At Tuesday’s Kamloops city council meeting, the Finance Director will be presenting options to add some capital projects back into this year’s budget.

Kathy Humphrey says the federal government has announced that the city will receive its Community Works funding. “This week, coming up at council, we will be presenting to them an option to add some of the capital projects back that had been deferred or put on hold with COVID. So that’s sort of the first part of the budget discussion.”

Humphrey says it wasn’t sure whether that funding would come through. “They are actually paying Gas Tax or Community Works funding to all the municipalities and they are actually going to pay it in one payment some time in June they said. Normally we get half of it in June and half of it in the fall, but it’s all coming in June. So that’s adding about, we had budgeted to only get about half of it, so just around $2 million.”

Humphrey says it will be up to council to decide which deferred projects to put back on the books in 2020.

Meanwhile, last week Humphrey presented to the finance committee how the city is in better financial shape compared to what was being predicted when COVID-19 fist hit Kamloops.

Councillor Dennis Walsh says it took him by surprise because he expected the city to be paying some prices as a result of having to shut the majority of things down. “It’s really encouraging. The finance team has done a really great job of managing through this pandemic to this point. So they’ve been able to find areas where they can save money so we’re in a very good position really.”

“Took me by surprise because I thought we might be paying some prices here for having everything shut down and pretty well going with mostly full staff, but at home and stuff like that so we’re able to protect people’s jobs. So it’s been a really good exercise in the sense that where they can save money.”