Questions Residents Are Asking

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What is SRJC, LLC?

 

A Delaware limited liability company, file number 10649718, registered through Corporation Service Company at 251 Little Falls Drive, Wilmington. Delaware does not publish the members of a limited liability company. The applicant was identified at the September 28, 2026, hearing as Harvey Hanna & Associates, Inc. of Newport, the July 2026 buyer of the 102.57-acre Scott Run Commerce Center at 840, 900, and 940 Jamison Corner Road. The initials match the parcel, Scott Run at Jamison Corner; the acreage matches the $1,900,000 tier; the town matches. The July 2026 deed, on file at the New Castle County Recorder of Deeds, names the grantee.

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What is a Level II Site Readiness grant?

 

A reimbursement of 50 percent of eligible costs of preparing an industrial site of more than ten acres, zoned business park or industrial, vacant, and not committed to a named tenant, for “infrastructure and utility projects, rail extension engineering and development, and advanced planning and engineering.” The statute sets no cap. The program’s administrators set the tiers in January 2024 and have not published them; the awards show $1,900,000 for roughly 100 acres.

 

Why does a “shovel-ready” site need $1,900,000?

 

That is the question. The seller’s November 2025 offering memorandum said off-site improvements were complete at no cost to a buyer and all Delaware Department of Transportation entrance improvements had been built. Four state approvals expired between January and May 2026. The $1,900,000 implies $3,800,000 in eligible work. The application says what the work is. The notice does not.

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Who sponsored the application?

 

The statute requires a county or municipality with jurisdiction. The parcel is in unincorporated New Castle County, not the Town of Middletown. The sponsor is New Castle County under New Castle County Executive Marcus Henry.

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Did New Castle County cap warehouses?

 

Yes. Ordinance 23-104, approved January 9, 2024, signed January 25, 2024, by New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer, limits new large industrial buildings to 200,000 square feet. The Scott Run plan, with a 600,000-square-foot building, was recorded August 3, 2023, before the cap.

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Who is on the Council on Development Finance, and who put them there?

 

Seven appointed by the Governor, one senator appointed by the President Pro Tempore, one representative appointed by the Speaker. None is confirmed by the Senate. The Council is advisory; CJ Bell, Director of the Delaware Division of Small Business, decides. Appendix D lists them. One of the Governor’s seven, Jonathan Horner, is General Counsel of Schell Brothers, which gave the Governor’s political action committee $25,000 fifteen days after his appointment and whose affiliate Ocean Atlantic Companies owned the four corners of the Route 301 interchange at Jamison Corner.

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Did Senator Poore vote no?

 

Yes. I followed the hearing as it happened, by remote connection, and heard the vote taken. She cast the only vote against the recommendation. The Council’s minutes historically record tallies, not names. As of October 4, 2026, the State has not posted the minutes of the September 28 hearing.

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Does Alan Levin have a role in this grant?

 

Not in the vote. Alan Levin chairs the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council, which certifies the revenue the Bond Bill can appropriate, and he does not sit on the Council on Development Finance, the Delaware Economic Development Authority, or the Delaware Prosperity Partnership board. He organized and raised for Change Can’t Wait PAC, the political action committee that elected the Governor who appoints seven of the Council’s nine members and the Director who decides; he gave the Matt Meyer committees $29,100; and the committee’s donor list includes two Site Readiness Fund recipients, the attorney who represents developers before the Council, and Schell Brothers, whose General Counsel sits on it.

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What is DSM?

 

Three things. DSM, LLC is Delaware file number 4046958, with the same registered agent as SRJC, LLC, Corporation Service Company, which serves hundreds of thousands of Delaware entities. DSM Brokerage Services, LLC gave Matt Meyer’s county committee $400 in 2016 from the office of DSM Commercial. DSM Commercial is the Wilmington brokerage and development firm of Fred Wittig, Robert Wittig, Tripp Way and Michael Loessner, whose partners and two limited liability companies gave the Matt Meyer committees $29,400 and whose co-founder Robert Wittig was appointed by Governor Matt Meyer to the Delaware Prosperity Partnership board, the body that receives Site Readiness applications, on August 21, 2025.

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What did the two laws signed July 13, 2026, change?

 

House Bill 450 replaces the daily-trip threshold for a traffic impact study with 500 peak-hour trips, orders a statewide transportation impact fee by January 1, 2027, outside existing Transportation Improvement Districts such as the one Scott Run sits in, and lets the Delaware Department of Transportation redirect a county’s fee revenue if the county has not adopted conforming ordinances by June 1, 2027. Senate Bill 23 makes review of by-right residential projects administrative, provides that a public meeting on them “does not constitute and is not conducted as a public hearing,” and shortens the county rezoning conformance deadline to twelve months. Neither law funds the counties to carry it out. The State trained the counties on Friday, September 25, 2026, three days before this hearing.

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How much has Middletown received?

 

Amazon, 2012: $3,470,000 from the Delaware Strategic Fund, $4,000,000 from the New Jobs Infrastructure Fund, and a ten-year town tax abatement. Datwyler, 2018: $2,400,000 plus more than $700,000 in performance grants. WuXi STA, 2021: $19,050,365. Two $100,000 Level I Site Readiness recommendations for 1870 DuPont Parkway, in 2022 and 2024.

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How do I read the application?

 

Write to the Council on Development Finance in care of the Delaware Division of Small Business, Attention Andrea Wojcik, Director of Communications, business@delaware.gov, citing Title 1, Section 403 of the Delaware Administrative Code, Section 4.2, and Title 29, Chapter 100 of the Delaware Code.

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What can residents do now?

 

CJ Bell’s decision follows the Council’s recommendation; the Council reviews any award not under contract within a year, and any change of ten percent or more. Written comment to the Delaware Division of Small Business remains open. The 12th Senate District seat is on the November 3, 2026, ballot. The General Assembly that passed both laws by two-thirds returns in January 2027 and can repeal both by two-thirds without the Governor before the first county deadline on June 1, 2027. Every senator and representative has a name, a district, and a telephone number, and the question for each is whether they will vote to restore the law as it stood on July 12, 2026.

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Could County Council ever vote no on a project that met the code?

