Who pays for growth? DCCs, CACs and ACCs, explained

Somebody builds 300 apartments in Willoughby. The people who move in will drive on the roads, flush into the sewers, take their kids to the pool and catch the bus. Who pays for the bigger pipe, the wider road, the new rec centre?

In BC the answer, by law and by long habit, is that new development pays up front, through a stack of charges that get folded into the price of each home. That stack is what council, developers and letter writers have been arguing about for years in Langley. Here is what is actually in it.

Four charges, one home

The names all sound alike, which is most of the confusion. Keep them apart like this:

• DCC, development cost charge. The Township’s own charge for hard infrastructure: roads, water, sewer, drainage and parkland. Set by bylaw, one fixed rate per home or per square metre. Legally solid for decades.
• Regional DCCs. Two more fixed charges collected on top: Metro Vancouver’s, for regional water, sewage treatment and parkland purchase, and TransLink’s, for transit projects. The Langley School District’s school site acquisition charge rides along with them.
• CAC, community amenity contribution. A payment negotiated at rezoning for “soft” amenities: rec centres, affordable housing, greenways. Supposed to be voluntary. This is the one the court struck down in the Township in 2025.
• ACC, amenity cost charge. The Province’s 2023 replacement for CACs: a fixed, bylaw-set charge for amenities, with public consultation and annual reporting attached. The Township adopted its ACC bylaw on March 23, 2026.

1. The Township’s DCC

Development cost charges are the oldest and biggest piece. The Local Government Act lets a municipality charge new development for the capital cost of roads, water, sewer, drainage and parkland that growth makes necessary, and since the 2023 changes, fire halls, police facilities and solid-waste facilities too. The money goes into reserve funds that can only be spent on those projects. The bylaw needs provincial sign-off.

The Township’s current bylaw is No. 5897, re-adopted November 3, 2025. Per home, it is $86,787 for a single-family lot, about $55,000 for a townhouse or rowhouse, and $38,482 for an apartment. Of that apartment charge, roads take $16,362 and parks $17,956; water and sewer are small by comparison. Commercial space pays $125.92 per square metre, industrial $49.23. A single-family DCC is paid when the subdivision is approved; most others at building permit.

Those rates are among the higher ones in the region, and that has been a sore point. A Langley Monitor comparison in February 2025 found a Township project paying roughly four times what a similar one would pay in Delta. The Township is now reviewing its program: the proposal on its DCC page would cut residential rates by 17 to 18 per cent (the apartment charge to $31,618) and raise commercial and institutional ones. That had not been adopted when we checked.

The City of Langley has its own DCC bylaw, No. 3256, with a fee schedule updated in July 2026.

2. Metro Vancouver, TransLink and the school district

Three more charges are collected at the same counter and passed along.

Metro Vancouver charges for regional drinking water, sewage treatment and, since January 1, 2025, buying regional parkland. Langley is in the Fraser Sewerage Area. Metro’s board approved steep phased increases for 2025, 2026 and 2027; the Langley Monitor reported in January 2026 that then-mayor Eric Woodward sat on the Metro board that approved the plan, and that developers were asking for the increases to be frozen. In July 2026 the board partly relented: on July 24 it rolled the 2026 rates back toward 2025 levels and trimmed 2027. For an apartment that meant $18,956 down to $14,396 this year, rising to $18,433 on January 1, 2027. A single-family lot pays $22,886 now and $29,370 next year. Metro says fully revised rates arrive in 2028.

TransLink has charged a regional transportation DCC since 2020 to help pay for projects in its investment plans. From January 1, 2026 it is $3,416 per single-family home, $2,837 per townhouse and $1,774 per apartment, plus a per-square-foot charge on commercial space.

School District 35 collects a school site acquisition charge, from $1,000 per home in low-density projects down to $600 in high-density ones, to help buy land for new schools.

3. CACs, and why the court threw out the Township’s

Community amenity contributions are different in kind. There is no section of the Act that says “you may charge a CAC”. What the Act does allow is for a council to say yes or no to a rezoning, and a developer who wants a yes can offer something: cash toward a rec centre, some below-market units, a daycare. Provincial guidance since 2014 has said these should be modest, negotiated and voluntary.

