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Cost of Kamloops council code of conduct investigations up 60 per cent this year
Two-and-a-half years of Kamloops city council investigations have cost taxpayers nearly a half-million dollars.
More than two dozen complaints about each others’ conduct led to pay cuts for the mayor, public apologies and six times someone on council was found to have broken their own code of conduct.
Since July, 2023, city hall has spent $460,373 on the investigations. That includes $173,300 this year alone, a 60 per cent increase from last December.
Nearly all of them have been investigated by Vancouver lawyer Reece Harding.
Two ongoing investigations have so far cost taxpayers around $45,000 and $30,000, respectively.
Many of the investigations have centred on Mayor Reid Hamer-Jackson who was found to have broken council’s conduct rules four times. He also breached the Community Charter and privacy laws a few times.
Council sanctioned the mayor several times and demanded he take measures to make up for his behaviour, including sending apology letters and taking courses and provincial laws. Until he complies, Hamer-Jackson is earning less than half the mayor’s typical salary.
Aside from Hamer-Jackson, councillor Bill Sarai is the only person whom Harding found to have broken conduct rules. The first broken rule was deemed frivolous and ended with no punishment. The second, spurred by a secret recording and an iNFOnews.ca Freedom of Information request, prompted Sarai to issue a public apology.
The investigations are only part of the rising legal costs at city hall. Last year, $1.6 million in legal bills was triple what the city budgeted for.
By February 2025, Hamer-Jackson was blamed for a combined $1 million in legal costs since he was elected, but that was before his defamation lawsuit against councillor Katie Neustaeter got to a courtroom this past fall. City hall is paying her legal fees in the ongoing case.
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One response
This article exemplifies what is wrong with Kamloops civic governance. Its distortion and deflection only reinforce the destructive culture created by one of the most secretive and bullying city councils and administrations in recent memory. The result has been a steady erosion of public trust.
The article advances a narrative that castigates Mayor Hamer-Jackson for attempting to lift the veil of secrecy surrounding City Hall. In doing so, it ignores a critical reality: some councillors have chosen to weaponize the Code of Conduct (COC) by filing unsubstantiated and frivolous complaints.
According to the City’s own website under “Council Conduct and Investigations,” there are 29 COC matters listed. Of these:
• 6 were deemed “substantiated” in the opinion of a lawyer not by a court of law
• 10 complaints were dismissed as frivolous
• 9 complaints were withdrawn
• 4 complaints remain unresolved
Of the substantiated findings, four involved the Mayor and two involved Councillor Sarai. Importantly, these were legal opinions, not judicial rulings. The Mayor was found to be in technical breach for releasing information from in-camera meetings and for conflict-of-interest matters. Councillor Sarai was found to have misled the public by lying and to have allegedly released confidential documents.
The cost to taxpayers for these substantiated findings alone was $252,093.25, an unacceptable expense simply to referee internal disputes between elected officials.
But it gets worse. This is where the weaponization becomes obvious.
Legal fees totalled $90,420.57 for nine unsubstantiated complaints and $44,553.58 for ten withdrawn complaints. That is $134,924.15 spent on complaints that ultimately went nowhere.
In total, hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars have been burned resolving disputes that should never have reached this level of disputes that could have been settled by a kindergarten class.
City Council needs to move past personal grievances, internal power struggles, and the refusal by some councillors to accept the authority of a duly elected mayor. And while disagreements are part of politics, dishonesty is not. I will have a very hard time forgiving the act of lying by Councillor Sarai.
This is not governance. It is game playing at public expense and Kamloops residents deserve far better.