The city of Kamloops has set a fourth straight record year for construction activity with three months of 2020 still to go, the question now is, just how high can the record reach?
Building and Engineering Development Manager Jason Dixon says there are still some ‘decent sized permits’ in the pipeline still to come.
“Obviously we won’t see anything like we’ve seen with the Royal Inland Hospital project, but there are some permits that have been processed that once people pick them up, we’ll enter the stats,” he said.
“We have some projects that we are working on right now. It will depend on how they get through the system over the next couple of months.”
Dixon says even if you take out the $152 million in permits issued for the RIH Patient Care Tower project, it still leaves $195.5 million in other permits issued this year. That is just $28.5 million short of the first record of $224 million set in 2017.
“The one that I really take away is even if we took the hospital project away from the stats from this year, it would still be a strong year construction wise and I think that is an important thing to see that the rest of the construction industry still continues to be strong,” Dixon added.
Mayor Ken Christian meanwhile says he is pleased to see the city continues to have a healthy construction sector despite COVID-19 related slowdowns, calling it a ‘silver lining’ in an otherwise tough year.
“You know that is a lot of work and it means down the road a lot of additional tax monies for the city of Kamloops so that we can provide the services that our citizens want,” he said, noting it points to a growing city noting many people appear to want out of the Lower Mainland.
“Either due to increased property values and thus increased taxation or else just the congested nature of the Lower Mainland, and as they look for options, Kamloops is becoming an option that they are more and more selecting. So that has really sort of manifested the increase in building permit values.”
Christian also says projects like the Valleyview Secondary School expansion and the new Patient Care Tower has led to a healthy construction sector in 2020. Last year, Kamloops hit a record construction value of $288 million. It took until Dec. 31 to break the old 2018 record of $285 million.
Construction on the $417-million Patient Care Tower – the largest capital project in Kamloops’ history – is expected to be complete in 2022.