Many municipalities turned that into a tariff. The Township adopted its CAC policy in 2018 and revised it several times. By 2021 the base rates were $6,808 per single-family lot and $3,507 per apartment, tripled for projects seeking more density than the community plan allowed. In 2024 council added a $550,000-per-acre target in the Williams and Smith neighbourhood plan areas, later withdrawn for Williams.

A developer, Lorval Developments Ltd., took the Township to court. On June 20, 2025, in Lorval Developments Ltd. v. Langley (Township), 2025 BCSC 1148, Justice Coval ruled that whatever the policy called itself, read as a whole it worked as a mandatory payment regime tied to rezoning, which the Township had no statutory power to impose. The policy was declared invalid. The court did not rule on whether the amounts were reasonable, or on how the policy had been applied to particular projects.

The mayor at the time called the ruling a “nothingburger”, as the Langley Monitor reported, because the Township was already moving to ACCs. Council adopted an interim policy on July 7, 2025, under which contributions can only be negotiated case by case or offered by the applicant. The Township filed an appeal, then abandoned it in May 2026. The full story, with dates, is in the Langley CAC court case, start to finish.

The City of Langley still has an Amenity Contributions Policy (CO-80) for multi-unit and plex-home projects. We have not seen it tested.

4. ACCs, the new system

The Province’s answer, in the Housing Statutes (Development Financing) Amendment Act, 2023 (Bill 46), was to give councils a lawful, fixed charge for amenities. An ACC bylaw must be built from a list of specific amenities, a cost estimate for each, a split between existing residents and newcomers, and a growth forecast. Councils must consult before adopting, and must publish a report every year showing what came in, what was spent and what was waived.

The Township’s ACC Bylaw No. 6115 passed on March 23, 2026 after consultation in the fall of 2025. The July 2025 staff report shows the arithmetic: seven amenities costing an estimated $992.5 million, of which about $635.5 million (45 to 75 per cent, depending on the project) was assigned to growth, and after a one per cent municipal assist, about $629 million to be recovered from roughly 53,000 new homes and 1.3 million square metres of commercial, industrial and institutional space over 25 years.

The seven: the ice and dry arenas, convention centre and concert hall at the Langley Events Centre, Smith Athletic Park, and the Willoughby, Brookswood-Fernridge and Aldergrove community centres. Fire halls, affordable housing and climate projects, which the old CAC policy had covered, were dropped.

The charges: $19,571 per single or two-family home, $13,584 per townhouse or rowhouse, $8,634 per apartment, $65.62 per square metre of commercial or institutional space and $25.90 for industrial, adjusted each year for inflation. They apply to applications filed after the bylaw’s adoption; earlier ones stay under the interim policy.

So what is the argument?

Strip away the acronyms and it is one question with two honest answers.

The case for high charges. Growth has to be paid for by someone. If developers pay less, the shortfall lands on property tax or on a longer wait for the rec centre. Existing residents already paid for the infrastructure they use, through the DCCs baked into their own homes’ prices, and should not pay again for the next subdivision’s. The Township also grew faster than most of the region, so its bills came due sooner. The Local Government Act’s own rule is that charges recover costs “attributable to development”.

The case against. Home builders, through groups like HAVAN, argue that every dollar charged either comes out of what a builder can pay for land or goes onto the price of the home, and that the stack had grown faster than anyone could absorb: on our apartment above, the Township and regional charges together are more than $60,000 before a shovel moves. Charges that high, they say, slow housing starts in exactly the places the Province wants them, and the old negotiated CACs added delay and uncertainty on top. Critics also note that CAC money did not always build the amenity it was collected for.

Both sides agree on more than they let on. The Province’s 2023 reform, the Township’s move to ACCs, and Metro’s July 2026 rollback all point the same way: charges that are fixed, published and tied to a real project list, rather than negotiated at the counter. The remaining fight is about the size of the numbers, and that is a fight the new council, which meets for the first time on November 2, inherits along with the DCC review already under way.

Where to look things up

Every number in this piece is on an official page: the Township’s development cost charges and amenity cost charges pages, the City’s development costs page, Metro Vancouver’s DCC page and TransLink’s. Our development charges decoder has the jargon and every official link in one place.

For how a project gets from a fenced lot to a building permit, read how a development gets approved in Langley. For where your own tax dollars go, your property tax bill, line by line.

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