Kamloops City Council is being asked to create a new position for a full-time FireSmart Coordinator, who would be in charge of running the program.

Fire Chief Ken Uzeloc says the idea is to ensure that principles of the program are being reviewed, assessed, and incorporated with the goal of making Kamloops a FireSmart community.

“Successful FireSmart programs are when the communities themselves get engaged, so not just the city doing the city’s portion but getting the various communities across the city to actually buy in and start doing FireSmart initiatives,” Uzeloc told Radio NL.

“It makes the whole city safer.”

Uzeloc says if the position is approved by City Council on Tuesday, Jan. 9, the person will be tasked to coordinate with all City departments instead of having several people take up aspects of it in addition to their regular duties.

In a report to Council, Uzeloc said any fuel mitigation or fuel management in natural park spaces is managed by Civic Operations – Greenspaces and Natural Resources personnel, while Kamloops Fire Rescue does most of the assessments and public education work related to FireSmart.

“We really need somebody to really take the reins and coordinate and manage and work with the different parts of the organization on strategy and what our strategy is regarding Fire Smarting. That can’t be done off the side of various people’s desks,” Uzeloc said.

“There has been some changes to the FireSmart granting program that actually is looking for that. They’re looking for the program to be more formalized and embedded into the organization, if you’re going to be eligible to get grants to assist with some of that work.”

In his report, Uzeloc said the City was the recipient of $1.1 million in funding from the Community Resiliency Investment program between 2019 and 2023.

“This money has primarily been put towards forest fuel management efforts as outlined in the City’s Community Wildfire Protection Plan,” Uzeloc wrote, noting that not all of the money has been spent just yet.

“The primary focus of this FireSmart position is to support eligible FireSmart activities and other activities related to emergency management, structural fire, and/or forestry, as long as the other activities are not more than 20 per cent of their duties.”

Uzeloc also listed Logan Lake – Canada’s first FireSmart community – and West Kelowna as two examples where FireSmart programs were effective in saving properties, pointing to the Tremont Creek Fire in 2021 and the McDougall Creek Fire in 2023 respectively.

It is not clear how much this new FireSmart Coordinator position would cost, but Uzeloc is recommending it be funded from the City’s Working Capital Reserve for the first year, with taxpayers picking up the costs after that.

“There are some different job descriptions that we’ve been looking at from the FireSmart program itself that outlines some of the qualifications,” Uzeloc said. “It would be mostly the staff costs for the person but obviously there would be some training requirements and we’d want to formalize as an actual program, so you’d need some budget for engagement.

“A lot of that is to organize work with groups and to get out there and engage with communities.”