One Year. One Promise. One Truth at a Time.
- 7 days ago
- 18 min read
A reflection on the first year of The Truthline Network, the people who make it matter, and the work still ahead.
Times Square, empty and waiting. The barricades are up. The streets have been cleared. Tonight, a million people will stand here, counting down, hoping, believing that the new year might be different. Tomorrow morning, the confetti will be swept away and the work will begin again. But right now, in this quiet moment, anything is possible.
This Isn't About Politics. It's About Showing Up.
This morning, my friend Larry Jones rode his bicycle through Manhattan in the pale blue light before dawn.
He does this most days, pedaling from his apartment to his architecture firm on Eighth Avenue, watching the city wake up. But today was different. Today, Times Square was empty. The barricades were up. The streets had been cleared overnight for tonight's celebration. And Larry, alone on his bike in one of the most famous places on earth, stopped and took a photograph.
At 9:01 this morning, my phone buzzed. Three photographs. Times Square, empty.
I stopped what I was doing and looked. Really looked. The massive digital billboards glowing pink and orange against the gray morning sky. The crosswalk lines leading to nowhere. The silence you could almost hear through the screen.
A million people will stand in that exact spot tonight, counting down, hoping, wishing, believing that something about the turning of the calendar might change things.
And I thought about what a difference a year makes.
Times Square Official Live Webcast
A year ago tomorrow, the first day of 2025, I woke up free. My years in office were behind me. And I decided to do something I had never been able to do before: tell the whole truth.
For eight years, I had served as President of New Castle County Council. I had overseen billions of dollars in budgets. Thousands of pieces of legislation. Countless meetings, hearings, negotiations, compromises, victories, and defeats. I had done the work I was elected to do, and I had loved it. Truly loved it.
But I was also ready for something different.
I wanted freedom. I wanted creativity. I wanted to do something outside the box, something that had never been done before, something that could matter in a way that governing from inside the system never quite could.
And I wanted to say out loud what I had spent eight years biting my tongue about.
Not the polished, talking point, press release version of the truth. The real truth. The messy truth. The hard truth. The truth that makes people uncomfortable, that makes powerful people angry, that shines a light into corners where some folks would prefer the lights stayed off.
That morning, a year ago tomorrow, The Truthline Network was born.
I did not know then what it would become. I only knew it had to exist.
*
Last week, Larry sent me another set of photographs.
These were taken on a bike ride through Dyker Heights in Brooklyn during Christmas week. If you have never been there, Dyker Heights is not what most people picture when they think of Brooklyn. The homes are large, set back on tree lined lots. The families have money. The neighborhood is safe, quiet, and deeply proud of itself. And every December, those families transform their homes into something extraordinary.
They spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours covering every surface with lights. Giant inflatable gingerbread men stand guard in front yards. Life-sized nutcrackers flank doorways. Santas wave from second floor windows. Trees wrapped in red lights glow like embers against the winter night.
And the people come. Families bundle up in heavy coats and walk the streets together. Children point and gasp. Strangers smile at each other. For a few weeks every year, this Brooklyn neighborhood becomes one of the most visited places in New York City.
Not because anyone asked them to do it. Not because they get paid. Not because some government program required it.
They do it because they want to. Because it brings joy. Because community is something you build, one string of lights at a time, one act of generosity at a time, one decision to show up for your neighbors at a time.
I looked at Larry's photographs and I thought: this is what it is supposed to look like.
This is what happens when people care.
*
I met Larry's mother in 2008.
Her name was Mary Ellen Jones, and I was running for Congress at the time, knocking on doors in North Wilmington, introducing myself to anyone who would listen. When Mary Ellen opened her door, I did not know that this chance encounter would change my life.
She was in her eighties then. A small woman with sharp eyes and a warm smile. She invited me in, and we talked. And talked. And talked some more.
