A Calgary city councillor is raising concerns with a report from an independent panel tasked with reviewing the 2024 rupture of the Bearspaw feeder main, as the panel’s chair calls for urgency.
The 86-page report was written by a panel of industry experts and headed up by former ATCO executive Siegfried Kiefer, which reviewed the circumstances that led up to the critical failure of the Bearspaw feeder main in June 2024.
The report found systemic issues around how the city managed its water utility over the last 20 years, including deferred maintenance and inspections, and a fragmented governance structure that didn’t allow information and concerns to filter up to decision makers within the city.
“I’m confident that if council evaluates what we’ve said, they will align with our thinking,” Kiefer said in an interview with Global News’ Joel Senick on Calgary Close Up.
“I would stress that the urgency of the issue needs to be well understood, and now is the time for quick action, not delay and debate.”
The report was presented to city council last week during a special meeting called by Mayor Jeromy Farkas, in which council unanimously approved directing city administration to develop a plan by Feb. 3 to advance all the recommendations made by the panel in its report.
Ward 13 Coun. Dan McLean said he accepts everything the panel noted in its report, and that council should follow each of the recommendations.
“These are experts, they came and gave us their expert ideas and the fact that maybe administration and some on council think they know better, I disagree with,” McLean told Global News. “I will tend to agree with what the experts say.”
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In the short term, the panel is recommending the city stabilize the Bearspaw feeder main and enhance its monitoring, while fast-tracking a replacement for the pipe and further redundancy in the water system.
But in the longer term, the panel’s recommendations include establishing an independent expert oversight board for the water utility, and to eventually develop “a municipally owned corporation” to manage city water, similar to Enmax.
However, Ward 2 Coun. Jennifer Wyness is raising concerns about the recommendations, and rushing into any major governance changes as the city continues to manage urgent repairs on the feeder main, which ruptured again on Dec. 30.
“I have concerns with how we’re having conversations while the feeder main is still down,” Wyness said. “We’re still asking the region to conserve water, and we’re going on a witch hunt rather than solve the problem first.”
Wyness claims the panel ignored other city reports commissioned in the immediate aftermath of the feeder main break in June 2024, including an audit of the city’s infrastructure by Ernst & Young in October 2024, and a practice review by the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA) in May 2025, which found the city “uses data-driven risk management to support
prioritization, with engineering involvement in recommendations.”
Wyness equated the independent panel’s report to an “AI summary” of other reports completed about the feeder main, at a cost of $2 million.
The Ward 2 councillor’s biggest concern is around the recommendation to “carve out” the city’s water system into a separate corporation, which she said requires due diligence and public engagement.
“Calgarians will not accept a blank cheque being written for our water utility,” Wyness said. “They want it done right and they want it done in an affordable and reasonably priced way.”
Kiefer told Global News that council got distracted with that recommendation during its presentation of the report, instead of more pressing issues around the feeder main.
“Council, in our discussions, got sidetracked a bit in terms of the longer term recommendations around a separate municipally =ontrolled corporation. That is not an issue for today,” he said.
“Today is deal with the emergency, set up a proper management structure, set up a proper advisory board that can scrutinize what’s being done to ensure long-term interests are being met.”
During a press conference Monday, Farkas said he welcomes “a robust conversation and debate” around the path forward for the city’s water system and the “resourcing” and “timing” of how to implement the recommendations.
He said the previously commissioned reports were “largely city staff checking their own work,” and that council is working at “lightning speed” to fix the issues with the water system.
“There’s no such thing as moving too quickly on this,” Farkas said. “Calgarians need to know that their water supply is safe and reliable and this is what our council is committed to do. ”
© 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
