Kamloops council mulls new $27M firehall

Another construction project may be added to impending City of Kamloops debt.

A $26 million loan would pay for a new Dallas neighbourhood firehall, bringing a full-time crew to the area and replacing its on-call firefighters.

At the Feb. 10 committee of the whole meeting, Kamloops city council approved the plan, but it won’t be confirmed until the 2026 budget is approved in the coming weeks.

The city is currently taking on rapidly growing debt, which is expected to peak in 2029 at $426 million. Most of that total comes from the new downtown arts centre, an arena multiplex and a yet-to-be-approved RCMP detachment.

Last year, council spent $200,000 to design the new Dallas neighbourhood firehall, which now has a $27 million construction estimate. The new fire station would include around $1.5 million in spending in 2027, with almost the entire remaining cost paid for with a $26 million loan in 2029.

The expanded firehall comes with a plan to add a full-time staff contingent of six, currently staffed by an on-call crew.

The old firehall would be torn down and replaced with a temporary building until the new facility is built on the same location.

At the meeting, council denied another facility. It’s a proposed training facility for police and firefighters.

The facility has a $3.5 million price tag, which includes the designed work on the policing section of the building, fire training facilities along with the cost of operations. The cost of building a shooting range hasn’t been priced out.

It’s not the first time the training facility was proposed to council. It came forward in 2021 when it was also denied.

While the entire cost wasn’t yet known, staff expected to spare the city from spending more than $200,000 each year for police, firefighting and bylaw training. Most often it’s police, but they all travel out of the city for routine training. Officers and fighters from elsewhere would be expected to use it, while Thompson Rivers University would also use it for firefighter training.

“I honestly think with the different needs that we have with community safety… this is a seed that needs to be planted,” councillor Stephen Karpuk said.

While councillors Karpuk, Margot Middleton and Bill Sarai wanted to see it approved, others were concerned the city would bear the entire cost for a building that would be shared by other cities and agencies.