People have complained about the camps that have been set up along the riverbank in Valleyview and one Councillor hopes to see by-law officials looking into it as early as today.

Dale Bass says there is a lot of debris like tents, needles and shopping carts that are fairly easy to see. Bass says it’s quite an extensive area of the riverbank that has been taken up by several camps and she’s received several photos that show that it’s a massive problem with tents, shopping carts and needles among the debris. “By-laws and the director said that they were going to send staff down to look at it and then use our contractor that we have hired to clean it up.”

Bass says “the problem with that, once you clean up a camp, once by-law and RCMP clean up a camp, there’s nothing to stop it from coming back again. It’s something that’s hard to stay ahead of. That’s been the experience… they get everything cleaned up, they move the stuff into storage and they explain to people that they can’t be here during the day and then they go away and then the come back.” Bass says it could have by-law working on this 24/7 and it still wouldn’t be able to keep up. “As the city grows and as the services that we provide to that community become well known, people are coming to Kamloops because we have better services, we have the option for housing, and sometimes that just means we have more people on the street and on the riverbank for a while.”