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Jun 20, 2022 at 2:30 pm
City Councillor Mayor
Kamloops and District Labour Council asks:
What are the top three critical issues facing your community?
Candidate Answers
Affordability (housing, food, gas, basically everything) <= I'd like to take a look at co-operatives as a possible solution - housing co-operatives, worker co-operatives, food co-operatives,
Opioid crisis impacting our community, is there a way to work together on this instead of funding individual service providers?
Small business economic recovery from COVID and other extreme events <- support local, make it easier for small businesses to operate
I have based my platform, which is being further informed by community consultation, on three pillars which I believe incapsulate the most critical issues facing our community:
1. Affordability:
For Kamloops to be a desirable and attractive place to live we must...
- Draw and retain a new and targeted workforce
- Support innovative and advantageous development
- Cast a proactive (not reactive) vision for the future
2. Accountability:
In a time when polarization and a lack of responsibility to one another is increasingly the norm, we must transparently move toward...
- Action informed by community consultation
- Equitable, comprehensive, and practical supports for challenging community issues
- Strengthening the external partnerships that can create meaningful change
3. Advocacy:
In a community that works for all, we must work for all people.
Therefore, we must amplify...
- The needs of local businesses
- Children and families
- Health and safety
Safety is a key issue and it encompasses so many aspects. Safety on the street is impacted by homelessness, mental health, lack of affordable housing, a justice system that makes effective policing a challenge, poverty and fear. During this term I’ve been active alongside my colleagues to address these issues. That work must continue. It means continuing to lobby the province to work with municipalities to find solutions. Unfortunately, municipal councils need answers more quickly than the provincial government provides them.
Inclusion is another issue to be addressed. It also covers many aspects from accessibility to listening to the public. I campaigned in 2018 to improve the public’s voice at City Hall and successfully saw all neighbourhood associations given a voice to our safe and secure Kamloops engagement group. I also successfully saw council’s procedural bylaw amended to provide caregiver and parental leave from physically attending council meetings, a small step that hopefully might make it easier for people to run for council who have those concerns. I also was successful in seeing council and staff address the childcare crisis in the city, a significant economic impact that needed to be addressed.
1) Homelessness and its associated effects (i.e. crime and general feeling of being unsafe in certain areas of the City).
2) Affordable housing (or the lack thereof). I'm advocating the creation of the Kamloops Housing Corporation whose purpose is to build, buy, and maintain affordable housing for Kamloops residents. Waiting for the provincial or federal government to take any action isn't working. The City of Kamloops must start building affordable housing now! The private sector will not willingly build affordable housing so we must.
3) Terrible public transit! If you've taken it, you know how bad it is. Good public transit reduces cars on the road and works efficiently all day (and night), every day (and night).
There are lot of opportunities and challenges for Kamloops.
To directly answer your question, the top 3 critical issues facing Kamloops right now are:
1) Community Safety
2) Housing affordability
3) Retaining our amazing community friendliness and spirit as we grow.
I believe that housing is the issue that is impacting the most citizens in Kamloops. Access to safe shelter is fundamental, and is intertwined with community safety which I believe is the second most pressing issue. The third issue I personally find important to address is inclusion. As a sibling of a special needs adult, I know first hand the barriers and challenges he faces towards employment and participation in the community. These three issues will be a top priority for me as a city Councillor.
Top 3 issues are all somehow related. First we must address the pendulum shift of our courts for social disorders. Any type of criminal activity should lead to consequences. Along with that we must hold our local health authorities to task to have meaningful engagement in the local mental health and addiction issues facing the said individuals, but also for the safety of our community. Some sort of mandatory imposed recovery or health assistance must be provided to those who pose the greatest safety risk to themselves and our community as a whole, more importantly it has to be in a timely manner.Lastly tied in to all this is the housing affordability issue facing all our current and new residents in all the housing spectrum, including our thousands of international students. We as a city with our developers and large privately held land owners, have to be work together and get creative in having a local solution.
The tag for my campaign is: Housing. Safety. Kindness. Which indicates what I think are the three critical issues we need to address.
The cost of rent and of buying a new home is increasingly unaffordable. There's a range of strategies we can employ around densification to reduce the cost of servicing units, pre-zoning areas for greater lot coverage, asking the province to extend the foreign buyer's tax to Kamloops, and increasing energy efficiency.
