The Mayor of Kamloops says the city has two issues that it hopes to discuss at the annual Union of BC Municipalities convention that gets underway today.

The annual meeting of the towns, cities, and districts in B.C. is being held virtually this year because of COVID-19. Every year members of local governments gather to discuss a variety of issues and pass resolutions.

Ken Christian says the first issue has to do with the sharing of costs when it comes to housing prisoners, especially those that are not from the area.

“Its a dispute that we’re having with the province of British Columbia. It costs us over $200 a day to house a prisoner in local cells and we’re not getting anywhere near that in terms of compensation from the province of British Columbia,” he told NL News.

“While we accept that for local people who have to be incarcerated, we are not quite as accepting when it comes to having prisoners in our local jails that might be remanded or doing weekend sentences that could be from anywhere in the province.”

He says the city gets reimbursed about half of what it costs to house these prisoners, with taxpayers paying the rest.

The other issue from the city of Kamloops is asking for a review of the current outpatient mode in the province, in particular, with an eye towards preventing homelessness.

“Its our feeling that the outpatient model for mental health treatment is really failing both the community and those people with mental illness so as mayors, we want to raise these concerns with the government,” Christian said.

“I do think small secure facilities that treated people with specific illnesses would be better than them living on the streets trying to seek out an existence.”

Both these resolutions were set to be discussed at the Southern Interior Local Government Association (SILGA) convention, but that event was cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“So they just moved their block of resolutions forward to UBCM. I suspect they’ll be referred back to SILGA and hopefully in 2021, we’ll be able to have a discussion at the local level about that,” added Christian.

City supportive of Sadie Hunter running for UBCM board position

Mayor Christian also says the city is also hoping that Councillor Sadie Hunter gets voted onto the UBCM board as a director-at-large.

“We were very fortunate to have Arjun Singh in that capacity for a number of years and worked his way through the executive up to President,” he said. “So we want to support Sadie and I think that is good for Kamloops because it gives us a voice at the table.”

He previously told NL News that Hunter has the energy, the passion, and the skill-set to represent Kamloops on the board.

Christian adds that it is going to be a very different convention this year with everything happening online.

“What I’m going to miss is the opportunity to liaise with other local government officials and other mayors and talk to them about things like ‘how are you coping with the pandemic?’ and ‘how are you dealing with everything from urban tree canopies to recycling of organics?'”

The 2020 UBCM Convention runs until Thursday of this week.