The pink house, the foundation, and the four votes

IGlover Road in the morning

If you walk down Glover Road in Fort Langley on a Saturday morning, the village is doing the thing it's been doing for a century. The bakery is busy. The bookshop is propping open its door. The Cranberry Festival has run continuously since 1995, anchored by the Fort Langley National Historic Site at the river's edge, and in recent strong years has drawn upwards of tens of thousands of people to this stretch of road over a single weekend.

This is the village BC's heritage-preservation community has spent thirty years trying to keep. In 1997, the Township of Langley established the Fort Langley Heritage Conservation Area — Langley's first HCA — covering a defined district built around the Glover-Mavis-Mary core.

The HCA is the legal frame inside which everything that's happened over the last twelve months sits. Bill 44 — Premier David Eby's province-wide ending of single-family-only zoning, passed in November 2023 — applies inside Fort Langley as it applies everywhere else. Heritage Conservation Area status doesn't exempt a parcel from SSMUH eligibility. It changes how the resulting density looks: setbacks, materials, fenestration, paths to the door, light from at least two sides per unit. Form-and-character, in the planning vocabulary. Not whether the density gets built, but what it looks like once it does.

In May 2025, Fort Langley's first SSMUH application landed.

IIThe man at the centre of every vote

Of the four key Township council decisions in this twelve-month window — the George Towle House variance, the Glover-Mary-Church rezoning, the 32 Avenue subdivision, and the SSMUH design rules — only one took place without Mayor Eric Woodward at the council table.

He was born in Langley on November 11, 1972. He was raised by his single mother and grandparents in Langley City. He left UBC in his fourth year of political science, in 1994, and according to his own campaign biography went on to co-found a series of technology companies — including Internet Direct, an early western-Canadian internet service provider that later merged into Look Communications. By 2007 he had sold his last technology company.

In 2005, he started buying real estate in Fort Langley. By the late 2010s, Woodward's holdings reached approximately 40 percent of the commercial core of Fort Langley and 80 percent of the commercial property along Glover Road between 96 Avenue and Mavis Avenue — combined value roughly $55 million at the time, projected to exceed $100 million after redevelopment. He served as President of the Fort Langley Business Improvement Association from 2012 to 2017.

His signature project from that decade was the Coulter Berry Building — the LEED Gold mixed-use development at the corner of Mavis and Glover, opened in 2016. The building was not built without conflict. On October 28, 2013, BC Supreme Court Justice Joel Groves set aside the original heritage alteration permit. The reasoning, in the court's framing: a Township heritage-alteration permit lets council vary restrictions on buildings inside the heritage-conservation area, but the bylaw is explicit that the use or density of use may not be varied — and the three-storey structure was an increase in density, not just a variance on character. The BC Court of Appeal later overturned the ruling. The appellate decision treated the lower-court approach as common-sense in spirit but found that density (units per lot) is a separate question from overall building size, and that the Township was within its authority to regulate the latter. Coulter Berry exists today as built because of that appellate decision.

During one permitting dispute in the same period, Woodward painted a boarded-up Fort Langley property he owned bright pink. The Township ordered him to repaint it grey. He repainted it grey. Around 2015–2016, after another round of permitting friction, he publicly suspended redevelopment plans on several of his properties — what he himself called "mothballing" — and proposed a 27-room boutique hotel with 34 residences and commercial space across seven lots at Glover and Mary. This was the public posture, in those years, of the man who would shortly become Mayor of the Township.

In 2018, with the next municipal election visible on the horizon, Woodward transferred his entire Fort Langley real-estate portfolio into a new charitable structure: the Eric Woodward Foundation. The stated reason was to avoid future conflict of interest if he ran for office. The foundation's business arm — Fort Langley Properties Ltd. — would continue to develop and manage the portfolio, but ownership would sit one corporate layer removed from him personally.

In 2020, briefly, Woodward was acclaimed as the BC New Democratic Party's candidate in Langley East. He resigned the next day, citing "horrible, false personal attacks." In October 2022, he won the Township of Langley mayoral race with 10,911 votes, against Blair Whitmarsh's 6,805, former BC Liberal MLA Rich Coleman's 4,923, and Brad Sparrow's 3,188.

He has now spent three and a half years simultaneously serving as Mayor of the Township and, in a structural sense one corporate layer removed, the largest commercial-property holder in downtown Fort Langley. There is, at the time of this writing, an active defamation lawsuit he filed against Councillor Kim Richter and a former MLA over social-media posts about a no-bid municipal fire-truck purchase. There is a countersuit alleging the Township-funded investigation that vindicated him was itself a conflict of interest.

He is the Mayor who has presided over the four votes that will, between them, shape Fort Langley's built form for the next half-century. Of those four, he recused from one. The applicant on that one was his own foundation.

