What Were Three Mayors Really Asking For?
Inside the region's most important tool for shaping growth, and the effort to weaken it.
The Letter
In June 2025 three Metro Vancouver Mayors, Woodward (Township of Langley), Locke (Surrey) and Harvie (Delta), wrote to the Metro Vancouver Regional District Board directly to request significant changes to the policies surrounding extending the Urban Containment Boundary (UCB).
The Urban Containment Boundary dates back to 1996, a policy response to Metro Vancouver’s developed land expanding rapidly with suburbanization, driven largely by private vehicle ownership. Urban Containment is policed primarily by withholding Metro Vancouver sewerage services; unless your property is within the UCB you can’t connect to the regional sewer system, which limits density and development in areas outside of the UCB.
The UCB then acts as a force that pushes back against the outward expansion of cities. But why do municipalities want to expand outwards beyond it anyway?
The primary reason is the short-term financial incentive; municipal governments will allow construction on new undeveloped land to increase revenues, through increased property taxes, development fees and other charges that come with brand new development.
Those who follow Strong Towns understand that long-term, the financial incentive flips negative. Development cost charges might cover the upfront price of new roads, water pipes, and sewer lines. Community Amenity Charges might even cover the construction cost of a brand new facility. But neither mechanism covers the decades of maintenance, whether it be resurfacing a road, or replacing a roof at the end of its life. They completely fail to cover the ongoing operating costs for staffing new facilities, along with the firefighting and police coverage that new neighbourhoods demand.
The recent request by some residents of High Point Estates, an isolated low-density community separate from any other existing urbanized area in Langley Township, to become a gated community in response to rising crime and slow police response times, serves as a perfect illustration of the kinds of problems that arise with service delivery in sprawling areas.
Despite the evidence, this reality can be a tough sell to municipal governments who want to use the revenue from outward growth to fill present-day gaps in operating and capital budgets. In the Township of Langley, this approach has become further accelerated with the use of debt to front-load capital costs. The political conversation becomes focused on keeping the growth machine going indefinitely instead of breaking out of this cycle.
However, while local politics often fail to directly address the problematic incentives that lead to endless outward growth, the wider regional structure of the Metro Vancouver Regional District (MVRD) does. Since Municipalities within the MVRD operate as independent entities but share the costs of delivering regional services like water, sewer, and transportation, this creates collective political will to limit fringe development that would otherwise impose regional costs on every member municipality.
The Mayors’ letter wanted to redefine the UCB to allow contiguous extensions outside the ALR, reclassify qualifying UCB expansions from Type 2 (two-thirds weighted vote) to Type 3 (50%+1 weighted vote), and create a “minor realignment” mechanism that would let municipalities adjust the UCB site-by-site with mere notification to Metro.
It’s easy to see that these proposals represent an erosion to the UCB protections. The “site-by-site” adjustments in particular could risk a “death by a thousand cuts” scenario, where over the course of several years the UCB area is grown significantly with lots of small adjustments in succession.
As such, the response to the letter at the July 2025 MVRD meeting was heated. Director McCutcheon framed it as a test of regional commitment: “I think that this urban containment boundary is really, really critical for our region. It’s something that we’ve all signed off on. Every municipality has signed off on that… I think this is a really critical decision for us and sort of what we believe in as a region.” Director Kirby-Yung called the move “precedent-setting” and she compared the two-thirds voting threshold to Vancouver’s own protections for park space, arguing higher thresholds exist precisely to protect things a region values.
Despite this opposition, the board voted to initiate the amendment process and engage all member jurisdictions on the proposals, passing the motion 81 to 57 on a recorded vote.
The Response
Pre-consultation ran from January to March 2026 and the feedback was largely critical. RAAC, REAC, TransLink, and most member jurisdictions raised concerns about precedent-setting expansion of the UCB, infrastructure servicing costs, environmental impacts, transit inefficiency, and the risk of undermining the foundational tenets of Metro 2050. The recurring recommendation was that big amendment-framework changes belong in the next Regional Growth Strategy update, not a one-off Type 1 amendment.
Staff invited Surrey, Langley, and Delta to identify lands outside the UCB they wanted to flag for future change.
The Township of Langley named the Fraser Highway Employment Lands (FHEL), an area the Township had already done years of technical and planning work on.
Delta said it had no lands in mind. Its concern was procedural, not parcel-specific.
Surrey said none of the four options met its needs, refused to engage with Option 1, and only at a March 13, 2026 staff-to-staff meeting identified Southeast Surrey (300 ha) as its area of interest (this has not proceeded further.)
In response to this, at the April 2026 MVRD meeting, staff presented a much narrower package than the Mayors’ original ask. The outcome - Bylaw 1456 - simply added one new Special Study Area (SSA) covering the Township of Langley’s Fraser Highway Employment Lands and removed the two existing TOL SSAs, for a net reduction of 4 ha.
A Special Study Area (SSA) is an overlay tool in Metro 2050 that flags lands a municipality intends to redesignate in the future. The overlay does not change the underlying land use, so the Fraser Highway Employment Lands remain Rural under regional policy until a separate amendment is approved. What the overlay does do is lower the voting threshold for that future amendment from a Type 2 (two-thirds weighted vote) to a Type 3 (50%+1 weighted vote) at the MVRD Board.
