BONNYVILLE – A youth brought a school assignment about the Jessie Lake Trail all the way to Town of Bonnyville council.
Dr. Bernard Brosseau School Grade 6 student Brenna Heffernan spoke with council during their May 25 meeting about restoring the "beautiful nature that once surrounded Jessie Lake."
The ‘I can make a difference’ assignment is what brought Heffernan to the meeting. It required students to pick an issue, explain why it’s important, and what can be done to address it.
Heffernan chose to look into the Jessie Lake Trail walking path and the damages done to it due to high water levels over the past couple of years.
“What I’m planning to do is revitalize and restore the Jessie Lake Trail and the bird watching towers because... it’s pretty much submerged underwater and you can’t reach the bird watching towers,” she detailed. “I feel like that’s important, especially these days when there’s the coronavirus around and people can’t really get together to have social gatherings. I feel like it’s really important to get out, go outside, and get some fresh air.”
Heffernan noted there were a number of activities that could be done to restore the beauty of Jessie Lake, including a simple task like picking up garbage, however, it’s not enough.
One suggestion Heffernan made was to drain some of the water out of the lake, which was something the municipality has done in the past. Mayor Gene Sobolewski noted the town used to have pumps in place to try and drain the lake.
“To drain the lake an inch, it would take approximately 50 days,” he noted. “That’s just how much water there is because it’s spread over a large area so we would have to get big pumps but when we’re moving that volume of water, the other thing that happens is Alberta Environment has (told us) to figure out what happens downstream. We have to go and study, where before we didn’t, what happens when we put all that water someplace else. It’s got to go someplace and if it can’t, we don’t want to flood anybody else out.”
CAO Bill Rogers confirmed there’s plans for a study to be conducted by their engineers to monitor the water levels on Jessie Lake and Barrier Lake, which is just downstream, to look at what their options are.
“If you’re going to remove water from the lake, it’s a big lake. You’d have to remove an awful lot of water in order to make any sort of (impact). We’d have to do that in partnership with our neighbours, the MD of Bonnyville, because anything we dump out of town is going to flow into the MD, down through Barrier Lake, and eventually work its way into the river systems,” Rogers detailed. “It’s actually a very complex problem that involves just taking a whole bunch of water and trying to move it somewhere else or looking at the alternatives, which would be to build a trail somewhere else that’s above the high water line.”
Although repaving part of the Jessie Lake Trail is in the 2021 town budget, Sobolewski said the parts that are underwater can’t be addressed until Alberta Environment gives the municipality the go ahead due to the animals that call the area home.
“Some of the ideas we’ve got is putting in a boardwalk, a raised boardwalk, so you’d look down at the species so we don’t interfere with them and won’t be walking with them,” Sobolewski explained.
Coun. Ray Prevost noted, “It’s an expensive venture, but it’s probably something that we could put on the agenda when we have a meeting with the MD of Bonnyville.”
Heffernan said she had been thinking along the same lines when it came to a boardwalk in the area.
Included in the information provided to council by Heffernan was a petition to revitalize the Jessie Lake Trail, which had just over 100 signatures on it.
