The Greater Langley Chamber of Commerce is looking to expand the Inter-Municipal Business Licence program to include the entire Lower Mainland, from Hope to West Vancouver.
The program, which first launched as a pilot in the Langleys in 2012, allows mobile businesses to operate in more than one municipality under a single licence, rather than purchase a different licence for each municipality they do business in.
The current mobile businesses licence grants coverage in the City of Langley, the Township of Langley, Surrey, Abbotsford, Chilliwack, Maple Ridge, Mission, Hope, Pitt Meadows, Kent/Agassiz and Delta.
An expansion would offer coverage all the way to the North Shore. This would be in addition to the four different mobile business licence programs already operating in the Lower Mainland: Fraser Valley, Metro West, North/West Vancouver and Tri-Cities.
Across the province there are 11 similar programs, with 73 municipalities participating.
“The expansion of the program will provide an opportunity for Lower Mainland businesses to further reduce the burden and confusion of managing multiple business licences, and encourage increased compliance with the entire region,” Scott Johnston, president of the Greater Langley Chamber of Commerce, told Township council Monday night.
“We, as the Greater Langley Chamber of Commerce, are recommending including the full region — an additional program — to provide an opportunity for mobile businesses to select a program that mostly suits their needs.”
The program lends itself best to businesses in the construction industry, although the Chamber’s goal is to eventually make it accessible for all business sectors.
“At the present time, the initiative is … basically (for) construction-related or businesses that would attend a construction site. And the reason for that is that the bylaws are very similar throughout (participating cities),” said Lynn Whitehouse, executive director of the Greater Langley Chamber of Commerce.
“But when you start to expand to include other sectors, that’s where we get into a little bit of a problem. So at this point in time, we aren’t recommending adding an expansion to other sectors. We are looking for creation of a regional business licence under the current conditions.
“Our goal is definitely to try and work to move into other sectors, but we understand that there’s a lot of differences in the municipalities with regards to their bylaws and their regulations, which makes it a bit more difficult.”
For more information on the existing program in the Langleys, visit http://langleychamber.com/pages/MobileBusinessLicence1/.