 

Not since March 14, 1975. In Acierno v. Folsom, the Delaware Supreme Court held that Council’s approval of a conforming plan “must be deemed to be a ministerial act.” What Council and the county planning bodies could do, until July 13, 2026, was hold a public hearing, take testimony, and attach conditions for schools, drainage, and neighbors that the record supported; the Supreme Court confirmed that power on December 5, 2008, and again on August 6, 2026. Section 9223 of Title 29 ends the hearing and limits review to “objective standards.” The vote was never the resident’s protection. The hearing was.

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Which county loses the most?

 

New Castle County, by acreage and by code. Forty-three percent of its land is in the growth areas that must now permit four units an acre with townhouses and apartments, against a Suburban district that permits 0.67 and permits neither. Its 50-trip traffic study threshold is below the State’s new 500-trip floor and must be repealed by June 1, 2027. Its comprehensive rezoning is four years behind, and its five-year plan review in 2027 restarts a 12-month clock that ends in a must-approve rezoning pathway. Sussex County loses the hearing it used most, before its Planning and Zoning Commission, and said so; Kent County loses the conditioning power the Supreme Court gave it by name in 2008.

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Is any of it illegal?

 

The State may take a hearing from a county; counties hold only the powers the General Assembly gives them, and residents have no constitutional right to the hearing. What is unresolved is inside the laws themselves: the conflict between Section 2660(e) and Section 2662(a) of Title 9; whether a county-wide fee set by the Delaware Department of Transportation meets the “rough proportionality” test the United States Supreme Court applied to legislated fees in Sheetz v. County of El Dorado on April 12, 2024; and whether a surcharge divided among five funds “at the direction of the Governor,” with no shares set by the General Assembly, is an appropriation under Article VIII, Section 6 of the Delaware Constitution. The Governor’s guidance resolves none of these, because it is not a regulation and binds no one.

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Will my taxes go up again?

 

In New Castle County, the county’s own April 16, 2026, projection says the gap the 17.2 percent increase closed reopens at $19,400,000 in Fiscal Year 2028 and $21,000,000 in Fiscal Year 2029, with the Tax Stabilization Reserve at negative $28,800,000 by mid-2029, before a single unit is added under the four-unit-an-acre floor and before any impact fee is waived under Senate Bill 23’s Section 9222(c). Sussex County held its 2.14-cent rate and added a $5 per $1,000 construction surcharge; Kent County held its rate and raised its quarterly sewer unit fee to $12.62. The sewer, water, school, and road costs of the density the two laws require are not in any county budget yet, and the transportation impact fee that might have paid for roads goes to the State.

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Is the housing the laws produce affordable?

 

Not at the level of the shortage. Senate Bill 23’s definition of affordable reaches a household at 120 percent of area median income buying a home; the Delaware State Housing Authority’s shortage, cited in the bill’s own preamble, is nearly 20,000 units for renters below 50 percent. Section 9223, the by-right section, requires no affordable unit at any level. Executive Order 18’s Priority Housing Project requires 15 percent at 80 percent of area median income; its Qualified Opportunity Fund track requires none. Belle Mead on Route 24 offered 51 units at 80 percent and 283 at market rate.

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Why does no one in Dover or at the county say no?

 

Because the record of what happens to people who do is ten years long and public. Section XIX sets it out in order, in the words of the people it happened to: the officer, the lawyer, the three mayors, the six women, the assessor, the revenue council member, the Council member whose district lost its capital funding, and the author. Senate President Pro Tempore David Sokola said it on the record on March 26, 2026: the removal of Michael Houghton was “undue political interference” “for publicly asking questions.” Legislators, council members and State employees have said the same thing to this publication without attribution. The two laws passed the General Assembly by the two-thirds margins the Constitution requires, with the requirements that would have bound developers removed and the provisions that bind counties kept.

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If You Read Nothing Else

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Kevin Caneco wrote a letter on a Sunday in April 2022 from his house in Bayberry North, because a field behind it was about to become 1,800,000 square feet of warehouse, and nobody had told him. More than a thousand of his neighbors signed it in three days. They went to the hearings. They stood up, one after another, in front of the Planning Board and in front of County Council, and said what 233 truck doors would do to a street of houses, and the people who had to vote had to sit there and hear it. They got the county to pass a law capping warehouses at 200,000 square feet. They were too late for this one, because the plan had been recorded five months before the cap, but they learned how the system worked, and they used it.

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That system is gone. On July 13, 2026, Governor Matt Meyer signed a law that says the meeting on a project like that one, if there is a meeting at all, “does not constitute and is not conducted as a public hearing.” The hearings Kevin Caneco and his neighbors went to no longer exist for the next neighborhood. That is the first of the three things they took, and the warehouse is how I found the other two.

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On Monday, September 28, 2026, nine people in a room in Dover recommended $1,900,000 of your money to the company that bought that finished, fully approved warehouse site in July. The company is Harvey Hanna & Associates of Newport. The money comes from a State fund that exists to get land ready to build on. This land was already ready. The seller’s own sales brochure said so, in capital letters, on the cover. The one senator on that board who lives with the parcel, Nicole Poore, voted no. The State’s minutes will not say her name.

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That is the small story, and it is the one that put me in the room. Here is the large one, and it is the one you will live under.

Three days before that vote, on Friday, September 25, the Governor’s office trained every county and town in Delaware on two laws Governor Matt Meyer signed on July 13. I was on that call from its opening to its close, as one of as many as 102 officials and residents watching from desks and kitchen tables across the State. The two laws are Senate Bill 23, which its sponsors named the Housing for Every Delawarean Act, and House Bill 450, which they named the ROAD-DE Act.

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Between them, they change more than thirty sections of the Delaware Code, and this report takes them up one at a time. There is no short list of what they do to you. There is a short list of what you will feel first, and which law does each.

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Senate Bill 23 takes away the hearing. If a housing project already fits the zoning on a piece of land, it will now be approved by a planning office, not by anyone you elected. The new Section 9223 of Title 29 says the meeting, if there is one, “does not constitute and is not conducted as a public hearing,” and that public comment, where a county allows it at all, “is made only through written submission.” You may write a letter. You may not stand up and speak.