Safety is key. We must think of safety broadly, including mitigating the effects of climate disasters to prevent heat deaths, working to prevent deaths from the toxic drug supply, addressing bullying and harassment based on gender, race, or sexual orientation, addressing gang violence and shootings, addressing property crime, and creating a sense of personal security when walking through the city core.
Finally kindness, we need to take down the temperature when discussing the above issues. We need to remind each other that every person has value and needs to be welcomed and included. Anger is being misdirected towards groups of people and service providers like BC Housing and Ask Wellness, when we in fact need more resources and supporters, not less. Our point in time count shows that year after year we haven't made meaningful progress in housing the at least 200 people who are on the streets right now. We need more educators, more social workers, and more street nurses. We also need to design our civic programming to support healthy growth and development of children and families to help reduce future issues. Parks and recreation, urban nature, bike lanes, and a centre of the arts are all good ideas to work towards.
1) Our social fabric has been severely strained over the past few years with Covid, the fires, Le Estcwey (the missing), the floods and now the economic uncertainty with rapidly rising inflation.
2) The need for new schools in Kamloops as surrounding communities. Our schools are overflowing leading to suboptimal learning conditions and our buildings are old. We need a substantial investment from the provincial government in new schools for our district.
3) Additional supports for students. Differentiated and individualized education requires a lot of work from teachers and support staff as well as resources. When funding lags inflation, supports and programs don't meet the needs of students creating inequities within our system.
The most obvious is crime stemming from homelessness and drug abuse.
The second is housing; the lack of new homes and affordability in general.
Third is creating a higher quality of life overall: We have grown rapidly and now we have big city problems, without any of the big city benefits. This is felt especially by the growing number of people that are constantly weighing the option of leaving Kamloops.
The issues are interrelated and hard to separate as stand alone topics. I would suggest affordability/inflationary costs, housing, and community safety are at the top of the list.
1. Street issues and community safety are by far the biggest topic I have been hearing at peoples doors. We need the agencies tasked to help the street population to be much more engaged and accountable to the surrounding communities.
2. Overall accountability and transparency needs improving at city hall, many people feel they are not heard or respected. A robust ethics and integrity program must be pursued to bring trust and confidence back to council, doing the minimum required is no longer good enough.
3. Affordability in housing, whether its rental or for purchase. The city needs to remove red tape/zoning delays and fast tract the construction of homes of all kinds, (single family, duplex, apartments, etc).
I have six strategic focus areas in my platform including: Spending (fiscal responsibility); Safety and Security; Shelter; Supporting Business Success; Sustainability (Climate Action); and Shared Engagement. These are all interconnected and collectively support each other. However, among these, the three that will be priorities for me are:
1) Safety and Security, which includes addressing issues associated with street entrenched people and public safety.
2) Shelter, which is focused on growing and diversifying the housing stock and options that will foster greater affordability for residents and those looking to move to the City.
3) Spending, centred on the City’s focus on ensuring fiscally responsible spending and wise investments are a cornerstone of City budgeting. As the City undertakes new activities such as implementation of the Climate Action Plan or faces headwinds from increased costs such as the increased RCMP budget, carefully considering spending options will be critical.
Safety, health and future vision.
I think most people in Kamloops see safety as number one and this is a broad area. Kamloops has changed in the past 4 years and it has not been for the better. People often tell me they don't feel safe in certain parts of our city and that list is growing. Business owners and employees tell me that they don't feel safe, at work, walking to and from work, during business hours or after hours. Seeing businesses shut down due to the safety of their employees or because they just can't handle the thefts, vandalism, or such is telling. When people tell me they are thinking of moving or won't be retiring in Kamloops, I know that we have a problem on safety.
Safety is also snow removal or the lack of. I think a simple solution is to put front plows back on city trucks, give the staff training and experience in that equipment and its use, plus a plan to follow would help a lot. Also I think if we implemented a simple even and odd day parking rule, where even numbered sides of the street are vacant on even numbered calendar days and vice versa for odd, we could have snow plowed to the curb and or removed so that snow does not build up on our streets. Removing this snow also should cut down on our pothole problem, because there would be less snow melting into cracks to cause potholes to form. Potholes need to be filled, but more importantly, we need to make sure that we have proper road paving so that potholes are less likely to form as well. Safety is knowing you won't wreck your vehicle, or bicycle hitting a pothole while commuting.
