The City of Kamloops has created a new staff position for a FireSmart coordinator, who would be in charge of running the program.

This person will be tasked to coordinate with all City departments instead of having several people take up aspects of the FireSmart program in addition to their regular duties.

Councillor Stephen Karpuk spoke in favour of the idea, calling it a fantastic step forward and something that needs to be done owing to changing fire management strategies.

“Our public are waking up to the idea that we need, as a collective whole, to be coming on board,” Karpuk said. “People who have been trimming their cedars in parts of our community and dumping them on the backside of their cedar fence in the green space, thinking they would decompose, have just lit a fuse cord.”

Karpuk says he hopes to work towards reducing these fuel loads with the goal of making Kamloops a FireSmart community, like Logan Lake.

“My hope is that we can start this educational process work with our community associations, work with our non-profits and collectively through this coordinator see our community succeed,” he added.

“The risk that our community has because we are completely surrounded. And I always question where would we evacuate to. We are the place that people swim to and have come to over the decades. The evidence is very clear and I think this is a fantastic step forward and I am 100 per cent in favour of it.”

Councillor Mike O’Reilly said while he liked the idea, he raised concerns about provincial downloading.

“I’ve read the reports that said we’ve been applying for this money and we’re very successful with more than $1.1 million [between 2019 and 2023] but now we can’t do that unless we hire a new full time person. That to me is a problem,” O’Reilly said. “That is something we are being forced to do rather than having our grants writer help more or reallocate some resources than having this person that we are being mandated [to hire.]”

Fire Chief Ken Uzeloc said he understood those concerns, but noted this new person will “bring cohesion” to FireSmart efforts underway in Kamloops.

“We have little bits of work that is being done by the parks department, but KFR, by emergency preparedness but its not being done aligned,” Uzeloc said. “It is not being done collaboratively and its not being done strategically to help really more that dial forward towards a FireSmart community.”

Uzeloc also says Kamloops needs to have a FireSmart program given its location and geography and given “the fact how isolated we are from support.”

“What I’m looking for is for us to be able to lower the risk level so that if something does happen, we have the ability to control it or contain it until we can get resources here from BC Wildfire or whatever communities are going to come to support us because that’s not going to be quick for us because we are on our own,” Uzeloc said.

Councillor Margot Middleton also voiced her support for the move, saying its not just people who live near the Kamloops borders that need to worry about FireSmart.

“This really rolls off into the whole of the city of Kamloops where landscaping has not been done in a FireSmart way,” Middleton said.

“If we think of what that cost is, say for a full-time person, it would probably really only take one incident of fire caused by some other source other than wildfire to make that position extremely valuable and to have been worth every penny.”

The new position will be funded through reserves for the first year, with taxpayers picking up the costs after that.