Mary Ellen had lived a fascinating life. Born in Philadelphia in December of 1921, her parents were Joseph and Mary Canning. She grew up in Brooklyn and Philadelphia, spending childhood summers at her grandfather's home in Stone Harbor, New Jersey. She married in 1948, raised her family first in Philadelphia and then, from 1965 onward, in North Wilmington. She was an active member of Saint Helena's Parish for decades, involved in the choir, the Christmas bazaars, the Altar Society, the Outreach ministry, well into her eighties. She had worked at Delaware Trust at Penny Hill from 1969 until her retirement in 1986.
Her husband Henry, a chemist who had spent his career at DuPont, passed in 2006. Most of her friends had passed too. And she was lonely.
So I started visiting. Once or twice a week, I would stop by her house, just a few blocks from mine. I would cook dinner and bring it over, and we would sit together and talk. She told me stories from her childhood, from her marriage, from raising her son. She told me about summers in Stone Harbor, about working at the bank, about the priests who had come and gone at St. Helena's over the years. She told me about her son Larry, the architect who lived in New York City, who would design four floors of the World Trade Center, who spread his architectural drawings across her dining room table on weekend visits so she could see what he was building, who called her every single day.
She was the sweetest lady I have ever known.
*
In 2012, Larry called me with a question.
His mother could no longer live alone. What had started as forgetting little things had progressed over several years, and by then she was in the later stages of Alzheimer's disease. She still remembered who I was when I visited, though sometimes she forgot my name and called me "Little Girl" instead. She trusted me.
Mary Ellen had always said she wanted to stay in her home until she passed. The home where she had raised her family. The home she had lived in and loved for forty seven years. Larry did not want to leave her with a stranger.
Would I consider moving in with her? Would I take care of her?
I said yes.
*
I do not think I fully understood, until I lived it, what it means to care for someone at the end of their life.
The days were long. The nights were longer. There were moments of frustration and exhaustion and sorrow so deep it felt like drowning. And there were moments of grace so profound they still take my breath away.
Mary Ellen passed in January of 2014. I was sitting beside her, holding her hand. She was in the home she had loved so much, surrounded by the beautiful treasures and memories she had gathered over a lifetime of living. Her son, who had called her every day and visited every weekend, who had been her whole world, was on his way.
That extraordinary, profound experience taught me more about New Castle County than eight years on County Council ever could.
It taught me about the elderly in our community. About the care they need and the love they deserve and the challenges their families face. It taught me about what happens when systems fail and what happens when people show up. It taught me that behind every policy debate and budget line item, there are real human beings whose lives hang in the balance.
It taught me that this work matters. All of it. Every bit of it.
*
Larry grew up in Northern New Castle County, in the house where his mother would live for forty-seven years.
He left for the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, one of the top architecture schools in the nation, ranked among the ten best in the country, a place where acceptance alone signals something about who you are and what you might become. Larry stayed in New York after graduation. Not because he had nowhere else to go, but because New York is where architects go to find out if they are as good as they believe they are. It is the most demanding architectural market on earth. Firms from every continent compete for the same commissions. The standards are unforgiving. The competition never stops. To build a career there is hard. To build a firm there is harder. To last for decades, to keep clients coming back for twenty-five years, requires something more than talent. It requires listening. It requires caring about the work more than the credit.
Larry did not just survive New York. He built a life there. He thrived.
But he never stopped coming back to Delaware. Every weekend, the train to Wilmington. Every single day, a phone call. The distance was geography. It was never separation.
In 1979, Larry began his career with James Wines and SITE, the legendary architecture and environmental arts studio whose radical, imaginative work challenged everything the profession thought it knew. Wines won the Smithsonian's National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement. His drawings hang in the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Victoria and Albert Museum. To start your career there, in that studio, learning from that mind, it shaped how Larry saw buildings for the rest of his life.
Not as boxes to fill, but as spaces that could say something.
By the mid-eighties, Larry was the architect behind spaces that millions of people walked through without ever knowing his name: Saks Fifth Avenue, Marshall Fields, Lord and Taylor, the Bergdorf Goodman Men's Store in Manhattan. These were not ordinary commissions. These were temples of American retail, places where every detail mattered, where the architecture had to disappear into elegance so completely that customers felt it without seeing it. He delivered. Again and again.
