A moratorium on moving documents out of the Land Title Office in Kamloops to Victoria is being asked for.

City councillor Mike O’Reilly wants to make sure the city first meets with Land Title and Survey Authority of B.C., the Minister responsible and with First Nations who would be affected.

“Currently there are about 10,000 square feet of documents in Kamloops that will be relocated. It is substantial, and to give people a bit of an idea, the documents that are located there are the historical records from British Columbia from the Alberta border in the Kootenays to Kamloops. So it’s a significant area,” O’Reilly says.

“The current government staff that are there, they’re relocating them. And they told us they’re looking to downsize and go to a third of the size. their office right now is 15,000 square feet. So it’ll be 5,000 square feet for staff, but it’ll mean 10,000 square feet of documents will be gone and lost out of Kamloops.”

O’Reilly says at least 12 direct private-sector jobs would be lost as a result of the move. ‘

“But there are numerous research projects of people who come to the Kamloops area to do historical research. Whether it’s environmental, mining does it a lot, First Nations happens there all the time. And so it would be a very big blow to the city.”

He says a further concern is documents potentially getting lost with relocating them, and says happened when the Prince George land title office closed several years ago. The motion from O’Reilly asking for the moratorium by the Land Title and Survey Authority, will go before Kamloops city council next week.

The two area MLAs have also voiced concern to NL News about the planned downsizing of the Land Title Office in Kamloops.