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The same section “supersedes any inconsistent public hearing requirements,” which means New Castle County’s Planning Board hearing and County Council’s vote on a major plan, both written into the county’s own code, are gone for every project that qualifies. The only hearing the section leaves you is one before the Board of Adjustment, which you must file for yourself and, in effect, litigate. For fifty years the Delaware Supreme Court said a county could not refuse a project that met its code, but it could hold a hearing and attach conditions for the school down the road or the water in your yard.

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On August 6 of this year, the Court said it again, for six neighbors in Fox Haven near Lewes who testified about where the rain goes. The law signed twenty-four days earlier had already ended that for everyone who comes after them.

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House Bill 450 takes away the traffic study. Delaware used to require one when a project would add 50 cars in its busiest hour, or 500 cars in a day; New Castle County wrote the same floor into its code. The new Section 146 of Title 17 sets the floor at 500 cars in the busiest hour, and no county may go lower. A 450-home subdivision on Route 299 will get no study. A warehouse complex the size of the one in Bayberry would get none either. Inside a Downtown Development District, the study is “not required” at any size.

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And when a study is done, Sections 132 and 141 of the same title let the Department of Transportation do it with “algorithmic analysis of traffic patterns” and “artificial intelligence-based analytical tools,” so a resident who disputes the finding will be disputing a model.

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Senate Bill 23 takes away your county’s say over its own land. Every county must now permit at least four houses an acre, plus townhouses and apartments, across its growth areas, which is 43 percent of New Castle County, 13 percent of Kent and 12 percent of Sussex, by June 1, 2027. That is Section 2663 of Title 9. If the county misses a twelve-month deadline to redraw its zoning, a developer’s rezoning that matches the plan’s map must be called complete in 21 days and approved in 120, with no new hearing, under Section 2660.

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Section 9222 requires the county’s housing plan to allow duplexes, triplexes, apartments, and accessory dwellings “without the need for a conditional use permit or special exception,” and to re-examine its lot sizes, setbacks, and building heights “as those standards relate to achieving maximum permitted residential density,” which are the tools neighbors use to keep a project in scale. The same section lists “fee waivers, reductions, or deferrals” and “reduction or waiver of local impact fees” among the ways a county may satisfy the State, and every waived fee is a road, sewer, or classroom cost moved onto the people already there.

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Section 2652(2) keeps the rule that conformity with the comprehensive plan “shall mean only” conformity with its maps, so the written promises in a plan about buffers and character bind nothing. The Governor now certifies every county plan under Section 9103, and two sentences have been struck from the law: the county’s “right to accept or reject” his recommendations, and “the final decision on the adoption of the comprehensive plan is that of the municipality or county.”

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House Bill 450 takes the money, and Senate Bill 23 decides who is excused from paying it. The one new fee the laws create, a transportation impact fee on new development under Section 507 of Title 17, must be in place by January 1, 2027, and it is the State’s fee, not the county’s. If your county has not rewritten its ordinances the way Dover wants by June 1, 2027, the county’s share is spent “as determined solely by the Department.” A 2 percent surcharge on it is divided among five funds “at the direction of the Governor,” with no shares set by the General Assembly.

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And the Secretary “shall waive or reduce” the fee for any residential development “financed in whole, or in part, by the Delaware State Housing Authority”; one Authority loan on one building qualifies the whole project. Not one dollar of any of it is sent to a county for a road, a sewer line, or a classroom.

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What do you get for it? The law’s title says housing for every Delawarean. Its definition of “affordable” reaches a family earning 20 percent more than the median buying a house. The section that takes your hearing does not require a single affordable unit. California, Florida, and Massachusetts all took the hearing away too, and all three demanded ten to forty percent affordable housing in return. Delaware demanded nothing.

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And who pays? You do, through your county. New Castle County already raised your property tax 17.2 percent this year, and its own projection says the hole opens again in 2028. Your electric bill went up 17 to 20 percent on June 1. Delaware had the highest foreclosure rate in the country in the first three months of 2025.

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And who got it? The people in the Governor’s campaign filings. The Harvey and Hanna families, who own the company that asked for the $1,900,000, gave Matt Meyer $13,200 in checks of $1,200, seven of them in thirty-eight days before he had announced for anything. Schell Brothers, whose General Counsel, Jonathan Horner, sits on the Council that voted the money, gave the Governor’s political action committee $25,000 fifteen days after the Governor seated him. Drawbridge Claymont, which took $1,000,000 from the same Fund, and its owner gave that committee $85,000. Stoltz Real Estate Partners took $2,400,000 from it and gave the Governor $2,400 a month later.

 

The co-founder of the Middletown brokerage whose partners gave $29,400 sits on the board that receives every application before the State sees it. Alan Levin, who organized the committee and gave $29,100 himself, chairs the council that certifies how much the State can spend. The County Executive who sponsored the request worked for the Governor.

 

The money went out as a grant and came back as a check, and the people who wrote the checks now sit where the decisions are made.

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Now the question I get asked most: why did nobody stop it? The two laws passed with two-thirds of both houses. The requirements that would have bound developers were taken out of the bill before it passed. The ones that bind counties stayed in. I have been told by legislators, council members, and State employees, who asked me not to use their names, that they do not cross this Governor because of what happens to people who do. The record of that runs ten years. A police officer investigated five days after she answered his fundraising email.

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A county lawyer he had called “the best of the best” fired by telephone while his brother lay near death with COVID; his text to the County Executive never answered. Two mayors who endorsed his opponent telephoned and told “I will remember this.” A nine-year member of the State’s revenue council removed on March 25 of this year, the day after he asked why two months of numbers were missing; the President Pro Tempore of the Senate called it “undue political interference.”

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I was Council President for all eight of his years as County Executive. He shouted and cursed at me on the telephone, and I hung up, more than once. The committee Alan Levin organized spent $1,568,590.17 to elect him. The County Executive who sponsored the $1,900,000 request, Marcus Henry, was his economic development director.

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None of that is a theory. Every sentence of it has a date, a name, and a document behind it in the report that follows, and in the sources at the end.

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Here is what is still yours. The General Assembly that passed both laws with two-thirds can repeal both with two-thirds, without the Governor, before the first deadline hits on June 1, 2027. Ask your senator and your representative, by name, whether they will, and do not accept a promise to fix it; the law as it stood on July 12 is the fix.

