September 16 Council Meeting: Population decreases in single-family neighbourhoods, Know Your Neighbour Campaign, the federal election, and housekeeping matters

This week, I’ve been posting about Monday night’s Langley City council meeting. You can read about council’s first steps on the path of reconciliation with the Katzie, Kwantlen, Matsqui and Semiahmoo First Nations from Tuesday’s post. You can also read about the various City-funded projects that recently completed or are in-progress from Wednesday’s post. Today, I’ll be posting about the other items that were addressed at that council meeting.

Langley City provides neighbourhood profiles which can be viewed online. These profiles contain various highlights and statistics about our six neighbourhoods. The previous profiles where based on 2011 census data. Council received new neighbourhood profiles on Monday night based on the latest census data.

Langley City Neighbourhood Population Change between 2011-2016. Select map to enlarge.

One of the interesting things to note is that the population actually declined in the Simonds and Alice Brown neighbourhoods by 70 people between 2011 and 2016. There was modest population growth in the Blacklock and Uploads neighbourhoods of 30 people. The means these was a decrease in the number of people living south of the Nicomekl River. The population north of the Nicomekl River increased by 855 people in the same time period, with most of the growth occurring in the Nicomekl neighbourhood.

The updated neighbourhood profiles will be posted to Langley City’s website shortly.

Council approved door-to-door canvassing for our Crime Prevention Task Group’s “Know Your Neighbour Campaign” as follows:

Saturday, September 28, 2019: 10am – 12pm
Saturday, October 5, 2019: 10am – 12pm

If you’d like to volunteer to spread the message door-to-door, we will be going out two Saturdays: September 28 and October 5 from 10am to 12pm. Please contact Dave Selvage at dselvage@langleycity.ca or 604-514-2822 if you would like to help out. This is a fun activity.

Mayor van den Broek and Councillor Wallace sit on several Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) committees. FCM is the federal advocacy organization for local governments in Canada. Both recently returned from FCM committee meetings. Mayor van den Broek noted that people should visit the FCM website “Building Better Lives” to learn more about the federal parties during this election cycle, and what they promise to do to support local governments.

Council heard a presentation from Mervin Malish who does outreach work for Baldy Hughes Therapeutic Community & Farm. This is a 62 bed, private abstinence-based recovery program 30 kilometres from Prince George. He provided an overview of his organization.

Council approved out-of-province travel for Firefighters Murphy and Rossnagel to attend the Flammable Liquids Emergency Rail Response training course in Pueblo, Colorado. This course is being funded by CP Rail. Given that we have one of the busier rail corridors in Canada, this is important training for firefighters in Langley City.

Langley City has a new Director of Development Services, Carl Johannsen. As a housekeeping matter, council appointed him as our new Approving Officer. This allows him to approve subdivision plans.

As another housekeeping matter, council rescinded the appointment of former Mayor Ted Schaffer, and appointed Mayor van den Broek as the voting delegate for the Municipal Insurance Association Annual General Meeting. This local government led organization provides liability and property insurance for local governments in BC.