The Kamloops and District Chamber of Commerce says it is committed to working with the City of Kamloops to address concerns and find solutions as residents are faced with a property tax hike just under 10 per cent.

Executive Director Acacia Pangilinan says she understands the need for more money because of rising costs, but she also says business owners in Kamloops aren’t able to absorb these increases, because of challenging economic conditions.

“At the Chamber, we really felt that we couldn’t support more than what was being put forward in the provisional budget because of just the state of the economy and doing business in Kamloops, in B.C., and in Canada,” Pangilinan said.

“We’re hearing from out members that the cost of doing business is so high that we just can’t in principle really go and support much more of that.”

The City whittled down its provisional budget, and deferred some supplemental items, to end up with a 9.55 per cent increase in property taxes this year. The supplemental budget accounted for 0.1 per cent of that increase, with the majority of the increase blamed on “contracted or economic impacts.”

Pangilinan also told Radio NL that it was “challenging” for the Chamber to come up with its recommendations about the 2024 budget, because of a lack of detailed information from City Hall when it comes to how much money was actually spent in previous years.

“Just as an example, when a lot of organizations and businesses do their budgets, they look at their actuals to see what they spent, and then they create their budgets based on that,” Pangilinan said. “Without that information it did prove to be a bit challenging to understand where the city was really ending up with their budget.”

Pangilinan also said the Chamber feels the City’s supplemental budget process should be revised so it can be more transparent.

“The city was definitely open to receiving that feedback and I think they’ve recognized that its a process that they can improve upon,” she said. “We wanted to highlight that as a challenge that we had experienced through this process.”

The City will set its final tax rate in the spring, with property taxes typically due in early July.

“We really appreciated the opportunity to engage with city staff on this [budget] process,” Pangilinan added. “We’ve definitely raised some of the concerns that we out forward in our position with city staff and we’re looking forward to addressing those in the upcoming year.”

For more on the 2024 City of Kamloops budget, go here.