With last year’s record construction year, the City of Kamloops saved money in one key area.
The amount of new infrastructure built like roads and sidewalks was by far the least in the past four years.
“All those projects are pretty much infill-type projects. There’s not a lot of new infrastructure and roads being built for them, they’re already within the city on roads that are built,” Ddvelopment services director Marvin Kwiatkowski says.
“There’s very minimal infrastructure that was added, but yet a lot of units were added. We pretty much almost equalled the 2005 number for total units. So that’s pretty much the direction the OCP and council want to go, as far as infill developments happening.”
Kwiatkowski says infill development and less of a need for new roads, streetlights and underground pipes means the city spends less on operational maintenance.
“Typically if you’ve got a lot of activity happening but not a lot of new infrastructure, from a taxpayer point of view that’s pretty good. So we’re not adding a lot more operational maintenance to our regular city operations.”
In 2018 more than $285 million worth of building permits were approved by Kamloops city staff.
Interesting that despite the record construction value, the construction of new infrastructure – roads, sidewalks, etc – was way less than recent years. Kwiatkowski points out this is attributed to fewer subdivisions and more infill in #Kamloops. @RadioNLNews pic.twitter.com/th5mEWyKAG
— Colton Davies (@ColtonDavies_) February 5, 2019