He designed four floors of the World Trade Center.
Think about what that means. After September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center site became the most emotionally charged piece of ground in America. Nearly three thousand people died there. The rebuilding was not construction. It was an act of national memory, defiance, grief, and hope all at once. The site represents resilience, not just for New York, but for the country, for the world. To be trusted with any part of that project meant your work would be seen by millions, studied for generations, held to a standard that allowed no margin for error. The weight of it, the responsibility to get it right, to honor what was lost, to build something worthy of what it symbolized, was immense.
And he takes photographs.
Not snapshots. Photographs. The images in this Brief are his, Dyker Heights glowing with Christmas lights, Manhattan catching the first light of morning, Times Square empty and waiting for a million people to arrive.
When I look at Larry's photographs, I do not see pretty pictures. I see the eye of someone who understands how places hold stories. How buildings hold memory. How the past lives inside the present whether we notice it or not.
I see a man who left Delaware nearly fifty years ago and still calls it home. Who rode his bicycle through Manhattan at dawn Christmas Eve morning and thought to send three photographs to a friend in Wilmington.
I see the son who called his mother every single day. Who spread his architectural drawings across her dining room table on weekend visits so she could see what he was building, so she could be part of his life even from two hours away. Who never stopped showing up, year after year, even when she began to forget, even when she stopped remembering his name.
That is what showing up looks like.
But he never stopped coming back to Delaware, either. Every weekend, the train to Wilmington. Every single day, a phone call. The distance was geography. It was never separation.
Larry sees buildings the way some people see faces. He reads them. In 1979, he started with James Wines and Site Projects, learning to look at structures and understand what they were trying to say. By the mid-eighties, he was the architect behind spaces that millions of people walked through—Saks Fifth Avenue, Marshall Fields, Lord and Taylor, the Bergdorf Goodman Men's Store in Manhattan. He later designed four floors of the World Trade Center. I received the most amazing pictures captured as the project moved from concept to completion.
In 1994, he started his own firm. Laurence G. Jones Architects began with a philosophy that still drives it: no house style, no ego, no imposing his aesthetic on a client. Every project is a collaboration. He listens first. Learns the culture of the organization, the way people move through space, what they need that they may not know how to ask for. Then he designs: for celebrities, titans in industry, famous names you hear, and private names you don't. He designed corporate interiors, restaurants, retail spaces, educational facilities, new buildings, landmark restorations. Twenty-five years of clients who keep coming back because Larry treats their space like it matters. Because to him, it does.
But here is what you will not find on any website, in any portfolio, in any professional biography.
When I was County Council President, Larry would visit, keeping an unbroken connection to New Castle County. He would sit in my office or at my kitchen table, and we would talk about whatever was coming before the Council. A rezoning request. A development proposal. A land use decision that seemed routine on paper.
Larry would tell me things no legislation or research ever could.
He knew which farm that subdivision used to be. He knew who built the stone wall along the back property line and why it mattered. He knew which families had lived on that road for three generations and which roads used to be dirt paths that children walked to school. He knew the history of Northern New Castle County the way only someone who grew up here and then saw the world can know it, deeply, specifically, in his bones.
I had surrounded myself with people like that. Top experts in their industries. People who brought the same passion, the same expertise, the same refusal to do anything less than their best to every project, every issue, every decision. People who loved their work the way I loved mine. When you find that, when you build that around you, something happens that is hard to name but impossible to miss. There is an extra dimension to the work. A weight. A care.
Larry added that dimension for me.
He helped me see that a vote was never just a vote. A zoning decision was not lines on a map. It was how children would walk to school. How families would gather in their yards. How the elderly would age in place or be pushed out. How neighborhoods would hold together or fall apart. How businesses would create jobs or leave them behind. How responsible development could honor what came before while building something worthy for what comes next.
Larry helped me understand that every vote I cast would outlive me. That the decisions made in those council chambers would shape how future generations, people not yet born, would experience this place.
That getting it right mattered in ways that went far beyond politics or policy.
He carries the history of Northern New Castle County the way other people carry memories of childhood, because for him, they are the same thing. And he shared that history with me, one conversation at a time, so that I could carry it too.
