City Hall working on new nuisance bylaw to put a lid on neighbourhood disturbances
NEWS/ CITY HALL — Kamloops will have a new tool in its neighbourhood peace-and-quiet tool box soon.
Resident Joanne Forde at council meeting.
City staff were directed to continue work on a new bylaw that will round out existing regulations aimed at making sure neighbours are good neighbours. Residents Joanne Forde and Angela Rigby appeared before council at a workshop today asking the City to adopt a nuisance bylaw mirroring one that Nanaimo has used for years.
They said their North Shore neighbourhood has been plagued for years by drug dealing, noise and criminal activity. “The yelling and fighting wakes us from a sound sleep,” said Forde.
“This is no exaggeration, this is real and it has to stop.”
She said she knew of some areas where it’s taken years to shut down a drug house or get disturbances under control.
“We pay our taxes just as you do; why then can these drug dealers control our neighbourhoods for months and years?” She asked council to enact a nuisance bylaw and “get it working for Kamloops as soon as possible.”
Rigby, who lives next door to Forde, confirmed that, “We’ve had a number of homes on our street that have had drug dealers,” and residents need “some control back in our neighbourhoods.”
Corporate services and community safety director Dave Duckworth said a group of administrators had travelled to Nanaimo in March and sat through one of that City’s reviews of problem houses.
He said Nanaimo’s bylaw has been in effect for many years and probably isn’t technically enforceable if it was challenged, so Kamloops needs to do a thorough analysis of what it can do.
Kamloops already has a substance-abuse bylaw designed to shut down crack houses, and another bylaw on unsightly premises but a nuisance bylaw would cover off noisy parties and other disturbances.
Coun. Tina Lange cautioned against a law that would punish the landlords rather than the offending renters, which is what the Nanaimo bylaw does.
“Is there some way that we can bill the perpetrators? To say that the landlord has to pay seems a bit counterproductive when it’s the criminal that should really have to pay these costs,” she said.
It’s often hard for landlords to evict bad tenants because of the Residential Tenancy Act, said Lange, who owns several rental houses.
Bylaws supervisor Jon Wilson said the Residential Tenancy Branch allows for quick evictions if municipal bylaws have been broken. “We can support property owners to identify that there have been violations.”
Council directed staff to draw up the new bylaw and bring it back for consideration.
ArmchairMayor.ca 
North Shore Nuisance By-Law; since was being economically disadvantaged make someone a nuisance? We have a Canadian bill of rights which prohibits housing discrimination based on economic status of an individual. Branding neighbours drug dealers is often a label put on the economically disadvantaged by other neighbours to move them away and harrass the landlord. I hope this by law never comes into fruition.
LikeLike
Out of respect for conflict of interest laws, Peter Milobar doesn’t speak or vote on any matter that has to do with liquor licences because his family owns or used to own a hotel which held a liquor licence. Yet Tina Lange, who owns rental properties, doesn’t hesitate to speak out on this subject.
Is Milobar too cautious or is Lange out of line?
LikeLike
Coun. Lange quite often excuses herself from matters relating to housing issues due to her ownership of rental properties. In this case, council was responding to a delegation on the issue of neighbourhood nuisances. Conflict of interest, of course, is often a matter of perception vs. reality. Technically, a councillor needs to have a direct pecuniary interest in the outcome of a decision in order to be in conflict. More often than not, they excuse themselves to avoid the perception of conflict whether or not it’s real.
LikeLike