Growth and density

My grandpa was a cattle rancher, and my mom part of the 4H Club, so I have a soft spot for farming personally. Farmers are pragmatic people. They try not to spend what they haven’t got, they fix their fences before they fall down, and they plan for the long term, not just season by season. I see a lot of parallels to leading a community. Farms are what makes Langley, Langley. I don’t believe farming and Willoughby are at odds; in fact, developing Willoughby properly protects other farmland from the pressure to be turned into housing. We need to realize the rapid growth in Langley isn’t unique to us. Our country opened its doors to historic levels of population growth after the pandemic, and almost every city in the country strained under the weight of so many new people. The current mayor likes to blame previous councils, conveniently forgetting he was on one of them, but so many communities are dealing with this. The challenge in Willoughby is the homes showed up and everything else is still on its way. No community centre, pool or library, as the mayor spent our reserves and racked up the debt on other projects. Roads and sidewalks finished in front of one development and not connected to the next. Our plan is to bring in services built alongside homes, not years later. Sidewalks and traffic calming as part of every new build; schools planned with the neighbourhood around them. And Willoughby's community centre, pool and library with the price, the funding plan and the opening date out in public before we break ground.

I love Fort Langley, and you’ll often find me there with my wife and kids, grabbing a coffee at Blacksmith or Wendel’s, peeking in the shops. Yes, the mayor owns a considerable amount of the property there, and his slate pushed through a major lift in density for his land across the street from the Community Hall, with no public consultation. I recommend reading these two news pieces for more details on the mayor and his holdings: https://theijf.org/article/eric-woodward-foundation-financial-statements https://theijf.org/article/eric-woodward-charity.

Tim Baillie, Progress for Langley. Yes, public consultation is a must, and that can tie in with Fort Langley community plan. So right now there is a recommendation for a building that's four stories. It's right in behind the community center, and I'll guarantee you I will not support that because four stories is out of the question. We have to ask the Fort Langley people, what do you want to see, how do you want to interact, and how do you want to have your community go forward? In the past, there has been an awful lot of discussion, I'm going to put it nicely, discussion about how this should go forward. I agree fully with the fact that we have to come and ask the people in this very unique community of Fort Langley, what do they want to see, and how do they want to see it go forward?

Lauren Chalus Langley Strong, and we've heard from so many residents in Fort Langley that they're extremely worried about the loss of character and community feel, and I know I personally am too. Part of our plan is that I would support keeping the village core primarily low-rise, and this is already envisioned in the existing plan. I would also look to update the community plan and zoning bylaw with clear, enforceable standards for heights, setbacks, and designs. You know, this would all be done, of course, with public consultations, so residents feel like you actually have a real voice in the matter. Fort Langley's character is one of its greatest strengths, and it's honestly the jewel of the township, and it's extremely important to me. Thank you so much.

Yeah, thank you so much for the question. So for people that don't know, I do rent industrial space, so I'm fully aware of how tight the market is. I want to touch on the Fraser Highway employment lands, though, because you're absolutely right. There's trade-offs that we have to make. And as Council, we have to decide who wins and loses when we make those trade-offs. The Environment, people that live in the neighborhood. So I really struggle with something like the Fraser Highway Employment Lands when someone sitting on Council has their name on a development application inside of the Fraser Highway Employment Lands. We need to be more clear with residents who are we making decisions for. Now next up is how do we attract development to the employment lands that we have? Right now we're the most expensive place east of Burnaby to develop new industry. We need to take a look at this. Are we suffocating our future tax base by chasing immediate revenue? We need to take a long-term approach on what is the long-term property tax we could be getting, but we're losing by chasing development revenue here today. Thank you.

It's a great question Cory and thank you and over the course of this term our team has been very dedicated to ensuring that we have an additional supply of light industrial and employment lands in multiple different neighborhoods across the Township so that no matter where people decide to live in the Township they could feasibly live and work close to home. So for example, on the Fraser Highway employment land, corridor. We undertook one of the most rigorous public engagement processes I've seen even as a Council watcher before I was on Council. It's reminiscent almost of the Brookswood-Fernridge days, if you can remember the OCP open houses that they had for those. So we have had extensive community engagement, multiple rounds of iterations of plans. We have gone into Brookswood-Fernridge adjacent to Campbell Heights in an area where eventually we can bring additional transit, additional road infrastructure to make sure that there are employment centers close to home. Of course, we have initiated infrastructure projects like road widening, like detention pond construction, where we can have commercial mixed-use neighborhoods as well. Because it's not just about the employment lands, because obviously we need the warehouses. We have further, even more employment lands west of 200th Street coming. So across the Township, we're making sure that each community has a center that people can work, and we're going to continue that over the next four years. Thank you,.

Michael Pratt with Progress for Langley. And the simple answer is yes. I support a redo of the Fort Langley community plan, starting with community consultation as the baseline. Every community plan that's created is created to the best and highest potential when it starts with consultation. Fort Langley obviously has very strong opinions about what they'd like to see in their community. And I think that we need to, as a council, start with a listening exercise. And I look forward to hearing from you all about what we'd like to see as the future of Fort Langley.

Yeah, I'm going to have to echo what Councillor Pratt said. Sarb Rai, for Progress for Langley team. Yes, I think the Fort Langley community plan is upgrading, but I think first, it should be meaningful consultation with the residents, just talking to them and consulting with them just to find out what they want to protect, what needs to improve, and how they see the future growth fitting into their community. From there, I think council would need to step in and make informed decisions on density, traffic, and heritage in public spaces. Thank you.

This is all about respect for communities, and absolutely, that is the case in Fort Langley. Only should we update this plan, yes, but only with full and meaningful consultation with the community. We need enforceable priorities, and we need to inform the community about changes that are being made.

Well, I think it starts with consultation, because what we have to do is when we're prioritizing the industrial lands, which we must do in order to broaden our tax base, we need to make sure that there's appropriate buffer zones between them and the housing areas, between agricultural land and all the other non industrial-based uses or employment-based uses. When a successful business needs to grow … and it needs room to expand, it doesn't just stop growing because we don't have room for it. If we don't have room for those businesses, they will leave Langley and we can't afford that right now. So what I'd like to do is protect the established industrial areas from incompatible residential incursion, plus support bringing the roughly 500 acres of the non-ALR Fraser Highway employment lands into the productive employment use with phasing and appropriate buffers and consultation with the community. And then use an economic development department to attract employers, not merely to designate land. So consultation being the primary thing and protecting employment lands is an economic development, jobs and a tax base issue that must be on the top of any Council that's incoming.

Blair Whitmarsh, Langley Strong. You know, I think that obviously the very first thing is to have considerable public consultation in Fort Langley on what do the people in Fort Langley want to see for the heights of their buildings. We have a number of different heights across. I think it's important that we maintain our heritage quality of our buildings. Some of them are two stories. Some of them have been three stories. I don't think there's a magic number that we can set, but we need to protect the heritage quality of Fort Langley. And we need to have considerable ahead of time, not after it's built, but considerable ahead of time public consultation that is real consultation that we can then apply to whatever height is appropriate that's been decided by the residents who actually live in Fort Langley. Thank you.