The President of the Canadian Home Builders Association for the Central Interior, is hoping the incoming City Council will be able to help solve the lack of housing in Kamloops after the association’s all candidates forum on Wednesday.
One of the major issues on the minds of Kamloopsians heading into Saturday’s election is housing and the lack thereof in the city.
Tom Calne, said on the NL Morning News, that most of the people running seem to understand the importance of the issue. “I think what I’m most optimistic about is the fact that the message is now front and center.”
“The fact that we’re having an election and we’re going to have a new council, that’s a positive move certainly but the fact everybody now in this community I believe understands our concerns, understands the three percent available land, understand the need for infill development.”
“I think whichever councillors get elected and whichever mayor gets elected, based on the amount of discussion that’s been happening in this election campaign, I think we’ll start to see some positive changes for resources flowing back into the development engineering services building so we can shore up that planning department and following through I would say on many of the programs that we’ve seen brought forward over the last four years.”
“I mean, the last council was good at bringing plans together, there just wasn’t the follow through. We didn’t get the community rezoning that were meant to come out of many of those plans.”
Calne said he was pleased over all on how the forum went. “They all came out, everybody was respectful to one another, we were able to ask our questions and every single candidate is now on record for talking about attainable housing and progressive zoning and all of the things we’ve been mentioning so I think that’s a real success for our campaign.”
Asked if he felt that the candidate were well versed in how important this is during this election cycle. “It’s almost like there’s a collective buy-in of the fact that there’s a problem in this community and that makes myself certainly, I’m sure it makes our board and I’m sure it makes our board optimistic as to what we can see over the next four years.”
As far as an endorsement goes, Calne says “CHBA National, Provincial and Local are non partisan and to be honest with you, whoever wins on Saturday, we need to roll up our sleeves on Monday morning and meet with them and try to do what’s best for our community and our members.”
