The Vice President of Administration and Finance at Thompson Rivers University says a plan to build temporary student housing portables on campus has been abandoned for now.
Matt Milovick, says it comes after the City rejected a request from TRU as it sought an exemption to the BC Building Code to build these houses.
“I was disappointed. We felt that we could have achieved a temporary housing facility in ways that were safe,” he said, on the NL Morning News. “They are built to Alberta Part 10 building code for temporary industrial camps. They’re not built to BC Building Code but we had strategies to modify the issues around life safety. So we weren’t concerned about that.”
“What it would have taken is variances and the City wasn’t comfortable. We pushed them and they pushed back and that’s where we are.”
In a letter dated Sept. 22, Kamloops CAO, David Trawin, said the request was denied because of issues with the fire alarm systems, the heating and ventilation system, as well as utility issues, including sewer access.
“We felt that although there is a crisis, an institutional crisis for students at TRU, that we could not consider it, more importantly the courts probably would not consider it, and the province wouldn’t consider it an emergency,” Trawin told NL News. “Once we determined that that clause was not applicable in this case, it came to it that the units would have to follow the BC Building Code.”
“I’m not slighting TRU but the City cannot provide a building permit and allow a unit to go in legally until it gets that information. If they can get a professional to verify that it does meet the building code then we’re definitely prepared to expedite whatever we need to do to have that happen.”
Trawin also told NL News that if TRU is able to come up with an alternate solution, like modular structures that meet the BC Building Code, the City would be in a better position to work with the university.
“The only way to do that would actually be to contract one of the builders and actually build them from scratch and there we are, eight months later so it doesn’t help us solve our problem,” Milovick said Wednesday.
For now, he notes TRU is able to house some of these students in hotels and motels, though he cautions that is only a short term solution.
“Plan B is the agreements that we have with hotels and motels and we were fortunate in the sense because we’d done this earlier on while we were exploring the situation and at that time the hotels were essentially full with a lot of evacuees from the various forest fires were occupying them,” he said.
“But as we’ve seen them go back to their communities, we’ve seen vacancies created and we’re taking advantage of that.”
