'We have to cut in other areas' LRCA says after province slashes money for mandatory flood programs

The chair of the Lakehead Region Conservation Authority in northwestern Ontario says it will continue to provide all mandated flood programming despite a 50 per cent reduction in the funding it gets from the province for those initiatives, but will have to cut in other areas.

The 2019 provincial budget cut its share of funding for flood management programs in half — programs that conservation authorities are mandated to do by the province, LRCA chair Donna Blunt told CBC News.  That means, she added, the organization will have to go back into its approved budget for this year, amend it and then figure out the scope of non-mandatory services it can offer in the future.

The cut, Blunt said, came about one-third of the way through the authority's current budget cycle.

"We have to cut in other areas and that's what's going to be difficult," Blunt said. "We don't do a lot of above-and-beyond the core mandated programs."

"I think we're a responsible organization and we're going to look seriously at our next budget and see how we can continue in the future especially if they don't reinstate this funding."

The LRCA says it routinely got about $292,000 from Queen's Park for these efforts, which is now down to about $151,000. The authority's total budget is about $2.7 million, however, that also includes project-based federal funding for updating flood plain mapping.

The LRCA's mandatory flood programs include things like flood management and warning initiatives, management of its flood plains — or pieces of land owned by the conservation authority that serve as protection against rising waters — providing input to municipal official plans that guide development near waterways, doing technical studies, overseeing erosion control and maintaining the Neebing-McIntyre Floodway in Thunder Bay.

Andrea Minano, a PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo, where she runs the Flood Policy Research Group, has said, generally, conservation authorities receive about eight per cent of their funding from the province and just over 50 per cent from municipalities.

Minano and LRCA officials also said that, overall, provincial funding for conservation authorities has gone down ever since the mid-1990s.

"These cuts to conservation authorities translates to a form of downloading to municipalities to pay for provincially-mandated programs that the [conservation] authorities perform on behalf of the province," Blunt said, adding that they're looking to "minimize the levy increase to our member municipalities," going forward.

"We were surprised to hear about this cut during a time when Ontario's experiencing stronger and more frequent flooding events as a result of climate change," Blunt added.

The LRCA's member municipalities and townships include Thunder Bay, Neebing, Shuniah, Oliver-Paipoonge, Dorion, Conmee, Gilles and O'Connor.

"The authority will now have to go back and cut from other areas to ensure that provincial core mandate programs are still provided," Blunt said, adding that, right now, that could include training, travel, advertising, as well as deferring a number of repairs and maintenance work.