Kamloops City staff say that there is a total of about $28,662,000 currently sitting in reserve funds.

Administration is projecting a 2019 surplus of $700,000. Corporate Services Director Kathy Humphrey says that will go into the general surplus account which will have approximately $14.6 million after those funds are added.

“Our estimated contributed surplus for this year, so we sometimes refer to it as the prior year surplus, sometimes it’s our general surplus, our general reserve, we’re only contributing $700,000 into our reserves. So that’s the lowest number that we’ve had since I have been at the city in the past five years.”

Humphrey says the plan is always to budget for net zero. Mayor Ken Christian says in the grand scheme, that is a pretty accurate budget plan. “I would just like to point out, while $700,000 is an estimated surplus in 2019, seems like a lot of money, if one looks at the $115 Million, that’s about 0.6%. So conversely it tells me that the city was 99.6% accurate in terms of its budget.”

It shows that departments are tightening their belts when it comes to making sure they’re reporting accurate figures. “That is a factor of serveral things. One I think is that we are finally seeing the efficiencies that people have been working on and taking the money out of the budget to reflect them. So people are coming in far closer on their actuals to what we actually budgeted” Humphrey said. “So when we said we can do this for $50,000 we used to have $100,000 in the budget. We have now taken that money out of the budget…. There isn’t as big of a slush or wiggle room in the budget.”

Below is a list of the city’s reserve funds and how much is in them.