There was a finance committee meeting this week in Kamloops and the city’s Finance Director says the cash flow situation is looking good at this point in time.

The city had to rework the budget shortly after it passed due to COVID-19. Kathy Humphrey says at that time it didn’t know what that would look like and it had to do a lot of guess work.

“We tried to be semi-optimistic, but also realistic and present council with potentially some of the worst case scenario options and so thankfully I think there has been a shortened duration of complete shut down of a lot of facilities and building for the city as well as for the businesses which I think has helped the community whether this first phase of this long storm.”

Speaking on The Jeff Andreas Show, Humphrey says every community is different and for those that rely more on things like parking, transit or recreation facilities to pay the bills, they would be a little bit harder off. She says the timing wasn’t bad for Kamloops as it knew it would get a substantial amount of its property taxes paid leading it to believe it wouldn’t have to dip into reserves.

“I think this is a long term challenge for the community because while people have weathered sort of the first three months and things are starting to open up, we don’t know what the next year is going to look like and so we don’t whether or not things are going to have close again. We don’t know whether or not businesses are going to survive in this new normal.”

Humphrey says it will be taking a hit in its investment portfolio. “Our investments are really tied to interest rates and so for 2019 and the beginning part of 2020 our investments are doing really well. We have seen about a 50 per cent hit in the interest rates that we’re getting in our bank accounts and in our short term investments.”

Humphrey says come 2021, or even the end of 2020, it  expects its interest revenue will likely be about half of what it was last year.

A more detailed financial analysis is expected on July 14.