TUESDAY
RIDING TO HELP END MS: The weekend’s MS Bike Tour at Riverside Park included a youthful demographic in, left to right: Anderson Arksey, 4, Elliott Hayward-Cheetham, 4, Keegan Fretz, 4, Beckett Smigielski, 5, Aluria Smigielski, 3, and Kylie Fretz, 2. The fundraising event for multiple sclerosis research included rides of 12, 28, 40 and 57 kilometres, along with a 100-kilometre Century Ride that had cyclists pedalling from Riverside Park to the McLure Ferry and back. Allen Douglas/KTW
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Escort services may see lower licence fees By Andrea Klassen STAFF REPORTER andrea@kamloopsthisweek.com
After nearly two decades, the cost of licensing an escort service in Kamloops could become less expensive. As part of a major update to the city’s business-licence bylaw, staff are recommending the fee for escort and dating services drop to $2,000 from $3,000. The fee, which is higher than those charged to other types of businesses, also applies to exoticdancing services and body-rub studios. Don Garrish, the city’s business
licence and land co-ordinator, said the fee was originally pushed up from about $175 in the mid-1990s, following a trend among municipalities at the time. However, during the last decade, getting escort services to actually pay the fee has become a problem. “For the last number of years, all we’ve had is one licensed agency in Kamloops,” Garrish said. While the city has tried to enforce the bylaw, Garrish said advances in technology have made it difficult to track down escort services, even as they are advertising in classified sections of newspapers and in the Yellow Pages.
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“They run in like a virtual world, from a website or a cellphone, no addresses, nothing like that,” Garrish said. To try to get a better feel for why businesses weren’t getting licences, the city partnered with local media, including KTW, to collect feedback. Garrish said the high cost of the licence was the main complaint. “Reducing the fee came about as a way to encourage more of these types of businesses to be in compliance,” he said. “This doesn’t mean we’re going to get compliance. It means we’re making it easier for them to comply.”
There’s also another argument for bringing the fee down, Garrish said. The actual cost of licensing an escort business is much closer to $2,000. “One of the principles that we’re trying to work on through the whole bylaw review is when we charge a business-licence fee, it should represent the amount of effort it takes us to licence it,” he said. Escort-licence fees originally went to fund the social and health opportunities for persons in the sex trade program (SHOP), which helps prostitutes in the sex trade leave the profession.
Though the program, run by the ASK Wellness Centre for the city, still gets partial funding from the local government (just over $69,000 this year), the money no longer comes from businesslicence revenue. However, with the change in fees, community and social development supervisor Jennifer Casorso said the city is looking at setting up another partnership with ASK that would provide harm reduction specifically for people working as escorts. “We would be able to work through the licensing program, hopefully, to provide that link to ASK Wellness,” she said.
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