A Kamloops city councillor says the hope is that the future of Stuart Wood School will be decided sooner rather than later.

Bill Sarai says that’s on Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc, and he says there’s a lot of moving parts with other levels of government involved as well.

“And as you know, not everything goes as fast as you move up the government level. Everything seems to slow down even more.”

Sarai was commenting after city council voted ‘no’ by a narrow vote, for granting a the Children’s Circle Daycare a one-year lease of the school. The daycare has to be out of its space at the Royal Inland Hospital by June 1, and its new home in the Sagebrush neighborhood of Kamloops won’t be open until June of 2021.

“We were ready to make a decision, but we just didn’t have all the approvals in place to do it,” Sarai says.

“There’s a lot of groups out there that are in if not dire straits, then even more dire straights, looking for space to operate. In a perfect world, we would’ve got the blessing to open up a whole floor and maybe accommodate a lot of groups. The discussion just didn’t come to the point when (our) decision had to be made.”

The city and Tk’emlups signed a letter of understanding in February of 2019, which included coordinating the future use of Stuart Wood as a cultural centre.