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KAMLOOPS THIS WEEK THURSDAY
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30 CENTS AT NEWSSTANDS
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FEBRUARY 23, 2017 | Volume 30 No. 23
Council eyes 2.7% tax hike ANNUAL BILL RISES BY $105 WHEN SEWER FEE FACTORED IN ANDREA KLASSEN STAFF REPORTER andrea@kamloopsthisweek.com
Add another $65 to your home budget for 2017. After the City of Kamloops’ latest round of budget talks, the owner of an average-assessed home is looking at a 2.7 per cent increase to their property taxes this year, in addition to the $40 sewer fee hike council approved late last year. An average-assessed single-family home in Kamloops is $377,000. During a special morning budget meeting on Tuesday, council agreed to fund the majority of
What do you think?
What are your thoughts on the proposed tax increase of 2.7%?
Email us at:
editor@kamloopsthisweek.com
DAVE EAGLES/KTW
ONE MORE DRIVE
Bob Davoren checks out his tee shot on the eighth hole of Sun Rivers Golf Course yesterday as his best buddies look on. Davoren is the unofficial sports historian of Kamloops, with a collection as deep as his memories of the city’s sporting scene. Davoren is in the last stages of myelodysplasia syndrome, a cancer in which blood cells in the bone marrow don’t mature properly, and wanted to tee off one final time. Read about Davoren’s battle online at kamloopsthisweek.com by searching “Davoren.”
WEATHER Mainly sunny High 3 C Low -4 C
SUN PEAKS SNOW REPORT Mid-mountain: 143 cm Alpine: 177 cm Snow phone: 250-578-7232
the items on this year’s supplemental budget list — though it will rely on 2016’s budget surplus, estimated at $900,000, and use up most of the money it gets from local casinos and the provincial gastax fund to avoid adding more to the property-tax hike. Proposed projects that got the chop include a $20,000 pilot project to put portable toilets in the Tranquille Market and downtown, to determine where the city should build more public washrooms, and $25,000 to add water fountains at the city’s transit exchanges.
DRONE RESCUE A FIRST
The city will also cut $200,000 it had proposed to spend on stabilizing a rock face on Ord Road, where it is not yet clear if the slope where work needs to be completed is owned by the city, the Crown, private interests or if it falls within Trans Mountain’s Kinder Morgan pipeline right of way. Councillors are also weighing whether to spend a portion of last year’s surplus offsetting some of the costs of a multi-year drainage repair program. In 2016, council voted to spend $900,000 per year improving stormwater channels and other drainage infrastructure. Public works director Jen Fretz said the city is “playing catch-up” on those systems, which haven’t had the kind of dedicated repair funds given to water and sewer systems. She said the money will allow the city to continue funding major capital improvements across Kamloops and monitor the system for plugs. Last year, the cash came from the city’s RCMP reserve, but in 2017 it was due to come from taxation. Finance director Kathy Humphrey has suggested the city offset some of that expense in 2017 and 2018, with a larger portion coming from taxation each year. Coun. Tina Lange said she is concerned doing so will leave the city vulnerable in case of disasters, suggesting put the money into its reserve fund for emergencies. “I look at catastrophic events we’ve had, like that little rainstorm we had two years ago. What was that, $2 million for 20 minutes?” she said in reference to a 2014 storm that caused flash flooding across the city. See PUBLIC, A4
COLDEST NIGHT
Devices used to find seven in snow
Annual event takes place this Saturday
A3
B1
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