Municipal Drains

Municipal drains remove excess water collected by residential lots and agricultural, industrial or commercial lands. Municipal drains can be in the form of a ditch or buried underground with a closed pipe or tile system. They can also include pumping stations, grassed waterways, buffer strips, culverts, bridges or even creeks and small rivers.

Maintenance

The County of Brant will periodically perform work on municipal drains, as required. Please contact the County of Brant if you have any concerns or suspect work needs to be done on municipal drains located on your property.

Residents may be billed for their share of the cost to maintain municipal drains located on their property. Municipalities can accumulate the cost for maintaining a drain for up to five years or $5,000. It is possible for residents to be billed for work that happened before they owned the property.

To help reduce maintenance costs, remove debris from catch basins on your property. Preventative work can help reduce the possibility of damage to your property during a storm. Keep the area around municipal drains accessible and don't store materials or plant trees near the drain.

Municipal drains development

Landowners can petition under the Drainage Act to require a municipal drain if they have a drainage problem.

If certain criteria are met, the municipal engineering department works on a solution which will go through several public appeal stages until the project is accepted by the community.

Once the appeals are complete, the municipality passes a bylaw to adopt the engineer's report and the cost is assessed.

The municipal drain is then constructed and it becomes a part of the County's infrastructure. The County is responsible for maintaining the municipal drain.