Rita Pak, vice chair of the Accessibility Advisory Committee, presented the Annual Report and Work Plan to Kimberley City Council at their meeting on Monday, Jan. 13.
Pak highlighted that the committee's chair, Caprice Hogg, was unable to attend the meeting herself, due to the fact that her wheelchair is unable to access council chambers.
The committee is joined Councillor Woody Maguire and staff liaison Jasmine Nelson.
"We want to thank the Council for putting together our group to help build a more accessible and inclusive City of Kimberley," Pak said. "Our committee is made up a group of passionate residents living with a disability, or a caretaker of a loved one who has a disability."
The committee has been meeting bi-monthly since February of 2024 and in March provided their feedback to the City Planner regarding drive-thrus and gas station proposals. In their initial meetings they discussed the priority projects and summarized a list of barriers facing people with disabilities in the city.
Upon review of their terms of reference and after reading through numerous accessibility plans from across the province, their committee recommended to Council in July that they hire a consultant to help complete a plan that would outline the most effective way of getting the work done.
"According to the BC Accessibility Act of 2022, an accessibility plan wold provide a framework to identify, remove and prevent barriers to accessibility in our city," Pak said. "Our committee’s biggest accomplishment from the past year was securing a $27,000 grant to help create an age-friendly accessibility plan for the City of Kimberley."
In November, following reviews of Requests for Proposals (RFPs) with the help of City staff, a consultant from Cardea Health Consulting, Kate Milne, was hired to develop the City of Kimberley Age-Friendly Accessibility Plan.
The committee met with Milne in early January and will be working closely with her over the next two months to engage the community and provide feedback as needed. She will consult various groups in the City to research and identify barriers that may prevent residents from living and fully participating in civic life.
Pak said Cardea Health is a consulting agency that have worked on 11 projects across B.C. She added Milne has expertise working with communities that are centred around tourism, as well as communities with aging populations.
According to Pak, the first draft of the Age-Friendly Accessibility Plan should be ready by May, with the hope that the final version will be completed by June 2025.
Pak thanked Council for the opportunity to update City Council on the achievements and continued work of the Committee over the past year, and extended gratitude to Jasmine Nelson for her hard work and research she put in as well.
Mayor Don McCormick thanked her for the presentation and feedback and said, getting a new committee like this off the ground “is not an easy thing."
“It takes an awful lot of work, sometimes one step back to get two steps forward and we really appreciate the work that you and the rest of the committee have put in this year."
He added that Kimberley and countless other communities around Kimberley were built around 100 years ago, with many of its buildings being at least 60 to 80 years old.
"They were put up in a time before accessibility was even a thought and we have had very little brand new construction built in Kimberley over the years," McCormick said. "So on a scale of one to 10 of where to we sit with respect to accessibility, we are probably down at one or two, quite frankly."
Pak added that from the feedback she received from Milne in their recent meeting, the top-three priorities for people living with disabilities in all the different communities she visited were snow removal, housing and transportation.