IIIMay 12, 2025 — the George Towle House

The George Towle House was built at 8813 Glover Road, at the corner of 88 Avenue, in 1912. Towle is one of those Fort Langley names that still survives in the museum collection's curatorial notes: he died early; his widow Clara remarried James Moore and continued to live in the house. The structure has stood, in one form or another, for one hundred and thirteen years.

On May 12, 2025, an SSMUH application landed on the Township council agenda for that property. The proposal: reposition the 1912 house on its lot — moving it bodily, in the way heritage relocations are sometimes done — and build a new triplex to the north, with detached garages for all four units. The Township's traffic-analysis staff reported no significant concerns. The proposal needed a variance to permit driveway access onto 88 Avenue, normally prohibited for SSMUH lots; council voted to grant the variance with a registered covenant prohibiting left-hand turns from the property.

The vote was 8–1. Councillor Kim Richter was the lone dissent. With that vote, Fort Langley's first SSMUH application — at one of the village's recognized heritage properties — was approved.

IVJune 24, 2025 — Glover-Mary-Church

Six weeks later, on June 24, council took up an application substantially larger. The applicant was Fort Langley Properties Ltd., the business arm of the Eric Woodward Foundation. The proposal: rezone the block bounded by Glover Road, Mary Avenue, and Church Street — the heart of downtown Fort Langley — to allow two three-storey mixed-use buildings, retail at ground level, residential above. Seventy-six units total. The 2023 conception had been forty-seven units; the redesigned proposal shrunk individual unit sizes to bring more units inside the same footprint.

The vote was 4–3 in favour of the rezoning. Councillors Kim Richter, Margaret Kunst, and Barb Martens opposed. Mayor Eric Woodward recused himself. The applicant was the foundation he had created seven years earlier to hold his Fort Langley portfolio; the recusal was correct procedure under the Township's conflict-of-interest framework.

The Township's Chief Administrative Officer, Chan Kooner, advised council that because the application did not require an Official Community Plan amendment, the formal public-hearing process the village had grown used to for major rezonings was not legislatively required. The traditional hearing was not held.

The Township's Director of Development Services, Stephen Richardson — municipal staff, not the applicant's representative — fielded council's technical questions about the revised plan. When asked whether the changes from the 2023 concept counted as "minor," Richardson's response, preserved in the FLCA's reporting, was the kind of line that gets remembered: "Minor, I suppose, is a subjective term."

Six weeks. Two votes. Four units on a heritage parcel. Seventy- six units on a downtown block. Both inside the same defined conservation area.

VFebruary 1, 2026 — Brookswood, 32 Avenue, 37 lots

The third vote took the conversation outside Fort Langley proper but inside the Township's planning gravity. On February 1, 2026, council read for the third time a rezoning application from HUB Engineering for a 37-lot subdivision on the 19800-block of 32 Avenue, in Brookswood. Every lot in the subdivision would be SSMUH-zoned. Each owner could, by right, build a single-family home, a duplex, a triplex, or a fourplex. The unit-count range was 37 to 148, depending on what each owner chose.

The third reading passed 8–1. Councillor Richter was again the lone dissent — this time on tree-removal grounds, not on density. The CAO, Chan Kooner, summarized the project's actual unit count this way: "Whether they're going to do that or not is up to the proponent themselves."

VIApril 27, 2026 — the SSMUH design rules

The province had set a hard compliance deadline on Bill 44: every BC municipality with a population over 5,000 had to legalize small-scale multi-unit housing on previously single-family parcels. The Township of Langley was the last municipality in Metro Vancouver to do so. The design rules — what an SSMUH building has to look like to receive a permit in this Township — came forward on March 13, 2026 (first and second reading, unanimous) and were given final reading on April 27, 2026.

The rules themselves were thoughtful. Parking must be visually de-emphasized. Entrances must be accessible. Every unit door must have a paved access path leading to it. Each new building must match the stylistic vocabulary of its neighbours. Every unit must receive natural light from at least two sides. Three-to-six- unit buildings would be permitted; six-plexes only on lots near frequent transit, which in the Township means essentially zero qualifying lots today.

What made the March 13 sitting memorable wasn't the rules. It was the Mayor's posture during them. Woodward had repeatedly opposed the provincial SSMUH framework since Bill 44 passed in late 2023, on heritage and form-and-character grounds. At the March 13 council meeting — presiding over a vote he had to take, on provincially-mandated rules he had to enact — he said two things plainly:

And, when Councillor Richter asked what recourse opposed neighbours had, he suggested they call the nearest NDP MLA. He acknowledged on the record that the province had granted landowners the right to build the form regardless.

The design rules passed unanimously on first and second reading anyway. On April 27, fourth reading carried. Permits under the rules are issued by Township staff, with a mechanism allowing any three of nine councillors to pull a file back for council review.