And he takes photographs.
Not snapshots. Photographs. The images in this Brief are his, Dyker Heights glowing with Christmas lights, Manhattan catching the first light of morning, Times Square empty and waiting for a million people to arrive.
When Larry sent me the Dyker Heights photographs, he did not just send images. He walked me through the neighborhood the way he walks through everything, with history, with context, with stories. He told me about the families who started the tradition decades ago and the ones who carry it forward now. He told me about the people he met on the sidewalks while he was taking these pictures, strangers who stopped to talk, children who pointed at the lights, neighbors who knew each other's names.
Now when I look at these photographs, I do not see pretty pictures.
I see what was. I see the community that built it. I see the people who show up year after year, not because anyone asks them to, but because they understand something that cannot be measured or mandated: that what we create for each other matters. That the places we shape will shape the people who come after us.
I see the eye of someone who understands how places hold stories. How buildings hold memory. How the past lives inside the present whether we notice it or not.
I see Larry.
I see a man who left Delaware nearly fifty years ago and still calls it home. Who rode his bicycle through Manhattan at dawn Christmas Eve morning and thought to send three photographs to a friend in Wilmington.
I see the son who called his mother every single day. Who spread his architectural drawings across her dining room table on weekend visits so she could see what he was building, so she could be part of his life even from two hours away. Who never stopped showing up, year after year, even when she began to forget, even when she stopped remembering his name.
That is what showing up looks like.
*
A year ago New Years Day, I asked myself a question.
What kind of county and state do I want to live in?
Not the county and state we have. Not the one defined by backroom deals and political favors and contracts that can go to friends instead of the most qualified. Not the one where elected officials say one thing and do another, where process is used as a weapon, where the people who are supposed to serve the public end up serving themselves.
I want something better.
I want a county and state where government operates on best practices. Where transparency is not a slogan but a standard. Where we do not just listen to what elected officials say but watch what they do and ask whether those two things match. Where the people running our government are experts in their fields, hired because they are the best, held to the highest expectations, working in a culture that values public service above all else.
I want a county and state where we follow the money. Where we ask hard questions about whether our tax dollars are going where they should. Where grants and contracts serve the public interest, not political interests. Where the question is not "who does this help get reelected" but "is this the best and highest use of these resources to improve the quality of life for the people who live here."
I want elected officials who will do the right thing even when it is hard. Even when it might hurt them politically. Even when their friends and colleagues criticize them for it. Because it is the right thing to do. Because the people they serve deserve nothing less.
*
Can we get there?
I do not know.
I know that we will not get there if we do not try.
I know that elected officials can and will level up if they have to. I have seen it happen. When expectations are high, when accountability is real, when the public is watching and asking questions and demanding answers, people rise to the occasion. And when expectations are low, when no one is paying attention, when there are no consequences for cutting corners or serving yourself instead of your constituents, people sink to that level instead.
The Truthline exists to raise expectations.
It exists to shine light into dark corners. To ask the questions no one else is asking. To connect the dots that powerful people hope will stay unconnected. To tell the truth, even when it is hard, even when it is messy, even when it is uncomfortable to say and uncomfortable to hear.
Because if we do not do this work, it will not get done.
Because silence has gone on long enough.
Because the truth still has a voice.
*
I have seen miracles happen.
I have seen communities come together when it mattered most. I have seen ordinary people do extraordinary things. I have seen a Brooklyn neighborhood transform itself into a wonderland of light because a few families decided to bring joy to strangers. I have seen a son care for his mother across hundreds of miles and decades of days. I have seen a lonely woman in her eighties open her door to a stranger and begin a friendship that would change both their lives.
I have seen what happens when people show up.
*
New Years Eve, a million people will crowd into Times Square.
They will stand in the cold for hours, pressed together, waiting. When the ball drops and the clock strikes midnight and the new year begins, they will cheer. They will hug strangers. They will believe, at least for a moment, that anything is possible.
New Years morning, the streets will be covered in confetti. Sanitation workers will sweep it away. The barricades will come down. Life will go on.
