A pair of building permits worth $17.5 million last month, pushed the construction value in the City of Kamloops closer to another record year.

Building and Engineering Development Manager Jason Dixon says one permit was for the superstructure at the Royal Inland Hospital Patient Care Tower, while the other was for two apartment buildings near TRU.

“Those two projects really make for a big month. If you look at October 2018, we had some big projects that month too, so direct comparison wise it’s a bit hard,” he said. “It’s the variation in kind of permits from month to month, and year to year.”

In all, the city issued just under $37 million worth of permits in October, a 54 per cent jump from October 2018’s $24 million.

“There were more single family permits last October,” Dixon added. “This October, we saw a big increase in single family units in multi-family type sites. We had 23 this year, versus three last year. So it is just sort of the ebbs and flows of the different types of projects, and when we get applications made.”

Through ten months of this year, the permit values in Kamloops sits at just under $247 million, about $39 million short of last year’s record of $285 million.

Kamloops also set a new building permit record in 2017 with at $224 million in approved permits.