The City of Kamloops is going to allow downtown businesses who want to keep their extended sidewalk patios to keep them until October of this year.

Debating the concept at length, council finally voted in-favour of a plan which will see patios that are not needed any more removed by April, freeing up some of the roughly 40 metered parking spots that are currently occupied.

“The current design for the sidewalk extensions was meant to be temporary, ” Rod Martin, the city’s Planning and Development Manager, wrote in a report to council. “The design utilizes a paver brick sidewalk surrounded by concrete barriers, which has held up quite well for the two years they have been in place.”

“The sidewalk design does not lend itself to being easily dismantled and reassembled. Also, some of the businesses that currently have the bypass sidewalks no longer require them.”

About half of the existing sidewalk extensions are expected to be removed by April with the rest gone after October.

“Generally, it was felt that the sidewalk patio extension program has a very positive impact, that it increases the downtown’s vibrancy, and it outweighs the loss of parking,” Martin said during Tuesday’s council meeting, noting the city is out about $15,000 per month in total lost parking revenue, about $375 per stall.

Businesses that want extended patios back for next year will have to pay for all construction and maintenance costs as well as $700 per displaced parking stall for the seven-month patio season from April 1 to October 31, translating to $100 a month.

That is in line with the results of a survey by the Kamloops Central BIA where a majority of respondents said they’d be okay with a $100 monthly fee, with the money meant to offset some of the lost parking revenue.

“The proposed fee of $700 per parking stall displaced by the bypass sidewalks for the extended patios will not offset all of the lost parking revenue.” Martin wrote.

“However, it will cover the increased cost for City crews to maintain the areas surrounding the sidewalks and is in line with the amount that businesses indicated they were willing to pay to have an extended patio in response to the KCBIA survey.”

The patio vote was not unanimous though, with two councillors voting against the idea, one of them being Kelly Hall.

“I liked what city staff put together but to me, I just thought it was almost status quo,” Hall said, noting he felt the plan was not complete.

“We’re going to do this. We’re going to do a little bit of this, we’re going to do a little bit of that, and in all honesty, I think the downtown needs a beautification opportunity, and I think we just missed the mark a little bit.”

Speaking on the NL Morning News, Hall added that while patios need to be part of a downtown beautification plan, it also needs to be done right.

“Right now when I look at the patios that we’ve had in the last three years with COVID, being the one that spurred the extension of the patios, I call them cow corrals basically,” he said.

“I mean people are just sitting there and they’re grazing and having their coffee and what not, but there is no aesthetic appeal to them. There is no uniformity.”

The other no vote was from another rookie councillor, Katie Neustaeter, who wanted more information about how the patio plan will fit into the broader development of downtown Kamloops.

“I don’t feel informed about where we are going with the downtown and what that could look like to make a decision on something that is related to such a specific piece of what could be a larger project,” she said.

The roughly $100,000 cost to remove all of the existing patios will be covered by the COVID-19 Safe Restart Grant for Local Governments, the same fund which was used to install the brick sidewalk extensions back in 2021.

– With files from Paul James and Bill Cowen