Legal bills keep reaching new heights at Kamloops city hall as costs near $2 million in 2025.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s around four-times the amount spent in 2021, before the last election. Despite planning for another jump in legal fees, it\u2019s more than double what was in the 2025 budget.<\/a><\/p>\n Excluding more than $3 million held in trust, taxpayers paid $1.96 million to law firms last year, according to the city\u2019s 2025 statement of financial information.<\/a><\/p>\n The largest bill of $1.2 million went to Fulton and Company, where the city\u2019s retained counsel Denise McCabe is a partner. Another $212,000 went to Young Anderson, which handles city council\u2019s code of conduct investigations.<\/p>\n Legal fees are a regular part of city business. It\u2019s not uncommon to pay for legal advice on new bylaws, to take on the odd lawsuit or work on real estate deals.<\/p>\n Kamloops has seen abnormalities since the 2022 and taxpayers are bearing the costs.<\/p>\n There have been numerous code of conduct investigations,<\/a> a court challenge against the Build Kamloops loan approval,<\/a> the mayor\u2019s lawsuit against a fellow city councillor<\/a> and a rise in Freedom of Information requests that have all attributed to the rising legal bills.<\/p>\n Among more than a half-dozen law firms, the costs ranged from around $26,000 to $1.2 million, excluding amounts held in trust.<\/p>\n How much has been spent on each of those items isn\u2019t detailed in the annual financial report, but city council has blamed Mayor Reid Hamer-Jackson for more than $1 million in legal fees<\/a> over the past few years. Much of that likely includes the roughly $300,000 spent on code of conduct investigations since 2023.<\/a><\/p>\n Council approved a 2025 budget of $900,000 for legal fees after reaching a new record of $1.6 million in 2024. It\u2019s not clear how much is specifically set aside for legal costs in the 2026 budget.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Legal bills keep reaching new heights at Kamloops city hall as costs near $2 million in 2025. That\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":227386,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[128,130,129],"class_list":["post-227385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227385\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/227386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}