How Volunteers Spotted a $64.5M Problem and The Township Didn't
We're Just Getting it Wrong about Developer Fees
When speaking about developer fees at the December 15, 2025, council meeting, Mayor Eric Woodward said “people on the internet [are] speaking with authority and they’re just getting it wrong”. The timeline below tells a different story: volunteers at home reading PDFs spotted a $64.5M problem the Township was making.
A Timeline of Mistakes
The Township of Langley’s current plan involves borrowing money to build facilities like Smith Athletic Park and Five Rinks at the Events Centre, with developer payments intended to pay back that debt. The program originally being used to collect these payments was CACs (Community Amenity Contributions), which were unlegislated and voluntary. The Province introduced the ACC (Amenity Cost Charges) program, which is legislated and non-negotiable.
This distinction matters because ACCs are forward-looking they can only fund future projects approved within an ACC bylaw, not pay back debt taken out before the ACC program existed. This restriction should have been a red flag in June. Here is what happened.
June 20, 2025
The BC Supreme Court struck down the Township of Langley’s existing CAC program. We’ve gone into depth on this in other articles and had a letter to the editor published, but to keep it brief: CACs needed to be voluntary in nature and the Township wasn’t following this. The courts striking it down meant that there was now no program to collect developer payments to pay back existing debts for the sports facilities.
June 22, 2025
Strong Towns Langley, after reading the Monday council agenda, immediately saw the problem that was about to occur, council was going to borrow even more money for sports facilities that weren’t going to be able to be included in the ACC program. We were aware that ACCs were forward-looking and couldn’t be used to pay back debt that was taken out before an ACC program had been developed. We wrote the Province a little after midnight clarifying our understanding.
June 23, 2025
In the afternoon session of council, two temporary borrowing bylaws in the amount of $64.5M was approved for the athletic facilities. Even though there was no CAC bylaw in place (struck down by the courts), it was assumed the Township would be able to use an interim CAC bylaw and then ACC payments to pay back the debt. The Township already had $79.5M in borrowing for these two projects bringing the total up to $144M.
July 21, 2025
The first reading of the ACC bylaw passed and crucially included projects that the Township had already started building or borrowed against, which we were aware wasn’t allowed.
September 18, 2025
We published our article which included our back and forth with the Province confirming our understanding that the sports facilities couldn’t be included in the new ACC program.
December 15, 2025
Council passed the second reading of the ACC bylaw. This version has now removed the sports facilities and noted that there is $144M of money that was borrowed against the sport facilities that needs to be paid back using ‘in-stream’ (development proposals already submitted) CAC monies and cannot be brought into the ACC program.
How Did This Happen?
The comment I want to make about this timing is straightforward: I do not understand why that borrowing on June 23rd went ahead without a CAC program in place. Why wasn’t that tabled, so that anyone could have read through the same ACC PDFs we read and understood that the borrowing couldn’t have been brought into an ACC program?
The township and council have massive resources at their disposal to understand these complex programs, but three people with unrelated full-time jobs were able to spot this problem, and the borrowing was still taken out. The township has a CAO, planning staff, finance staff and legal counsel. None caught what we found that weekend. Had that been paused and people read the PDFs we read, the funding gap right now would only be $79.5M instead of $144M. That’s still a lot of money, but far more manageable.
The Problem We’re In Now
The plan originally was to use developer payments over a 25-year period to pay for all sorts of projects. Instead, we’re now stuck using all the CAC payments from in-stream developments to extinguish debt, while developments that haven’t even been submitted yet will pay for everything else. This creates a significant timing problem as well as risk that payments might not even be paid.
The Timing Squeeze
The timing issue means that for the next few years, all projects being completed which are in-stream today will have all their developer contributions go towards paying for Smith Park and Five Rinks, and there will be nothing going towards other amenities like the long-promised Willoughby Community Centre.
The township could hypothetically borrow and build the community centre, but it needs to have enough ACC payments coming in to cover interest and principal payments. This means it’s going to be years before those projects even have the financial backing before they can start being built.
We’re going to move thousands more people into Langley and have no way to use those developer payments to build amenities they are expecting or being promised, because we made such a large financial gamble. This is the exact problem that many wanted solved in the last election, but it’s only going to be worse except now we have a soccer campus and a few ice rinks.
Consider a family moving into a new build in 2028 that is currently in-stream. They will have paid tens of thousands of CACs and none of that money will go to a community centre. Instead it’s all going to pay for debt from past mistakes. There are multiple towers included in in-stream development too, so this isn’t just a few small houses, it represents a large amount of population growth.
The Uncertainty Issue
We discussed in depth in our last article that CAC’s in-stream cannot be counted on because they are voluntary in nature and require in-stream development to actually go ahead. If a development stalls out because it no longer pencils that money is no longer there.
The Risk of Using Debt
This whole story outlines the exact problem with using debt to finance projects. Repayment of debt is fixed, but the revenues aren’t necessarily certain. Development can slow down, a recession can hit, or the Province might change the rules.
We aren’t an austerity organization, we want smart investment in the Township but you have to recognize the other side of borrowing is a risk that cash flows might not exist to cover payments. Borrowing money the Monday after the CAC program was shut down without first understanding how the ACC program works isn’t a smart investment, it’s gambling with taxpayer funds. That is essentially the crux of the problem, maybe this will all work out but the Township is taking on massive risk and we as taxpayers are the back stop.
There was a semantics argument in council that construction is what triggers the ACC problem, but there cannot be construction if there are no funds to pay for it. Passing the borrowing bylaw was the trigger that sent us down this path.
What’s Next?
We don’t know exactly how the ACC transition is going to play out, but we do know what needs to happen. Council needs to:
Be transparent about the full financial picture and the timeline for promised amenities,
Develop a realistic plan that doesn’t assume best-case scenarios for development rates, and
Consider how to balance debt service with the amenity needs of new residents.
We are Langley residents. We don’t want the Township to fail financially. We want amenities to bring our families to, we want stable taxes, we don’t want any of this. This Township would be a lot stronger if voices, even those from a blog of online enthusiasts, were listened to instead of being hand-waved away.
When volunteers reading PDFs in their spare time can spot critical problems that staff and council miss, something has gone wrong with the decision-making process.
You can try to dismiss us as not understanding it but, had we been listened to, we would have saved Township of Langley taxpayers $64.5M.