Strategic Financial Stewardship

When a private company is facing a tight economy, the leadership team doesn't automatically jack up prices and expect customers to pay more for the same service. They look inward. They review their overhead, challenge their assumptions, and ensure that every single dollar spent drives a direct, measurable return.

It is time to bring that exact executive mindset to Kamloops City Hall.

Voters are tired of being treated like an endless ATM to fund a growing municipal bureaucracy. Financial stewardship isn't about cutting the essential public services our neighbourhoods rely on—it is about managing our city’s budget with the same respect, discipline, and scrutiny you apply to your own household or business.

Here is my business-minded playbook to protect Kamloops property taxpayers and optimize our city’s financial engine.

Managing the city's budget with business discipline, operational efficiency, and respect for the taxpayer.

Leading By Example: Scrapping the Catered Meal Budget

True leadership starts at the top, and it starts with behaviour. When local families are stretching their grocery budgets, and small businesses are fighting to stay afloat, elected officials should not be eating on the taxpayers' dime.

The Action: I will introduce motion to entirely eliminate the taxpayer-funded catered meal and entertainment budget for city council meetings.

The Common-Sense Shift: If ordinary city employees pack their own lunches or buy their own dinners, city councillors can too. While this is a modest line item in a massive city budget, it sends an unarguable message of goodwill to the community: We are listening, we are tightening our belts alongside you, and the days of casual entitlement at City Hall are over.

Shifting from Bureaucracy to Customer Service

Municipalities love to spend time and money optimizing "internal processes." They shuffle paperwork from one department to another and call it progress. But as an entrepreneur, I know that if your internal processes look good on paper but your customer service still fails, your organization is losing.

The Action: I will advocate for a complete operational shift that views Kamloops residents and business owners not as "subscribers to a bureaucracy," but as valued customers.

The Common-Sense Shift: Whether you are a homeowner trying to report a broken bylaw issue, or a small business owner trying to get a commercial renovation permit on Tranquille, your interface with City Hall should be frictionless, transparent, and fast. Time is money. By cutting bureaucratic red tape and speeding up permit turnarounds, we lower the cost of doing business in Kamloops and stimulate our local economy without spending a dime of taxpayer capital.

Asking the Right Questions: The "Find 10%" Challenge

When politicians ask department heads, “Are you being efficient?” the answer is always a unanimous “Yes.” It is a useless question that gets zero results. To protect your tax dollars, leadership has to change the operational parameters.

The Action: I will push for a formal directive requiring all municipal department heads to identify 10% in operational cost savings within their internal administrative overhead.

The Common-Sense Shift: This directive will include a strict, legally binding clause: these savings cannot interfere with front-line public services. We are not cutting the workers who pave our roads, clear our snow, or keep our parks clean. We are commanding managers to trim the internal administrative fat so we can protect the meat and potatoes of what you actually pay taxes for.

Maximizing ROI on Our Major Assets

Kamloops has proudly worn the "Tournament Capital of Canada" brand for years, and we are making an incredible investment in our new Performing Arts Centre (PAC). But infrastructure is only half the battle. If you run these multi-million-dollar facilities like a passive landlord, they become a permanent drain on the taxpayer balance sheet. We need to run them like aggressive asset managers.

The Action: I will champion an entrepreneurial marketing and partnership framework that connects our massive sports and cultural facilities directly to local economic growth.

The Common-Sense Shift:

The Digital Welcome Wagon: We will launch a streamlined, digital portal for visiting tournament and event attendees. Local Kamloops hotels, restaurants, and downtown retailers will plug exclusive discount codes directly into this system. Visitors get an amazing local experience, our small businesses get an immediate surge in foot traffic, and the city can track the exact economic impact of every single event.
Filling the Empty Dates: We must mandate that the operational model for the new Performing Arts Centre aggressively target high-yield commercial bookings, touring acts, and regional conferences—specifically during the mid-week slots and the slower winter "shoulder season." We don't just build a beautiful theatre; we actively market it to ensure it generates revenue and pays dividends back to the community.

Ending the "Use-It-or-Lose-It" Budget Trap

In traditional government bureaucracy, there is no incentive for a department to finish the year under budget. If a manager runs their team efficiently and has leftover money on December 31st, they cannot roll those savings over to help their team the following year. Instead, those hard-earned savings are swept into a central city pool, and the department loses access to them entirely. This creates a deeply broken "use-it-or-lose-it" mentality. To protect their funding levels and ensure they don't look overfunded on paper, managers face immense systemic pressure to rush out and spend remaining tax dollars every year-end on non-essential supplies, upgrades, or consulting.

The Action: I will move to implement a municipal Gain-Sharing Incentive Framework for City Hall departments.

The Common-Sense Shift: We will stop creating systems that encourage year-end spending sprees. Under my plan, if a department legitimately innovates and saves $20,000, we will allow them to "carry forward" a small percentage of those savings (for example, $5,000) into a dedicated innovation pool for their team to use next year for specialized training, advanced field tools, or safety gear. The remaining $15,000 goes straight back into the taxpayer reserve pool. This gives staff a proud, powerful incentive to find efficiencies and treat your tax dollars like their own money.

The Bottom Line