The city’s finance director says a new building inspector would be a huge help at Kamloops city hall.

Kathy Humphrey points out permitting staff with the city were swamped at many times in 2018.

“With the increase in building permits and development in the community, we’ve asked council to add another building inspector into the staffing. So that’s probably one of the top priorities from an administration perspective,” Humphrey says.

“We also have some of the building inspector staff who are going to retire in the next few years. They haven’t announced any dates, but they are at that age where they could retire. So we want to make sure we have some staff working towards being there when they do.”

According to a report brought to city council yesterday, processing times for building permits in Kamloops last year took longer than any of the past four years.

Residential permits took 4.2 weeks to process on average, more than the city’s target of three weeks. Commercial and multi-family permits, meanwhile, took 7.5 weeks to process on average, also more than the target of four-to-six weeks.

“They [building inspectors] have targets where they’re trying to approve permits within a reasonable amount of time, and work with the building community to not be the road block in holding things up. So that all requires staffing in terms of plan checking and working with builders to get permits and everything approved,” Humphrey says.

Hiring a building inspector will be one of 13 supplemental budget items that city council will decide whether or not to include in this year’s budget.

The 2019 budget will be finalized in early March; if all 13 supplemental items were approved, they would just over $1 million to the overall budget, which would be an extra 1 per cent.