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Until they answer, your county’s comprehensive plan hearing is the one hearing the laws left; New Castle County’s in 2027, Kent’s and Sussex’s in 2028, and the ordinances the laws force on your county by June 1, 2027, each still require a public hearing before they pass. Go to every one of them and ask the same question. Use them the way Bayberry did.

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“They did not hide what they did. They wrote it down, signed it, and trained the counties on it on a Friday. I was on the line, watching. Now so are you.”

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IV. The Math On A Finished Site

 

50 percent reimbursement, $3,800,000, and what Seaford’s $1,900,000 bought on raw ground

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The Fund reimburses half. That single rule turns $1,900,000 into a claim about $3,800,000. To collect the full grant, SRJC, LLC must spend at least $3,800,000 on “eligible site readiness expenditures,” the infrastructure and utility work, engineering and planning that Level II exists to fund, and submit receipts for it.

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Put that beside the seller’s memorandum. Off-site improvements: “$0, EQT Completed Work.” Delaware Department of Transportation entrance plan: “all improvements have been constructed.” Two traffic signal agreements recorded. Sewer approved by the county and authorized by the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control. Water capacity certified by Artesian Water Company. Drinking water authorized by the Delaware Division of Public Health. Delaware State Fire Marshal approval in hand. A floodplain map revision approved by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The county’s Land Development Improvement Agreement issued and recorded. The record plan recorded. The seller marketed this parcel for three years, to a national audience, as a site on which a buyer could pull a building permit.

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Now put it beside the last $1,900,000 the Council recommended. On January 27, 2025, a woman named Deb Chaney sat in the Delaware Room in Dover on behalf of Seaford Industrial, LLC, with Trisha Newcomer and Charles Anderson from the City of Seaford beside her, and listened to Bryan Mack of the Delaware Prosperity Partnership introduce her company, which “is requesting Level II Site Readiness Funds for site preparation activities, including engineering, construction of roads, wastewater, water and storm water management for 106-acre development.”

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That was raw ground zoned commercial on Route 13, being converted into a business park with two initial buildings of 194,000 square feet. The City of Seaford and Sussex County both supported it. The Council recommended $1,900,000, five to nothing. Roads, water, sewer, stormwater, engineering: the things a site does not have. That is what $1,900,000 bought in Seaford.

 

Table 5. Two $1,900,000 requests, side by side

 

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What does it buy at Jamison Corner Road? The public notice does not say. The application is with the Delaware Division of Small Business. The Council’s own regulation, Title 1, Section 403 of the Delaware Administrative Code, Section 4.2, commits the Council to “make certain information contained in a company’s application available to the public upon written request.” Any resident may make that request.

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Two possibilities exist on the face of the record, and both belong to the applicant to explain. Either the site work the seller described as complete is not complete, in which case the words “shovel ready” and “$0, EQT Completed Work” on a national marketing document sold a $25,300,000 parcel on a description that did not hold; or the site work is complete and the $3,800,000 is for something else, in which case the Council recommended, and the Director will decide whether to fund, work outside the purpose Level II was written for. The Council heard the answer this morning in Dover. The public did not, because the public did not know to be there.

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“$25,300,000 to buy it finished. $3,800,000 to finish it.

$1,900,000 from the State to pay half. Either the site was not what the seller said,

or the money is not for what the Fund says. One of those is true.”

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There is a third line in the seller’s budget worth holding onto: the New Castle County Transportation Improvement District fee, $2,642,025. The Southern New Castle County Transportation Improvement District is the county and state program under which developers near Route 301 pay into a road fund in lieu of building their own road improvements and, in the Dermody Properties case next door, in lieu of a traffic impact study. Whether that fee is among the “eligible site readiness expenditures” SRJC, LLC intends to submit for reimbursement is a question the application answers and the notice does not.

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V. The Sponsor: Who Signed for the County

 

Unincorporated jurisdiction, the statutory sponsor letter, Ordinance 22-135 and 23-104, and the checks to Marcus Henry

 

The statute does not let a developer walk in alone. Section 8711A(c)(1) requires the applicant to “be sponsored by at least 1 public entity,” and defines a public entity as “either a county or a municipality.” The sponsor “must identify any regulations, zoning requirements, or local ordinances that apply to the project.” The September 2024 fact sheet turns that into a checklist item: a support letter from the county or municipality with planning jurisdiction, confirming the zoning is consistent with its comprehensive plan.

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The Scott Run Commerce Center has a Middletown mailing address and a Middletown ZIP code, 19709, and the State’s notice calls it “their project in Middletown, Delaware.” It is not in Middletown. It lies in unincorporated New Castle County. Every approval on it is a county approval: county zoning, county application number, county Land Development Improvement Agreement, county record plan, county Department of Public Works sewer approval. No annexation by the Town of Middletown appears in any record. The Town Council of Middletown and Mayor Kenneth L. Branner Jr., who has held that office since March 6, 1989, and was re-elected March 3, 2025, over Joseph Duane Pontak Sr., have no planning jurisdiction over it.

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The public entity with planning jurisdiction over 840 Jamison Corner Road is New Castle County. The sponsor letter the statute requires, the letter that identifies the zoning and the local ordinances that apply to the project, comes from the administration of New Castle County Executive Marcus Henry, unless the Delaware Division of Small Business accepted a letter from a municipality without jurisdiction, which is its own question.

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I know what that letter has to say, because I sat in the President’s chair when New Castle County Council wrote the ordinances it has to identify. On November 22, 2022, Councilman David Carter of the 6th Council District, whose district held this parcel, introduced Ordinance 22-135 to impose a one-year moratorium on any land development application “proposing a warehouse or similar building or facility of 150,000 square feet or larger.” The ordinance recited eleven active warehouse applications totaling 12.3 million square feet, which is roughly forty Walmart Supercenters. Kurt Foreman of the Delaware Prosperity Partnership called moratoria “blunt instruments.” The Delaware State Chamber of Commerce called it “a huge red flag for site selectors.” The moratorium did not pass.

