It looked like your tax dollars were at work when the road was paved in front of your new house and the street lights were put up just before you moved in.

In reality, your tax dollars hadn’t started to toil.

The developer is the one who built the infrastructure.

You ended up paying, but not at city hall. Part of the cost for those new lights and pavement increased the price your house builder paid the developer for the lot, then the price you paid the builder for the lot with a house on it.

“From a cost perspective, most of the costs have to be passed on to consumers,” says Alan Norris, CEO of Carma Developers.

Developers pay for all the infrastructure – sidewalks, roads, deep and shallow utilities, and streetlights – says Judy Ferguson, executive director for the Calgary chapter of the Urban Development Institute (UDI), the industry group.

“They basically donate everything to the city for the rest of its life,” says Ferguson.

Taxes eventually pay for ongoing maintenance of the infrastructure. Developers pay half the cost of adjacent collector roads from their neighbourhoods to major roads.

Developers will sometimes end up paying in advance for an interchange required by a new neighbourhood, or “front-ending,” she says.

“A lot of things are subject to negotiation to get a development off the ground,” adds Ferguson.

Calgary developers pay a transportation levy to the city for improvements that may fall outside their new neighbourhoods but are necessary to support the development. This year it’s $41,655 a hectare – $24,381 to city projects directly related to the neighbourhood, and $17,274 to the city’s transportation projects in general, she says.

The city and the development industry, represented by the UDI, look at how to spend the funds for the next year’s projects on works that might not otherwise be done that year. The items are from the city’s project list.

“The city is very good at anticipating the needs and working with the development community on master-planned communities,” says Ferguson.

“It’s a very good relationship; it really is . . . we’re extremely fortunate in Calgary with the willingness to allow the development industry, in the form of UDI, to come to the table. There are a lot of cities where the development industry would be quite envious of this,” she says.

UDI is currently working with the city on a study on financing growth. Darren Martin, project manager for the city-UDI study, says it grew out of negotiations last year on the development agreement.

The first report included a list of infrastructure needs created by growth. A second report will examine different funding scenarios, with a final report in the summer, he says.

Developers have always paid for roads, notes Doug Kelly, president of UDI Alberta and a vice-president for Carma in Edmonton.

When municipalities couldn’t keep up with servicing themselves, they turned the work over to the private sector. Calgary and Edmonton were the first centres to have an offsite road levy, but the terms are different in the two cities, he says.

Lindsay Kelly, executive director of the Edmonton and Alberta chapters of the UDI, points out that some municipalities, including Edmonton and Calgary, have developers pay for roads abutting subdivisions. In Edmonton, developers pay for the actual cost. Each basin, as it’s called, has a different levy from $10,000 to $40,000 per hectare.

Developers look at the whole cost of bringing a lot on stream, with some municipalities charging for water trunk mains, for example.

“You can’t do a straight-across comparison from one municipality to another,” Kelly says.

And talks continually occur with municipalities. “That’s why the UDI is busy all the time. It’s a constant negotiation,” she says.

Calgary Ald. Ric McIver says the developers’ contribution to offsite roads represents a 250-per-cent increase from a few years ago, so it’s moving in the right direction.

In his southeast area, McIver points out that a new regional plan foresees 90,000 to 100,000 people living south of Highway 22X and east of Deerfoot Trail. It calls for 3,000 to 4,000 non-retail jobs in the community so people can live and work there.