Image Credit: CFJC News

By Curtis Goodrum

City Hall

Council’s Committee of the Whole hammers down Kamloops tax increase to 7.42%

Apr 2, 2025 | 1:41 PM

KAMLOOPS — At a Committee of the Whole meeting Tuesday afternoon (April 1), Kamloops council voted to defer parts of the municipal budget until 2026. The proposed tax increase will be lower for than previously thought this year. The debt servicing for the building of a new RCMP detachment will also be deferred until 2026.

“The total of those changes would bring us down to a 7.42 per cent tax increase,” said Dustin Rutsatz, the financial planning and procurement manager at the City of Kamloops.

Councillor Stephn Karpuk had some strong words against putting off spending.

“I’m not (for) deferring. We’ve agreed we want to do this as a council, put the money away. It’s like borrowing something, not paying now and putting it on credit for later. Every business would think it’s a bad idea. This is good social debt that’s now becoming badly financed. My perspective is, let’s pay for it. We’ve decided to do this. Let’s do this,” said Karpuk.

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However, some councillors disagreed and believed the RCMP detachment project should be approved by the community first.

“The RCMP building — maybe we’ve accepted that plan, but our community has not yet. I do not know what our community, overall, thinks of that plan. We don’t have a borrowing bylaw for it, and I think we need to be careful at this moment in time — especially as we look at what’s coming down the economic pipe over the next little while — that we’re not putting everything into the basket all at once,” said Councillor Katie Neustaeter.

The councillor got support from other members of the council, including Mike O’Reilly.

“We need to hear from the community,” he said. “Every councillor on this table and the mayor campaigned on new recreational facilities. That’s what we heard from the community. That’s why we’re here. Nobody campaigned on a new RCMP building, and we didn’t hear that as a need from the community.”

The committee, after the discussion, voted for the motion to change the budget, which will still need to be formally approved at next week’s regular council meeting.