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What passed instead was Ordinance 23-104, introduced July 25, 2023, heard by the New Castle County Planning Board November 7, 2023, and by the Council’s Land Use Committee January 2, 2024, and approved by New Castle County Council as Substitute No. 1 as amended on January 9, 2024. New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer signed it January 25, 2024, and called it “the biggest step forward in putting limitations on a building of large industrial structures/warehouses in New Castle County history; in fact, in the state’s history.”

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It cut the maximum size of a large industrial building from 450,000 square feet to 200,000, pushed buffers from residential land from 50 feet to 500, and required earthen berms and a public hearing for anything larger.

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The Scott Run record plan, with its 600,000-square-foot Building A, was recorded August 3, 2023. Ordinance 23-104 was signed January 25, 2024. The plan is five months and twenty-two days older than the law that would have stopped it. That is why the seller could write “fully approved” on the cover in November 2025, and that is what the county’s sponsor letter has to explain to the State: that the ordinances that apply to this project are the ones it was recorded in time to escape.

 

Table 6. The plan and the cap

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“The county capped warehouses at 200,000 square feet on January 25, 2024.

The county recorded a 600,000-square-foot warehouse on this ground on August 3, 2023. Now the county is the sponsor asking the State to help build it. That is the sequence.”

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The county’s money trail is short and specific, and New Castle County Executive Marcus Henry’s own campaign filings, attached to this report, tell it. Harvey Hanna & Associates, Inc. contributed $600 to Marcus Henry for New Castle County Executive on October 17, 2024, three weeks before Marcus Henry was elected on November 5, 2024. The $600 is the maximum a corporation may give a county candidate in an election period under Title 15, Section 8010 of the Delaware Code. It is the only contribution the firm made to a county executive candidate in 2024.

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Then the election came and went, and the checks kept coming. Schell Brothers LLC, whose Ocean Atlantic Companies affiliate owned the four corners of the Route 301 interchange at Jamison Corner, $600 on November 7, 2024, two days after the vote, filed as “Schoell Brothers.” The General Counsel of the company that wrote that check, Jonathan Horner, would be seated on the Council on Development Finance nine months later. The land use law firm Tarabicos Group LLP, $600 the same day. The contractor EDIS, $600 on November 13, 2024. Michael Houghton, then Chairman of the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council, whom Governor Matt Meyer would remove sixteen months later, $600 on November 4, 2024.

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And on February 14, 2025, Creek View Road Associates II LLC of 100 Dean Drive, Newark, $1,500, on a committee whose limit for a county race is $600 per election. Marcus Henry himself put in $10,000 on November 1, 2024. The committee ended 2025 with $3,050.96 in the bank.

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Table 7. Marcus Henry for New Castle County Executive, itemized receipts after Election Day 2024

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VI. The Council: Nine People and One No Vote

 

Nine People and One No Vote: how the nine are appointed, the Director who decides alone, Jonathan Horner’s seat, Senator Nicole Poore’s record, and three dissents with no names.

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Start with one chair. Jonathan Horner of Lewes, one of the nine members of the Council on Development Finance, is the General Counsel of Schell Brothers, the Rehoboth Beach homebuilder. The Delaware Superior Court’s April 28, 2025, opinion in Delaware Human and Civil Rights Commission v. Schell Brothers, LLC and Jonathan Horner identifies him as “Mr. Horner, General Counsel for Schell Brothers.” Governor Matt Meyer named him to the Council in August 2025. On September 10, 2025, Schell Brothers LLC gave Change Can’t Wait PAC, the political action committee that elected Governor Matt Meyer, $25,000.

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Schell Brothers’ real estate arm, Ocean Atlantic Companies, owned the four corners of the Route 301 bypass interchange at Jamison Corner, the interchange this parcel’s traffic signal feeds, and was the contracted seller of the ground across the road to Dermody Properties. Schell Brothers gave New Castle County Executive Marcus Henry $600 two days after his election. On Friday, September 25, 2026, “Jon Horner” was on the attendee roster of the Governor’s implementation training on the two land use laws described in Section XIV. On Monday, September 28, 2026, he sat on the Council that took up the Scott Run request.

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The Council on Development Finance is nine Delaware residents, and Title 29, Section 8707A of the Delaware Code tells you exactly who put them there. The Governor appoints seven: two from New Castle County, one from Kent County, one from Sussex County, and three at large, drawn from lawyers admitted to the Delaware bar, bank or trust company officers, and private equity or venture capital experts. The President Pro Tempore of the Senate appoints one senator. The Speaker of the House appoints one representative. Terms are three years. No more than a bare majority may come from one party. The Governor names the chair, who “shall serve at the pleasure of the Governor.”

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None of the appointments goes to the Senate for confirmation; the Senate nominations database for the 151st, 152nd and 153rd General Assemblies contains no Council on Development Finance entry. A quorum is five. “The consent of a majority of the quorum is required for approval on any vote.” Five members in the room, three votes carry.

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The Council is advisory. Section 8707A(a) says so, and Section 8753A of the Delaware Economic Development Authority statute says the Authority “shall consist of the Director,” that the Director “shall be the Chairperson of the Authority,” and that “the powers of the Authority shall be vested in the Director.” The Delaware Economic Development Authority is one person. That person is CJ Bell, Director of the Delaware Division of Small Business, appointed by Governor-elect Matt Meyer on January 9, 2025, and before that Matt Meyer’s Director of Economic Development at New Castle County. The Council recommends. CJ Bell decides.

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The nine who heard SRJC, LLC this morning are listed in Appendix D. Fred Sears II of Wilmington, the retired President of WSFS Bank and of the Delaware Community Foundation and Vice Chairman of the Diamond State Port Corporation, chairs. William “Jack” Riddle of Rehoboth Beach, a banker, holds the Sussex seat. Kevin Kelly of Hockessin holds a New Castle County seat.

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Four were appointed by Governor Matt Meyer in August 2025: Jonathan Horner of Lewes, the attorney, at large; Laura Lloyd of Wilmington, a certified public accountant, at large; Brian Kaye of Dover, the Kent seat; and Darren Stephenson of Wilmington, the second New Castle County seat. Representative Edward Osienski of the 24th Representative District, Newark, is the Speaker’s appointee. Senator Nicole Poore of the 12th Senate District is the President Pro Tempore’s appointee.

