Wal-Mart reno boosts city construction figures

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A multi-million expansion to the Kamloops Wal-Mart helped boost the city’s building-permit totals over this time last year for yet another month.

The city issued more than $17 million in building permits in July, compared to just under $14 million in 2011.

“The biggest one was the Wal-Mart addition. We’re at $6 million just for that project alone,” said development and engineering-services director Marvin Kwiatkowski.

Overall, the city handed out more than $8.5 million in commercial permits, compared to $4.6 million in 2011.

For the year-to-date, Kamloops has more than doubled its commercial permit value: $63 million in permits this year, versus $29 million or the first six months of 2011.

“We’re obviously doing substantially higher than we did last year,” said Kwiatkowski.

“That’s pretty strong, double than last year.”

Residential construction was down slightly from last year, with $5 million in permits issued compared to $7 million in 2011.

Kwiatkowski said those numbers will likely see a greater increase in 2013, once the current rush of commercial construction is complete.

Overall, the city is well over 2011’s permit total for the first six months of the year.

This time last year, more than $97 million in building permits had gone out. In 2012, it’s more than $118 million.

After starting the year expecting to issue around $140-million in permits, the city’s since reworked it’s projections, with $175 million as the new mark to meet.

Kwiatkowski said the city is well on track to hitting that, given there are several big projects still in the works or expected before the year is out.

That includes $6 million to bring a Target to Sahali Mall and construction of the Telus data centre.

“I think it’s going to be a pretty strong finish,” Kwiatkowski said.