
Six hotels and motels on Columbia Street West in Kamloops are no longer considered nuisance properties.
Those properties are the Ramada by Wyndham, Best Western Plus, the Panorama Inn, Grandview Motel, Columbia Motor Inn and Knights Inn. The city says assessments have been done on all of those properties to see what kinds of crime prevention measures have been undertaken.
“The City has seen a dramatic change to the upkeep and processes of the properties assessed, and as a result, service calls for the area have dropped significantly in a short period of time,” Community services supervisor Kevin Beeton said, in a news release.
Some of those preventative measures including improved lighting, locking doors and gates, cleaning parking lots and balconies, adding more fences and adding surveillance, height strips on doors and limiting cash in registers.
Kamloops Accommodation Association President, Tyson Andrykew, is pleased with the move, telling NL News a lot of work has been done over the past few months to get to a stage where the designations could be lifted.
“The properties – you know the six that have been noted – really went above and beyond to adhere to what the city wanted to see and took all the recommendations and made the changes and ultimately done what they can to improve the situation in the neighbourhood,” he said.
In all, nine properties in that corridor were deemed nuisance properties in late October, though it wasn’t made public until December. It came after a flurry of police incidents including a shooting at the Hospitality Inn on Oct. 16.
Three motels on Columbia Street West – Hospitality Inn, the Star Lodge and the Desert Inn – remain as nuisance properties for now. Further down the street, the Acadian Motor Inn also stays on that list.
“We had kind of known that a few properties were not complying with the demands of what officials wanted to see, but ultimately we’re going to continue to encourage those properties to do what they can to get those lifted. By and large its their hands to make those necessary changes,” Andrykew said.
“We’re confident the other properties are working in that same direction, but it’s just going to take them a bit longer to get there.”
The city says its community services division, formerly called the bylaw division, will be doing assessments on those remaining nuisance properties.
– With files from Victor Kaisar