Kamloops city staff are reporting significant savings on capital projects.

Staff say the city delivered capital projects for $91 million since August of 2018, which is $3.52 million under budget. It says that’s a savings of 6.8 per cent.

Civic operations manager Jen Fretz says the city has saved money primarily through its procurement process.

“We’ve really moved away from the traditional tender to a variety of different ways of procuring projects. They’re really innovative ways and they’re new ways, and we’re really trying to work the construction industry in Kamloops and beyond to help them try to understand what it is that we’re trying to do,” Fretz says.

“Some of the challenges are the timing of projects, making sure that we’re aligning all of those things with the local marketplace and the timing of putting those requests for proposal or tenders or whatever they might be out to the market. We are making sure that we’re continuing to work with our internal departments, stakeholders as well as communications to make sure we get information out internally as well as externally.”

The city outlined 57 projects and the biggest saving came on improvements to the Sandman Centre, which cost $700,000 under budget at less than $1.85 million instead of $2.55 million.

It also saved more than $1.3 million collectively, on drainage improvements to Owl Road in Juniper (savings of $458,000), on upgrades along River Road in Valleyview ($432,000) and on pedestrian upgrades along Tod Road in Barnhartvale ($464,000).

The savings from those projects will now go back to the reserve funds that they were taken out of.