Draft 2013 Township of Langley Capital Budget

Township of Langley council started the process of approving its 2013 capital budget. The capital budget includes both items that were not completed in previous years that get carried-over to the current budget plus new requests. The draft capital plan proposes to spend $213 million. The following graph breaks down the spending by the various functions. When I created the graph, I wanted to see how much spending was financed by debt which is putting off costs to future generations and how much was paid for by Developer Cost Charges (DCCs) which is a pool of money that each and every developer must pay when building a project in the Township.

Draft 2012 Township of Langley Capital Budget - Select Graph to Enlarge.

Beside the general overview of the draft budget, I want to highlight some of the $10m+ capital projects. One of the largest capital projects that the Township of Langley is working on is over $30 million eastern Langley water main project. You can read more about this on a previous blog post. An interesting thing to note is that water mains, not roads are what cause sprawl, so it will be interesting to see what the long-term effect will be on the rural landscape in the Township. One of the primary proposes of the project is to get Aldergrove on Metro Vancouver water.

In the draft transportation budget, the Mufford Overpass and related works will incur $11 million in expenditures. The long-term Fraser Highway widening project from the City of Langley to Aldergrove will also cost over $10 million in addition to the millions that have already been spent. The most interesting project I found was $34k for a flag pole. I hope it’s going to be a nice flag pole.

The largest amount of capital spending for parks is $10 million for the acquisition of new park land. This is paid for entirely out of DCCs. In the corporate administration budget, $15 million is set aside for land acquisition. One of the more innovative projects that the IT department is taking on is laying fibre optic cable with new capital projects like the Mufford Overpass and East Langley Water main project. This will allow them to build out their own fibre optic network to connect their sites together much more cost-effectively which will save a large sum of money from leasing fibre from the telcos.

The biggest proposed capital project is the $34.8 Million Aldergrove Community Centre. When I was looking over the proposed budget, I noticed that a good chunk of money is flowing into Aldergrove. In fact over 30% of the capital budget will directly benefit Aldergrove. Now faster growing areas of Langley have certainly seen a good amount of investment in recent years like the Langley Event Centre, but Aldergrove and rural Langley certainly has a large focus in this draft budget.

It will be interesting to see how this budget is refined as council gets closer to adopting it.