The town of High River is within inches of completing a deal with the Province for 14 houses in the northwest part of town.

The Province took them over after the 2013 flood but nothing's been done with them through three successive governments, Conservative, NDP and now the UCP.

Mayor Craig Snodgrass says the PC's in government at the time didn't want to retract the rules around homes considered in the flood fringe, the NDP, he says didn't really know much about it and didn't give it a lot of attention other than to grant extensions but also didn't want the "headache" of trying to rewind the previous decision, and the current UCP government didn't want to get into selling the homes to get them back into private ownership.

He says the Town put forward the idea to buy them back.

"It's been an eight year grind to save these houses on Riverside Drive and High View Gate, they received the same protection as the rest of High River and they were actually minimally impacted during the flood so they are safe homes to get back into private ownership.

Back in April council authorized administration to move forward with an agreement with the Province for the sale of the homes at a cost of $3,502,735.

The Province did not approve of a real estate commission discount so the Town upped the offer to $3,681,450.

Snodgrass says Alberta Treasury is ready to sign off and the homes will soon be in the hands of the Town, which he says is a big step forward.

"That's why we came up with the solution that 'Hey you do one real estate transaction, you sell all the homes back to the Town of High River, we'll take responsibility of it, we'll deal with all the headaches and everything else because it's that important to us that we get this deal done," said Snodgrass.

They'll be sold in the new year although the mayor says it'll be up to council to decide how that will be done.

This is one of 14 homes the Town of High River wants to buy from the Provincial government to put back on the market.

He looks forward to people actually moving into the homes again.

"That's the hope that in the spring we can get these back into private ownership and get people moved back in there so that the two or three residents who stuck it out and kudos to them, because if we didn't have a couple of those owners really dig their feet in and refuse the buy-out offers I think this would have been very difficult to get this done and we'd have lost all those homes but because there's a couple of them, the Suiters and the Ikebuchi's primarily, they're the ones that dug in and said 'Hell no we won't go' and that's what really allowed us to have a big defence on keeping these homes, so kudos to them, it was a good working relationship with everybody and we got it done."

The official deal could be finalized any day now.

 

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