Pond work on schedule, city says

Construction on a naturalized stormwater pond is on schedule for its October completion date, City of Brandon director of engineering services Kyle Winters told the Sun recently.

The 10-acre pond just east of the Brandon Municipal Cemetery aims to mimic prairie wetlands through filtering water and increasing stormwater storage to prevent flooding, according to the city’s website. The project aligns with climate change policy and funding initiatives to promote naturalized infrastructure across Canada and in the province.

“Within the city’s climate action plan, there was a focus on building resilient infrastructure. By installing a large, naturalized stormwater pond, that’s something we aim to do, by accommodating or providing stormwater infrastructure for large rain events that often occur or will occur due to climate change,” said Winters.

City council adopted a Climate Change Action Plan on May 15, 2023. The plan details how the City of Brandon is addressing the climate emergency, which includes the goal of building resilient infrastructure.

The stormwater pond was purposely planned in the Lyndale Drive and Sycamore Drive region to enhance naturalized solutions to property flooding in the area, Mayor Jeff Fawcett explained.

“With the heavy rainfalls in that area that we’ve been dealing with, this solves that issue,” he said.

The city’s naturalized stormwater pond guidelines were developed in 2018 by Native Plant Solutions, the environmental consulting branch of Ducks Unlimited Canada. The guidelines were used to design the pond and select native plant species to implement, said Winters.

“You’ll see some cattails, bulrush … then further up the slope, you’ll see native grasses, willows, shrubs … and then it’ll blend right into the maintained area that will eventually be the cemetery,” Winters said.

The project features a 500-metre pathway for transit methods alternative to driving including walking, wheeling and biking.

The nearly $6.3-million project is funded by the City of Brandon and the Government of Canada through its Natural Infrastructure Fund.

The city announced it spent close to $5.3 million on the naturalized pond project. The federal government announced its $1-million contribution last December.

The federal funding comes from the government’s $200-million program that was announced in June 2021. Its purpose is to provide financial aid to projects that use natural or hybrid approaches to increase resilience to climate change, according to a news release on the Government of Canada website.

The naturalized stormwater pond project is a hybrid approach that uses human engineering to enhance natural infrastructure and ecosystem processes, including filtering and mitigating surface water from heavy rainfall.

The pond’s proximity to the cemetery expansion allows for the shared use of resources between the two construction projects. Winters said that a lot of the material dug out for the pond is being used to grade the future expansion area of the cemetery.

“We feel that the piece of infrastructure will service for a number of years to come, regardless of what the climate may offer,” he said.

» jmurray@brandonsun.com