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When a new community is built, the developer pays for the infrastructure that is specific to that community. This includes the roads, street lights, water and sewer systems (among other things) inside the community. Most developers pass these infrastructure costs along to the homebuyer, which essentially results in residents paying for the community in which they live. People who live in other parts of the city are not affected by these costs.

However, each new community or development has an impact on infrastructure outside of its specific borders — causing more demand on things like major bridges and interchanges leading into and out of the neighbourhood, wastewater lift stations, wet and dry ponds, and traffic signals on major roadways. For many years, all Calgary taxpayers, regardless of whether or not they were directly affected by the development, bore the cost of growth on much of this off-site infrastructure, and these costs were distributed among all taxpayers.

This is why, for example, your water bills have increased; for 10 years, the city did not ask developers to contribute to our water and wastewater costs, meaning we all had to foot the bill for very expensive infrastructure.

I didn’t think that this kind of subsidy was fair, and so, in 2011, shortly after taking office, I asked administration to work with industry to come up with a way to recover some of these costs. We came to an agreement and started collecting some of these funds at that time.