A drive-thru Starbucks will soon be moving in near MacArthur Island.
Kamloops council has approved a development permit for a vacant lot on Tranquille Road and 12th Street, across the street from NorKam Secondary.
Jeremy Heighton, the executive director of the North Shore Business Improvement Association, explains that a gas station used to be at that site.
“Realistically, when a gas station closes down, it has to go into a sort of dormancy phase. And the soil is monitored and tested for a period of time before any new development can move forward. Now when that one closed, they actually dug out a whole bunch of the soil and replaced it, so it accelerated that typical dormancy phase.”
The development will also have two commercial tenants, and Heighton says the plans are welcome news for that neighborhood.
“We think it will be a really positive addition to the 12th Street corridor. There are already a number of commercial properties further up 12th. It’s one of those kind of things where it sort of becomes a community hub for that particular neighborhood and that area. So we’re all in favor of it. There’s nothing wrong with having new, top-quality, high-class commercial opportunities here on the North Shore,” he says.
“It has always been a fairly high-traffic zone, when it was a gas station it did have quite a bit of business… It would have an immense amount of business coming out of the NorKam high school.”
A timeline for development on the property was not immediately clear.