But something will have shifted. The calendar will read 2026. Another year will stretch out ahead, full of choices we have not yet made, work we have not yet done, truths we have not yet told.
*
A year ago New Years Day, the Truthline Network was born.
In the twelve months since, we have published investigations into the Tyler Technologies contract and its connections, into Amazon's influence in Delaware, into audit failures that went unnoticed for years, into rezoning decisions made behind closed doors, into the gap between what officials say and what they do.
We have documented attempts to silence public comment. We have followed the money. We have asked hard questions and demanded real answers.
This is the work. This is what accountability looks like.
One report at a time. One brief at a time. One truth at a time.
And we are just getting started.
*
What happens next depends on you.
I cannot do this work alone. No one can. The Truthline Network is reader supported because that is the only way to stay independent. No corporate sponsors with agendas. No political IOUs cashed with taxpayer funded jobs. No political patrons expecting favors. Just people who believe that truth matters, that accountability matters, that the county and state we leave to our children and grandchildren matters.
If you have read this far, you are one of those people.
*
So here is what I am asking:
Subscribe. Get the Truthline delivered to your inbox so you never miss a report, a brief, a story that matters.
Share. Send this to someone who needs to read it. Post it on your social media. Talk about it at your kitchen table. The more people who know the truth, the harder it becomes to hide.
Support. If you have the means, donate. Every dollar goes directly to the work of investigating, reporting, and holding power to account. This is not a campaign contribution. This is an investment in the future of the place you live.
And most of all, pay attention. Watch what your elected officials do, not just what they say. Ask questions. Demand answers. Show up at meetings. Vote. Make your voice heard.
The people, the families, the friends, the neighborhoods, the communities of New Castle County and Delaware matter. Your lives are important. The stories that unfold here, the life changing events that happen in these streets and these homes and these council chambers, they matter. What we do here, for good or for worse, ripples outward to other parts of the country and the world.
We are not powerless. We are not voiceless. We are not alone.
I think about Mary Ellen sometimes.
I think about her sitting in her living room in North Wilmington, surrounded by the treasures of a lifetime, telling me stories about Stone Harbor and St. Helena's and her son the architect in New York City. I think about holding her hand at the end. I think about what she taught me about showing up, about caring, about what we owe each other.
I think about Larry, still riding his bicycle through Manhattan at dawn, still taking photographs, still connected to the place he came from even though he left it decades ago.
I think about those families in Dyker Heights, spending their own money and their own time to create something beautiful for strangers.
I think about Times Square, empty and waiting, about to fill with a million people hoping that the new year will be better than the last one.
*
One year ago New Years Day, The Truthline Network was born.
New Years Day, it turns one.
I do not know what the next year will bring. I do not know how long this work will take or how hard the road will be or what obstacles wait around corners I cannot yet see.
But I know this: it will not happen if we do not try.
And I know this: we are trying.
Thank you for being here. Thank you for reading. Thank you for caring about the place you live and the people you share it with.
New Years morning, Larry will ride his bike through Times Square again. The confetti will be ankle deep. The barricades will be coming down. And I will be at my desk, working on the next story, because the truth does not take holidays.
Happy New Year.
The truth still has a voice. And that voice is just getting started.
Manhattan at dawn. The super tall towers of Billionaires Row catch the first light while the city sleeps below. Larry Jones, who grew up in Northern New Castle County and now designs buildings in this skyline, sees connections the rest of us might miss. The past and the present. The place you came from and the place you are.
Manhattan Skyline at Dawn, Captured by Laurence G. Jones, December 31, 2025
Winter trees reach toward a pale sunrise. A solitary figure walks below. In the quiet before the city wakes, there is space to think about what matters. About what we build. About what we leave behind.
Image 1 - 6, Dyker Heights, Brooklyn
Captured by Laurence G. Jones
December 31, 2025
Where silence ends and truth speaks.
Karen Hartley Nagle is the Founder, Publisher, and Editor in Chief of the Truthline Network. She served as President of New Castle County Council from 2016 to 2024.