VIIThe Bedford Landing precedent

To understand why Fort Langley is engaged at this intensity over a 76-unit downtown block and four units on a heritage parcel, it helps to remember what happened the last time the village had a major density vote.

In 2005, the Township rezoned the former McDonald Cedar Mill site at the waterfront edge of Fort Langley to medium-density residential. Construction began in 2006. By the time it was done, Bedford Landing had delivered approximately 278 single-family and row houses, 8 townhouses, and 70 apartment units to the village. Residents at the time felt the Township had overridden majority sentiment on the final waterfront rezoning. The development, when complete, added roughly 1,500 residents to a village of 2,500 to 3,000 — close to a 50-percent jump in Fort Langley's population in a few years.

Bedford Landing is the working reference point in Fort Langley today for what happens when masterplan promises meet twenty-year reality. It is the precedent the new Glover-Mary-Church plan is being read against. It is also the project the Eric Woodward Foundation explicitly positions its own waterfront proposals as a corrective to. In other words: the same political coalition that opposed Bedford Landing in 2005 is now being asked to support a 76-unit downtown rezoning, by a mayor who is one corporate layer removed from being the developer, in the same calendar year that the village has had to absorb provincially-mandated fourplexes whether it wants to or not.

VIIIKim Richter, the opposition

The most consistent voice on Township council against the recent density wave is Councillor Kim Richter. Richter has been on Township council since 1999 — first elected under the Langley Citizens Coalition, then for two decades as an independent, now serving her seventh term. She moved to Langley from Calgary in 1986. She is a professor of business management at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

Her dissents across the four votes do not all come from the same place. On the Towle House (8–1), she opposed on heritage grounds. On the Glover-Mary-Church (4–3), she joined Kunst and Martens in opposition on heritage and scale. On the 32 Avenue subdivision (8–1), she opposed on tree-removal grounds, not density. On the SSMUH design rules, she questioned the delegation of approval authority to staff and pressed for the three-councillor call-back mechanism — but ultimately, with that safeguard in place, supported the rules.

She is not running for mayor in October 2026. She is joining the Langley Strong slate — four sitting councillors — in opposition to Woodward's re-election slate, Progress For Langley. The two slates will set the actual political shape of the 2027–2030 Township council, including whatever Glover-Mary-Church looks like at the development-permit stage, whatever Fort Langley waterfront development proceeds, and whatever the next round of SSMUH-design-rule revisions brings forward.

IXThe contradiction the village is being asked to resolve

There is a contradiction in this story that the editorial pages haven't really worked through, and it matters more than the procedural details of any single vote.

The man who has been the most vocal council critic of provincially-mandated density in Fort Langley — "I wouldn't want one next to my house" — is also, in his corporate-foundation capacity, the developer behind the largest single density bet the village has approved in this generation. The seventy-six units at Glover-Mary-Church are a bigger density move than anything Bedford Landing's masterplan actually executed at a single block. The fact that the recusal was procedurally correct does not make the politics of it simple. Two things are true simultaneously: that this Mayor recused appropriately on the one vote where he had a direct interest, and that the same Mayor's foundation will, when those seventy-six units are built, complete the most significant transformation of downtown Fort Langley since the heritage conservation area was designated in 1997.

The village will absorb both. Bedford Landing absorbed roughly fifty percent population growth and is now indistinguishable in its rhythms from the older streets it expanded onto. Glover-Mary-Church will likely do the same, more concentrated, over a different decade. Whether the design rules passed on April 27 are enough to make the new buildings look like they belong on Glover Road is the actual question — not whether they get built, but what they look like once they do.

The political question is whether, in October 2026, Fort Langley voters return Woodward's slate with the latitude to continue this trajectory, or hand the council to Langley Strong with the political mandate to slow it down.

XSaturday morning, 2030

If you walk down Glover Road on a Saturday morning in 2030, the bakery will still be busy. The bookshop will still be propping open its door. The Cranberry Festival will still draw tens of thousands of people to the village for one weekend each October. What will have changed are two specific things you can already see in outline: a triplex sitting just north of a 1912 heritage house at the corner of 88 Avenue, and two three-storey mixed-use buildings holding seventy-six homes in the block where Glover meets Mary.

The Mayor who shepherded the year that made both possible is the same Mayor whose foundation built one of them. Both buildings will be in compliance with rules he opposed publicly. Both will, almost certainly, look like they belong on Glover Road, because the design rules will have made them.

Fort Langley has spent thirty years deciding, slowly, what kind of village it wants to be. The four votes between May 2025 and April 2026 may have done more to answer that question than any other twelve-month window since the heritage conservation area was drawn in 1997. The answer is more density than the village has ever absorbed in such a short window. The man at the centre of every one of those votes — recused on one, presiding over the others — is the same man.

For the underlying policy framework — septic constraints, HCA mechanics, Bill 44 inside an HCA — see the canonical Fort Langley Zoning Vision document.