Monday - Dec. 11, 2023 - Langley budget

☀️ High 9C

Good morning!

Our microwave broke last week. We haven’t gotten around to either fixing it or getting a new one, but we really should. Not only is it pretty inconvenient to try to heat leftovers on the stove (with mixed results) but the microwave door is stuck shut, too. And it got stuck with a plateful of quiche inside. It doesn’t smell or anything (yet), but if I drop dead mysteriously in the next few days, my bet’s on airborne mold from the deteriorating eggs in the microwave.

– Grace

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Traffic & Weather

🌤 Local forecast: Langley | Chilliwack | Abbotsford | Hope

🚘 Driving today? Check the current traffic situation via Google, and find DriveBC’s latest updates.

🛣 Click here for links to road cameras across the Fraser Valley, including those for the Coquihalla, Highway 7, Hope-Princeton, Fraser Canyon, and Highway 1 in Langley and Abbotsford.

NEWS

Costs for Langley soccer pitch skyrocket

The projected cost of Langley Township’s youth soccer campus has more than doubled in the past year and is now expected to cost $100 million.

Those figures are included in Langley Township’s proposed new capital plan and come after staff were given the green light earlier this year to begin design work. 

Last year, when the facility was first included in the township’s budget, the price tag was estimated at $40 million.

The higher soccer campus costs are just one piece of news emerging from the latest budget of the township and other local municipalities. 

Over the coming weeks, we’ll unpack the capital plans of each of the Fraser Valley’s largest regions, with a focus on planned infrastructure and facilities and their costs.

• Today, we look at Langley Township, the municipality with the largest building aspirations.

Related

Need to Know

🚑️ A woman sent home from Langley Memorial Hospital’s emergency department needed emergency surgery for a brain bleed [CTV]

👉️ Police want to stop storing evidence from Robert Pickton’s farm and the largest serial killer investigation in Canadian history—but advocates say disappearances linked to the farm would never be solved [Vancouver Sun]

🐔 Another case of avian influenza has been discovered at an Abbotsford farm [CityNews]

🔎 An Amber Alert Saturday ended with the child being found safe in Chilliwack [CityNews]

😟 A Chilliwack addictions treatment facility says it is facing a huge budget shortfall [Global]

🏗 Most new proposed housing projects in Abbotsford and other local cities won’t require a public hearing for approval [Abbotsford News]

🎩 A Langley businessman has been dressing up as Jacob Marley every year since the mid-’90s to raise money [Vancouver Sun]

🕳 A Mission sewer maintenance company won the award for the city’s most original float for its septic-inspired scene [Mission Chamber of Commerce]

👉 A Chilliwack-area First Nation has evicted residents of a prominent homeless encampment [Chilliwack Progress]

⚖ An open-and-shut case in a Langley killing took more than two years to see a guilty plea entered [Langley Advance Times]

🔥 A vehicle believed to be connected to a shooting in Mission was found torched in Surrey [Global]

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The Agenda

Downtown Chilliwack to get province-mandated density rules

The provincial government has designated the area around Chilliwack’s downtown bus exchange to be a “transit-oriented development” area, meaning dense buildings will be permitted nearby and parking requirements axed. But the area surrounding Abbotsford’s downtown exchange has not yet been labelled as such.

Last month, the province unveiled new rules meant to increase the construction of apartments in close proximity to high use transit exchanges. The plan is to both increase the supply of housing in areas where vehicles—and the space-intensive parking they require—are not necessary.

After the rules were unveiled, The Current wrote about how the legislation could impact Fraser Valley communities. Specifics were, and remain, relatively vague. The province said areas surrounding transit exchanges in medium-sized communities would be affected, but didn’t define a bus exchange. It said cities would themselves be required to designate such areas in their communities.

This week, the province released a list of interim transit-oriented development areas. The list only included four sites in the Fraser Valley: the downtown Chilliwack exchange, Langley City’s bus exchange, and to-be-built SkyTrain stations at 196 Street in Langley Township and 203 Street in Langley City.

But while Abbotsford and Mission didn’t make the list, they will still be impacted. In another document, the province declared that both communities are among the 31 local governments that must self-designate transit-oriented areas in their municipalities. For Abbotsford, that might give the city leeway to declare its South Fraser Way area—where high-density buildings are already permitted—a transit-oriented area, rather than the historic downtown, where building heights are capped across four key blocks.

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🗓 Things to do

🎞️ Film fest: The Banff Centre Mountain Film Festival will come to Mission's Clarke Theatre on Dec. 13 and 14. Details online.

🎻 Seasonal concert: The Bez Arts Hub in Langley will hold a concert of seasonal music and true, often funny, Christmas stories on Friday, Dec. 15

🎵 Festive ukulele: The Mission Ukulele Circle will be playing festive music for audiences at the Mission Library on Thursday, Dec. 14. Details online.

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Catch up

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