With the City of Kamloops having now pulled down all of the extended sidewalk patios downtown for the winter, work on a new program for next year is said to be ramping up.

Howie Reimer, the Executive Director of the Kamloops Central Business Improvement Association, says the City is looking to the City of Kingston, Ontario as it continues to develop its own extended patio program.

Reimer says the onus will now be on business owners – and not the City – as they’ll have to pay for the patios, as well all of the construction and maintenance costs. They’ll also have to pay $700 per displaced parking stall for the seven-month patio season from April to October.

“We’ve heard from most of our businesses that it was time for those extensions to come down but there are discussions regarding a new extended patio program with portable patios, pop up patios which they do in many other jurisdictions,” Reimer said.

“There are lots of questions still, but the Kingston patio program is one that they’ve been looking at. [It] has been very successful and could be adopted in whole or in part for the coming spring.”

The removal of the sidewalk patios this month freed up around 40 metered parking spaces in total across downtown Kamloops.

“There are elements of the business community that would prefer everything be left for parking,” Reimer said. “There are others that believe that the patio extensions are going to create more vibrancy.”

“The discussion with the city is ongoing and I think we’re probably going to get a bit of a hybrid.”

The extended patio program was put in place in 2020 to help businesses stay afloat at a time when COVID-19 health orders meant restrictions on how many people could be indoors in a public place.

Patios initially had wooden sidewalk extensions, which were replaced with the brick extensions in 2021.