Bruce Masterman (file photo)
At least the Town of High River has been able to convince someone the Disaster Recovery Program is broken.

Councillor Bruce Masterman brought a resolution forward to the Alberta Urban Municipalities Associations convention calling for an external review of the program.

It passed with 91 per cent in favour.

"It was a resolution to try and elevate the discussion about DRP, to take it out of strictly High River's bailiwick and make it more of a provincial issue, which of course it is," Masterman says.

He says the 91 per cent speaks to just how important the issue is for municipalities across Alberta.

"I think the think that excites me is that all along Minister (Deron) Bilous, whenever we've talked to him about problems in the DRP, he kind of indicates that he doesn't think there are problems," he says. "We ask for things to be fixed, we ask for applications to be moved along and more importantly with this resolution, depending on that the province does with it of course, it would mean if they went for this and put some changes in, no other community would go through what High River went through and is still going through more than two years after the flood."

He says the bureaucracy is too embedded in the system to do an effective review so it needs to be done by an outside body.

Masterman says most to the issues with DRP pre-dated the NDP government, giving them a perfect opportunity to fix it but they've so far chosen not to do it.

"Definitely a squandered opportunity, the provincial government has done a lot of really good things for High River and unfortunately the one area that's fallen short is the treatment of individual DRP claimant in High River and other communities and this government really had a chance to come in and make better and show that it was serious about making it better but instead hasn't done that," he says.

Municipal Affairs Minister Deron Bilous will speak at the AUMA convention Friday morning.