 

Table 8. The Council on Development Finance, September 28, 2026

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Senator Nicole Poore is the member who lives with this parcel. Her district covers the Route 301 corridor and the neighborhoods that border the site. She co-sponsored the bill that created the Fund. Her record on the Council on warehouses is in the minutes, and it is consistent. On March 28, 2022, when Stoltz Real Estate Partners’ Blue Diamond Park and Churchmans Road sites each received $1,000,000, she “expressed concern about warehouse proliferation at Blue Diamond Park near residential areas.”

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On September 23, 2024, when PR-Stoltz Venture LLC returned for $2,400,000 on 246 acres at Blue Diamond Park, the minutes record that she “voiced her concerns regarding the potential impact of construction on neighboring communities, truck traffic, the anticipated construction start date, and the salaries for the positions.” The vote was 7 to 1. On December 8, 2025, when CRISP Partners LLC returned for its second award of $1,400,000, she “requested an analysis of funds to see what percentage of contracts go to in-state versus out-of-state contractors.” The vote was 7 to 1. This morning, September 28, 2026, she voted no on SRJC, LLC, alone. Every other member who voted said yes. The vote was 8 to 1.

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Here is what the minutes do not record: who cast the one. Both prior sets of minutes read “Approved By: Vote 7, Opposed By: Vote 1.” No name. Section 10004(f) of the open meetings law requires minutes to include “a record, by individual members” of “each vote taken.” A tally is not a record by individual members. On the two Site Readiness votes in the Council’s history before today where a member said no, the public record does not say which member. I watched this morning’s vote as it was carried live. Senator Nicole Poore said no. The State’s minutes should say so.

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“Three dissents in four years. Two sets of minutes posted. Zero names.

The law says a record by individual members. The Council keeps a tally.

Read the statute and read the minutes and tell me which one is complying.”

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Senator Nicole Poore’s employer is Jobs for Delaware Graduates, where she has been Executive Director since 2014 at a 2024 salary of $113,100 plus $15,600 in benefits; the nonprofit has received $34,200,000 in state funds since July 2017, including $1,395,197 in Grant-in-Aid in Fiscal Year 2025. She won the September 15, 2026, Democratic primary and faces Mark Esposito on November 3.

 

Harvey Hanna & Associates has contributed to her committee four times: $100 on March 27, 2014; $250 on October 27, 2022; $100 on March 18, 2025; and $600 on July 7, 2026, the day after the Delaware Business Times reported the Jamison Corner purchase. The $600 was the corporate maximum. She voted no anyway, and hers was the only vote against.

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The other eight are the Governor’s, the Speaker’s, and the President Pro Tempore’s. The Harvey and Hanna families gave Governor Matt Meyer $13,200, and the firm’s circle $16,800. The developer’s firm gave the Delaware Democratic State Committee $41,125 between 2012 and 2025, including $5,000 on September 9, 2025. The company whose General Counsel sits at the table, Schell Brothers, gave the Governor’s political action committee $25,000. And the man who organized that committee, Alan Levin, gave $29,100. Appendix B has every line, from the filings themselves.

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​RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS​​​​​​​

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XVI. By Right: What Every Council in Delaware Could Do on July 12, and What None Can Do Now

 

What Every Council in Delaware Could Do on July 12, and What None Can Do Now: Acierno, Ashburn, Smokey Hollow, Section 9223, and the five things that are not clean.

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Frank Acierno wanted to build a shopping center. It was 1972. He held a lease on forty acres in New Castle County zoned for manufacturing and commercial use, and the zoning allowed what he proposed. The New Castle County Department of Planning rejected his plan on February 24, 1972, for three reasons: it did not fit the comprehensive plan, the tract was the wrong shape, and the traffic would be bad. The Planning Board split. New Castle County Council then voted 4 to 3 to reject the plan on traffic.

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Acierno sued. On March 14, 1975, the Delaware Supreme Court, Chief Justice Daniel L. Herrmann and Justices William Duffy and William T. McNeilly, ruled for him in Acierno v. Folsom, 337 Atlantic Reporter Second 309. The sentence that has governed every county in Delaware since: “The requisite approval by the County Council of subdivision plans approved by the Planning Department, either initially or pursuant to the mandate of the Board, must be deemed to be a ministerial act.” And: “The County Council was not given the authority to disapprove an approved plan.”

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That is the rule the Governor’s Initial Implementation Guidance means when it says by-right projects “are required to be approved by local governments by law and Supreme Court precedent.” It is true. It has been true for fifty-one years. It is also half of the law, and the half the guidance leaves out is the half the General Assembly repealed on July 13, 2026.

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“Fifty-one years ago the Supreme Court told County Council it could not say no to

a plan that met the code. It never told County Council it could not listen.”

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The other half. Tony Ashburn & Son, Inc. owned 254.33 acres zoned Agricultural Conservation in Kent County. On July 27, 2006, it applied to subdivide the land into 214 lots, 0.84 units an acre, under the one-unit-an-acre limit. The Kent County Planning Office found the plan met every requirement of the Kent County Code and the comprehensive plan and recommended approval. The Kent County Regional Planning Commission held the public hearing that Title 9, Section 4811 of the Delaware Code required, heard the State agencies through the Preliminary Land Use Service on infrastructure, on the site’s location outside the Growth Zone, on schools, and on September 14, 2006, denied the plan. Kent County Levy Court upheld the denial. The Delaware Superior Court affirmed.

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On December 5, 2008, the Delaware Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Jack B. Jacobs, reversed, in Tony Ashburn & Son, Inc. v. Kent County Regional Planning Commission, 962 Atlantic Reporter Second 235. The Court wrote: “When people purchase land zoned for a specific use, they are entitled to rely on the fact that they can implement that use provided the project complies with all of the specific criteria found in ordinances and subject to reasonable conditions which the Planning Commission may impose in order to minimize any adverse impact on nearby landowners and residents.”

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Then the Court said what the Commission could still do. “The Commission may condition its approval of Ashburn’s subdivision application based on non-Code factors, such as agency recommendations, school capacity issues, and concerns regarding the health, safety and welfare of the community. The Commission may consider these issues and has discretion in formulating conditions on approval designed to harmonize and coordinate regional planning. But, the Commission’s power to impose conditions cannot be administratively enlarged to a power to deny a conforming application outright.”

