The City of Kamloops will be working with interested business owners who want to bring back extended patios next year.

Planning and Development Manager Rod Martin says city staff are currently fine tuning their extended patio guidelines, with those details expected to go before council early in the new year.

“The idea would be to create guidelines that would allow them to be sort of easily taken down,” Martin told Radio NL. “Business owners would have to come up with a design that would work well for them. We want them out for the winter for snowplow reasons and that sort of thing.”

All of the extended sidewalk patios there were installed at the City’s expense two years ago have been pulled down for the winter.

Martin says it will be up to business owners to decide if these extended patios are worth the investment.

“They can give us a draft proposal before they spend a lot of money looking into it, to see if they are on the right track and then if they are, then they can go ahead with a more detailed design before they actually start spending the money,” Martin said.

He also says Kamloops business owners can also choose to stick with the “much cheaper” standard patios extensions that do not take up any parking spots, if they choose to do so.

“It would given them some sidewalk seating that only costs about $40 a year. It doesn’t involve any bypass sidewalks, so they always have that option,” Martin said.

Howie Reimer, the Executive Director of the Kamloops Central Business Improvement Association, told Radio NL that the City of Kamloops is looking to the City of Kingston, Ontario as it continues to develop these guidelines.

“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] has been very successful and could be adopted in whole or in part for the coming spring.”

Under the new program, business owners will have to pay all of the construction and maintenance costs for extended patios. They’ll also have to pay $700 per displaced parking stall for the seven-month patio season from April to October.

Martin says the City is working to have these new guidelines in place, well before the summer 2024 patio season.

“We’re going to be trying to design something that is going to look good, its going to be safe, accessible, but provide flexibility for the businesses to come with their own design that works well for them as long as they address all of our concerns,” he said.

“It gives the restaurants the ability to try and design that is hopefully somewhat affordable and easy to remove and replace each year.”

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. The removal over the last month will lead to the return of about 40 metered parking spots in 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.”