High River Council's decided to move a $781,754 surplus from last year into its Capital Reserve account.

Mayor Craig Snodgrass says the surplus came about because the Town, at least financially, is still dealing with flood issues.

"You know we budget as best we can, the thing that's absolutely, virtually impossible to budget on are the grants and the flood recovery money and the DRP (Disaster Recovery Program) funding, those kinds of things, insurance funding that we're still getting, just like every homeowner went through, this municipality, this office is doing the exact same thing." Snodgrass says.

Councillor Michael Nychuk had a question about $7 million that was budgeted for contracted services while the bill came in at $13-million.

It was explained by Chief Financial Officer Kola Oladimeji that projects that were approved had to go ahead while the town knew grants were coming but they just didn't know how much or exactly when so it's all a wash in the end.

"It's been really tough," the Mayor says, "And like Kola said, we're two, three years away from really getting this flood accounting cleaned out of our books, so it's not going away anytime soon, it's just something we're used to now and manage the money effectively and responsibly like this administration always guides us in the right way of doing things. That's the thing about having Tom Maier as our CAO now, he's the one that started us on the success of this financial plan and now we have Kola Oladimeji leading the CFO role this town's in exceptional hands to handle this."

Town Manager Tom Maier says they have a better idea of the flood's affects on the Town now and it should remain in a good position without having to shift the financial burden onto taxpayers.

Snodgrass says putting the money into capital reserves means it's still available if something were to come up, while if it was used to pay down debt the money would be gone.