Cache Creek Council met with MLA Jackie Tegart last week to see if she could lend some weight to post-flood projects that Emergency Management BC (EMBC) is “questioning or rejecting.”
EMBC is calling the hyroseeding along Stage Rd. “landscaping” and refusing the $1,400 project even through Mayor John Ranta said it’s only replacing what was already there.
“It was done in 2006 when the road was paved,” said Ranta, but EMBC says it’s not eligible for funding. Ranta says their own criteria says they will fund work that is in the public interest.
There are two projects on Old Cariboo Road. One is a ditching project that has been cut back to one-third of the estimated cost of $32,000. Ranta said Public Works crew had to do some work along the road and it seems the government agency has deducted that work. He added that EMBC seems to be tightening their budget more now after a summer of disasters around the province.
There is also an area adjacent to the road and river that seems to be crumbling, he said. It could start to undermine the road if that happens and then it will cost more than the $60,000 to repair it, but EMBC says the Village cant prove that it wasn’t like that before the flood.
EMBC is still insisting that the Village needs to prove ownership of a water diversion ditch on Valleyview Dr. even though there is no record of it and no easement. “That’s the way things were done in those days,” says Ranta. That project is estimated at $80,000.
There is also a sewer easement in a residential driveway on Valleyview in need of topsoil and seeding.
Ranta says they’re necessary projects, and if EMBC won’t approve them, the Village will have to pay for them without provincial assistance – once it is finished paying for the rest of the repairs. Even with provincial assistance, Cache Creek will be left with approximately $1 million in repair bills.
EMBC covers only 80 per cent of any costs of a project that it deems eligible.