Safety is also having a truly connected trail system, hopefully the River Trail, so that non-vehicular traffic can move around our great city without being hit or killed. I have been hit twice on my bike while commuting to work and as such I now ride on the sidewalk on my commute from Brocklehurst to Aberdeen. Now is the time to finish this trail system. Safety in the air we breath because we have less people in combustion engine vehicles and more in clean air commuting or recreating.
Safety for businesses is also an issue. Businesses should know that the city will work with them to expand and succeed not put up road blocks or bureaucracy. Entrepreneurs need to know and feel safe that Kamloops is open for business and will encourage them to join our community. Builders need to have efficiencies in the the process to meet our housing needs for those needing safety in shelter.
Safety is knowing that ALL of Kamloops is safe from the flooding and fire risks that we may face. Alternate commuting/escape routes from Juniper also need to be there for Westsyde and Rayleigh (ie. a bridge link across the North Thompson). We need to finish the diking to reduce our already identified flood risks and in doing so would help us finish our River Trail. We need to accelerate our FireSmart Program in Kamloops to reduce our risk of an interface fire burning our community.
Safety is know we have ALL Kamloops protected by fully staffed fire halls. Currently Hall 4 in Westsyde has 2 FT staff, Heffley/Rayleigh hall 5 has no FT staff and Dallas/Barhartvale/campbell Creek hall 6 has no FT staff. With the construction of the new City Garden towers downtown we need more Kamloops Fire Rescue staff to be safe. 32 members to be exact. Let's build a fire training centre in Kamloops that can assist us with recruitment of future staff and training current members or surrounding fire rescue staff. This will also help us retain current fire rescue staff who could instruct. This should bring in income to offset our current and future fire staff costs.
On the health front, we need to lobby for more autonomy from IHA. Kamloops is not well served by the IHA and it is too top heavy with VPs. Kamloops and the areas we serve needs its long overdue cancer clinic and a cardiac clinic here. We also need health through community design of greenspaces, building designs, recreational amenities (trails, facilities, etc), and transit. We can only do some much at City Hall but we can come up with local solutions that we can lobby hard for.
On the future vision. I think we need one. Kamloops is not Kelowna and we should not try to compare ourselves to them. We need to find our future and make steps to see it happen. An Arts Centre, or a convention centre, the Rivers Trail, or ??? we need to define ourselves and show off just how great this city is. That said we need to be fiscally prudent and responsible and ensure that what we decide makes sense financially in either the short and or long term.
1. Crime, addiction, and homelessness and shortage of affordable housing
2. Lack of accountability, transparency, ethics, and fiscal responsibility in the city hall.
3. Civic politicians who are enablers and promote addiction instead of recovery.
1. Social issues around crime, homelessness, mental health, and addiction. We must begin to change the conversation towards recovery and treatment using every tool available at the municipal level to promote change from higher levels of government.
2. A Lack of accountability and transparency within city hall has highlighted the need for an ethics and integrity officer similar to other BC cities.
3. A lack of affordable housing concerning multi-family units, red tape, and lengthy zoning applications.
1-2-3: Funding that doesn't reflect our regional needs
This answer relates to so many ailments facing our school district, namely:
1. Lack of inclusive and accessible education, especially for those with complex needs
2. Schools over capacity
3. Teachers/staff not receiving the support that they need to effectively do their work
I am not promising an overnight solution, but I do want to ensure that our region is getting its fair share in BC.
More broadly my priorities are:
▫️ Safety - protecting our children and engaging youth at risk
▫️ Hands-on education - investing in real-world education
▫️ Youth retention - attracting and keeping talent local
▫️ Property planning - utilizing our real estate for our community
My Top 3 Critical Issues are,1- Safety and Security of our City. We deal with Crime and Homelessness daily in our Business. 2- Affordable and attainable housing makes the top 3 list, 3-More services and venues, pools and Ice Rinks/Roller rink, Getting City of Kamloops Management and City Staff back together again, the staff are being treated with a lack of respect and unfair demands are being placed on them, this has created a large divide between Management and Staff.
We have a number of issues facing our community. We are experiencing a number of social issues with the overdose crisis, homelessness and housing costs/cost of living and issues that are divisive and polarizing,
The top issues facing Kamloops right now are public safety, homelessness, and housing affordability.