The mayor of Kamloops will be bringing forward another notice of motion at Tuesday’s city council meeting.

Speaking on NL Newsday, Reid Hamer-Jackson, says it hopes to get about 15 additional outreach workers onto the streets of Kamloops.

“Its basically to get the non-profits and ourselves to look at asking the government for some help in outreach where we need it, and with non profits that need it,” he said.

“I really think it will help to reduce some police calls, fire calls, ambulance calls, we’ll probably even have to have less security because they are going to be lived experienced people hopefully or people that have dealt with street-entrenched people.”

Hamer-Jackson says the idea is to add to a program launched by the The Mustard Seed last summer, when it hired George Murphy as a Street Outreach Worker to work with people who are homeless as well as businesses both downtown and along West Victoria Street.

“There’s George, and there’s George, and then there’s George,” Hamer-Jackson said. “As you know, I’ve been doing a little bit of that work myself over the last over three years and I really noticed that [at 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning], people want to get healthy and you can talk to them and a lot of them want to go into services.”

“That same person you see at 4 o’clock in the morning, at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, there’s sometimes a much different person there, so I think it can help when an outreach worker could be right there.”

Hamer-Jackson says he also hopes city councillors will vote in favour of his first notice of motion that he presented two weeks ago, on Jan. 17.

It hopes to examine the operations and a potential relocation of the municipally funded storage facility for people who are homeless that is run by the Kamloops Aboriginal Friendship Society at 48 West Victoria Street.

“Do I hope [council] will [support it]? For sure I hope they will,” Hamer-Jackson said. “I wouldn’t have put it forward if I didn’t think they would.”

While the Aboriginal Friendship Society initially told NL News they planned to contest to the move as they were blindsided by the mayor’s notice of motion, the two sides have since met and have agreed to work together “to do what is best for the city.”

Since this motion, the mayor has reached out to me twice,” KAFS Executive Director, Cal Albright said, in a letter going before City Council. “The homeless population are vulnerable, are traumatized and sadly many are Indigenous. I would be very concerned that simply moving our programs to another location without due diligence would make it worse and would be disrespectful.”

“I understand there are low barriered, recovery housing and addiction and mental health services in the area that the homeless population utilize. Does it not make sense we be the same area as these other services? What if 48 Victoria Street is the best location?”

The regular meeting of city council gets underway at 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 31.