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So the law of Delaware, from 2008 forward, was this. A county may not deny a plan that meets its code. A county must hold a hearing on it. At that hearing, residents speak, and the county may attach conditions for schools, drainage, roads, and neighbors, if the record supports them.

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Twenty-four days after the signing. On August 6, 2026, the Delaware Supreme Court said it a third time. Smokey Hollow, LLC proposed 82 lots on 66 acres zoned General Residential in coastal Sussex County, near the Fox Haven neighborhood. The Sussex County Planning and Zoning Commission held its hearing on March 20, 2024. Seven Fox Haven residents came. Six told the Commission that Lot 64 sat too close to their homes and that the water already came up into their yards. On April 10, 2024, the Commission approved the plan with nineteen conditions. Smokey Hollow sued over two: Condition A, which removed Lot 64, and Condition O, which set a fixed 25-foot buffer from non-tidal wetlands.

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On October 1, 2025, Resident Judge Craig A. Karsnitz of the Delaware Superior Court struck both conditions, writing that “the singling out of particular owners for idiosyncratic treatment, just because the prevailing neighborhood wind is unfavorable, is not acceptable when the property owner has met all the criteria that the local government has established.” The county appealed. On August 6, 2026, Chief Justice Collins J. Seitz Jr., with Justices Gary F. Traynor and Abigail M. LeGrow, affirmed on Condition O and reversed on Condition A, in Sussex County Planning & Zoning Commission v. Smokey Hollow, LLC, No. 440, 2025.

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The Chief Justice repeated Ashburn word for word: the Commission “may condition its approval of a subdivision application based on non-Code factors, such as agency recommendations, school capacity issues, and concerns regarding the health, safety and welfare of the community.” He set the test: a condition “must be rationally related to addressing, in the public interest, some potential land use impact of the particular use or development in question,” and “cannot be based primarily on generalized community opposition to the project.”

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And he sent Lot 64 back: “We remand to the Commission to investigate or charge others to investigate the environmental and drainage concerns and receive input from the developer. The Commission can then condition approval on the developer satisfactorily addressing any environmental and drainage concerns, or if they cannot be addressed satisfactorily, it can condition approval on eliminating Lot 64.”

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The six Fox Haven residents who spoke on March 20, 2024, had, by the Supreme Court’s ruling, been entitled to be heard, and their testimony about the water was enough to send the lot back for evidence. By the time the Chief Justice signed the opinion, Senate Bill 23 had been law for twenty-four days, and the next six residents in the next Fox Haven had lost the right to stand up.

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“The Supreme Court sent Lot 64 back because six neighbors said where the water goes. The General Assembly had already decided the next six could write a letter.”

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Table 17. Three counties, three votes against a conforming plan, and where the courts drew the line

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What Section 9223 keeps and what it strikes. Section 9223(b) of Title 29 commands that a by-right residential application “shall be reviewed through an administrative review and approval process.” Section 9223(c) allows a planning commission or board to look at it only if “the review is limited to determining compliance with applicable objective standards,” and Section 9223(a)(2) defines objective standards as “measurable, uniformly applicable, and not subject to discretionary personal judgment.” Section 9223(d) allows a public meeting that “does not constitute and is not conducted as a public hearing,” is “limited to determining compliance with applicable objective standards,” and “may allow for public comment, provided all such comment is made only through written submission.” Section 9223(e) “supersedes any inconsistent public hearing requirements … including public hearing requirements in § 4811, § 6810, § 6811, and § 6812 of Title 9.”

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Section 4811 is the Kent County hearing statute the Ashburn Commission acted under. Sections 6810 through 6812 are the Sussex County hearing statutes the Smokey Hollow Commission acted under. The General Assembly named the two statutes the Supreme Court had just built its law on and superseded them. It did not name any New Castle County section; the word “including” reaches them.

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The Acierno rule survives; no county could deny a conforming plan before, and none can now. The Ashburn rule does not. A condition for school capacity is not “compliance with applicable objective standards.” A condition for drainage that the code does not already require is not either. The Governor’s guidance describes what remains as “law and Supreme Court precedent.” What remains is the half of the precedent that favors the applicant.

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Table 18. A by-right residential plan, before and after July 13, 2026

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Is it lawful? Yes, as far as the State’s power over its counties goes. A Delaware county has only the powers the General Assembly gives it. The Delaware Supreme Court said in Mayor and Council of Wilmington v. Dukes, 157 Atlantic Reporter Second 789, on February 10, 1960: “A municipal corporation has no inherent authority; its only authority depends entirely upon that expressly granted or fairly implied or indispensable to its declared objects and purposes.” New Castle County’s home rule statute, Title 9, Section 1101, grants its powers “except as … denied by … statute.” In County Council of Sussex County v. Green, 516 Atlantic Reporter Second 480, in 1986, the Court said of Sussex County: “County Council does not have a free hand to grant rezoning upon request. It must conform with standards established by the General Assembly.” What the General Assembly gave, it may take. Both Acts recite that they amend municipal charters “indirectly, by a general law,” and both passed with the two-thirds vote Article IX, Section 1 of the Delaware Constitution requires.

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Residents have no constitutional right to the hearing. In Dale v. Town of Elsmere, 702 Atlantic Reporter Second 1219, on November 21, 1997, the Supreme Court held that “adjacent property ownership is insufficient to establish a property interest worthy of substantive due process protection.” The hearing residents had was a creature of statute and ordinance. Section 9223 repeals it. That is not unconstitutional. It is a choice.

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What is not clean. Five things.

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First, the two Acts contradict each other on the same page of the Code. Section 2660(e)(1) of Title 9, from Senate Bill 23, says a post-deadline rezoning “shall be approved by the County,” and (e)(3) says “final action … within 120 days.” Section 2662(a) of the same chapter, amended the same day by House Bill 450, says “the County Council shall not approve any proposed change in the zoning classification for land … without first complying with” a traffic analysis under the county’s agreement with the Delaware Department of Transportation. A Council that approves within 120 days without the analysis violates 2662(a). A Council that waits for the analysis past day 120 violates 2660(e)(3). Neither section mentions the other. Both bear the Governor’s signature and the same date.

