many studies have been done on the river, few have been done on all the lakes and wetlands in it.
These studies are meant to pull together information on the river and look for regional trends, said city environmental manager Mike Mellross. They will particularly focus on the supply and demand of water in the region, as little research has been done on it.
The alliance hopes to use these studies to minimize the effects of development on the watershed and restore natural areas damaged over the last century, Prefontaine said.
The summer village of Silver Sands is taking the lead on this grant because it is near the headwaters of the Sturgeon and has great interest in its health, Prefontaine said. Its small size also lets it qualify for a specific category of Alberta community partnership grant from the province.
The studies will likely be done by March 2016 if the grant gets approved, Prefontaine said.