The amended motion passed 105 to 25 on a recorded weighted vote.
Fraser Highway Employment Lands
The Township of Langley has known from the start that the Fraser Highway Employment Lands could not be developed without Metro Vancouver's involvement. The original December 2023 staff report on the Fraser Highway Employment Lands Area Plan directed staff to “Initiate consultation with Metro Vancouver regarding proposed requirements and potential timeline to amend Metro 2050, the Urban Containment Boundary and Sewerage Service Areas.”
The same December 2023 council report anticipated a Type 3 amendment - requiring a 50%+1 weighted vote of the MVRD board - and cited the specific Metro 2050 policy that already provided that path: section 6.3.4(f). The policy applies to sites contiguous with the UCB, outside the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR), and proposed for amendment from Rural to Industrial, including any associated UCB adjustment. All four conditions describe FHEL.
So while the new Special Study Area provides a 50%+1 weighted vote, this threshold was already available to the Township under existing Metro 2050 rules in 2023, before the Mayors’ letter, before the consultation, and before the SSA designation. The Township’s procedural position on FHEL appears on the surface to be no different than it was three years ago.
Governance Concerns
The Metro Vancouver staff report describes how the new Special Study Area package came together:
The Township did not submit formal feedback through Council. However, Metro Vancouver staff worked closely with Township staff to identify the underlying objectives based on the initial Mayor’s request and develop a policy resolution through the Special Study Area option.
The quote highlights two key governance concerns. The first concern is the scope of the letter. While Township of Langley Council understood an amendment to the Regional Growth Strategy would be needed for the Fraser Highway Employment Lands when approving it, the Mayor’s letter went beyond that, requesting fundamental structural changes to the UCB process. The requests in the Mayor's letter were never debated in public, and Council never passed a resolution endorsing them.
The second concern is process. Two existing Special Study Areas in the Township were forfeited in exchange for the new Fraser Highway Employment Lands SSA, and that trade was negotiated entirely between MVRD staff and Township staff. Council was not consulted on the merits of this deal and have not been given the chance to accept or decline it.
It is important to note that one of the opponents of the package was Woodward himself, who voted against it at the April meeting.
Implications and Outcome
The broad effort to loosen the UCB framework failed. The three Mayors asked for structural changes to how the region manages outward growth, and the region said no. The lower vote thresholds, the redefined UCB, the site-by-site minor realignment mechanism: all failed to gain any traction. The consultation feedback was clear and almost uniform, and MVRD staff acted accordingly.
That raises a question about the letter itself. If the FHEL already had a viable path through the existing framework, what was the letter for? The more charitable reading is that the Township wanted to remove any ambiguity about the amendment type for the FHEL project to simplify the process.
A less charitable reading is that the Township wants more freedom to expand into greenfield than current policy allows. The Township of Langley has 2,479 hectares of Rural-designated land, the second largest such inventory of any municipality in Metro Vancouver. The Mayors’ asks would have applied across that whole inventory: a Type 3 pathway for any Rural-to-Urban conversion, not just Rural to Industrial; lower thresholds for parcels that are not strictly contiguous with the UCB; site-by-site UCB adjustments by notification rather than amendment. The reforms that did not survive consultation could have unlocked hundreds of hectares of land that the current framework keeps off the table.
This connects to the deeper issue with the planning model. The FHEL is outside the UCB, surrounded by ALR on three sides. The plan calls for an Engineering Services Plan to scope the water, sewer, stormwater, and transportation infrastructure the site will need, in addition to the existing Township’s transportation plan which calls for this segment of Fraser Highway to be widened to four lanes.
There is a real regional shortage of industrial land. Metro Vancouver’s Regional Industrial Lands Inventory makes that clear. But the question Strong Towns asks is not whether the demand exists; it is whether this particular way of meeting demand, extending infrastructure into greenfield sites at the urban fringe, produces communities that can pay for themselves over their full lifecycle.
The final reading of Bylaw 1456 is scheduled for July 24, 2026. Adoption creates only the Special Study Area overlay. Redesignating the Fraser Highway lands from Rural to Industrial, and extending the UCB to match, requires a separate Type 3 amendment that the Township has yet to bring forward.
So the UCB held this round. Whether it holds the next one depends on whether the region continues to treat the boundary as a commitment. It highlights the threat that mechanisms like the UCB are under, threats that are so often buried in meetings and procedures that they are easily missed. These same demands could resurface again when the Regional Growth Strategy comes up for debate, so those of us who believe in the importance of containing sprawl and our long-term fiscal health must remain vigilant.
Strong Towns Langley is a community group dedicated to making Langley, British Columbia a better place. We advocate for incremental development, sustainable transportation solutions, housing accessibility, public spaces, and responsible growth strategies. Our group is part of the larger Strong Towns movement, focusing on creating financially resilient and people-oriented communities.
To learn more visit https://strongtownslangley.org