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Second, Section 9223 overrules Ashburn and Smokey Hollow for every residential plan in Delaware, and neither the Supreme Court’s opinion of August 6, 2026, nor the Governor’s guidance says so. The Sussex County Planning and Zoning Commission won, on August 6, the right to condition Smokey Hollow on drainage evidence. It had lost that right for every plan filed after July 13.

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Third, the guidance is not law. The Administrative Procedures Act, Title 29, Chapter 101, defines a regulation at Section 10102(7) as “any statement of law, procedure, policy, right, requirement or prohibition formulated and promulgated by an agency as a rule or standard,” and requires notice, public comment, and publication in the Register of Regulations before one takes effect. The Supreme Court applied that definition in Free-Flow Packaging International, Inc. v. Secretary, Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, 861 Atlantic Reporter Second 1233, in 2004. The guidance was posted on the Office of State Planning Coordination’s website.

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Its three sentences that appear nowhere in the statute, that by-right projects “are required to be approved by local governments by law and Supreme Court precedent,” that “oral public comments will still be accepted at the public meeting as part of the meeting record but will not be attached to the project itself,” and that written comment must be “related to the objective, measurable compliance standards,” bind no one. A county that writes them into an ordinance will have made them law itself.

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Fourth, the transportation impact fee must survive the United States Supreme Court. On April 12, 2024, in Sheetz v. County of El Dorado, 601 United States Reports 267, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for a unanimous Court that “the Takings Clause does not distinguish between legislative and administrative permit conditions,” so a fee set by a legislature must meet the same “essential nexus” and “rough proportionality” tests as one negotiated project by project.

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House Bill 450 recites “rational nexus” and “proportionality” at Title 17, Section 507(b)(1)b.2. Whether one county-wide fee “assessed on a land use basis” from the Trip Generation Manual and spent on “upgrading existing transportation infrastructure” anywhere in the county is roughly proportional to any one project is the question the first developer who refuses to pay will put to a court.

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Fifth, the surcharge. Section 507(b)(1)h.2 deposits the 2 percent surcharge with the Office of Management and Budget, “which shall, at the direction of the Governor, in consultation with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and the Controller General, divide the moneys between” the Delaware Farmland Preservation Fund, the Delaware Land and Water Conservation Trust Fund, the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control’s Shoreline and Waterway Management Section, the Department of Transportation’s sidewalk and bicycle path programs, and the Brownfields Development Program. Article VIII, Section 6 of the Delaware Constitution says no money shall be drawn from the treasury but in pursuance of an appropriation made by act of the General Assembly.

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In 1961, the Justices of the Delaware Supreme Court, asked about the Delaware Industrial Building Commission Act, wrote that a direction to the State Treasurer to pay “out of funds ‘not otherwise appropriated’ … is in violation of Article VIII, Section 6, for the reason that it would constitute a withdrawal of funds from the Treasury otherwise than by an appropriation act.” The General Assembly has named five programs. It set no shares. The shares are the Governor’s.

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“The law names five funds and one man. The Constitution names one branch.

They are not the same.”

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Table 19. The legal questions, answered

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What a Council President could not do. What no Council President could do, since 1975, was vote down a plan that met the code because the neighbors did not want it. I never believed otherwise. The Governor’s guidance is written as if that were the whole of what we had.

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RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS​​

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XVII. Three Counties, One Clock

 

New Castle, Kent, and Sussex on July 13, 2026, and what each loses by provision.

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The two laws treat New Castle, Kent, and Sussex Counties as one. They are not. Each has its own comprehensive plan on its own date, its own hearing statute, its own traffic threshold, its own school test or none, and its own share of land inside the growth areas the density mandate now governs. This section takes them one at a time.

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Table 20. The three counties on July 13, 2026

 

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Sources for the table: the three county codes; the Office of State Planning Coordination’s Investment Level acreage presented to the Cabinet Committee on State Planning Issues on February 25, 2025; the Delaware Department of Transportation’s list of districts in operation; the 2020 Census.

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New Castle County: the strictest traffic rule in the State, and the law that makes it illegal. Section 40.11.120(C) of the Unified Development Code, as amended by Ordinance 19-005 on May 28, 2019, says traffic impacts “are considered significant” when a proposal “exceeds two thousand (2,000) projected average daily trips” or “is projected to generate more than fifty (50) peak hour trips.” Section 40.11.210 sets level of service D inside sewer service areas and C outside them, and Section 40.11.210(B)(2) says that for residential construction “the required level of service standard must be attained at the time the Department issues a building permit.”

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House Bill 450 added Section 2662(b) to Title 9: any New Castle County ordinance imposing a traffic impact study “must at least provide” a threshold of “500 peak-hour trips.” Fifty is not at least five hundred. By June 1, 2027, New Castle County must raise its threshold tenfold or lose, under Title 17, Section 507(b)(1)d.1.B, any say over how transportation impact fees collected in New Castle County are spent, which will then be “determined solely by the Department.” The county with the strictest traffic rule in Delaware has ten months to repeal it.

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New Castle County is also the county that never finished rezoning to its own plan. NCC2050 was adopted July 26, 2022. The Department of Land Use’s own page says State law requires rezoning “within 18 months of comprehensive plan adoption” and that the Department “proposes to draft 10 individual ordinances, one per Council District.” Its July 2024 annual report says adoption “has faced challenges with publicly perceived controversial properties.” On July 14, 2026, Ordinance 26-025, “County Initiated Rezoning … Council District 7,” was still on the agenda.

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Senate Bill 23 cut the clock to 12 months and attached the must-approve rule to “revisions thereof.” When Council adopts its five-year review in 2027, the clock starts again, and this time an owner whose parcel the map already shows for what he wants files, waits 21 days, and is approved within 120.​ The county’s Article 5 school test survives, because a school district’s certification of capacity is an objective standard. What does not survive is the Planning Board hearing at which the Traditions at Whitehall neighbors learned about a 1,409,850-square-foot building in October 2023, and the two referrals back to the Department that Council used on that plan. On August 4, 2026, the Planning Board still noticed a public hearing on Boyds Corner Preserve, 165 lots on Suburban-zoned land under transfer of development rights, application 2025-0468-S. Section 9223 had been law for twenty-two days. Whether that hearing was lawful, or whether its record is now a nullity, is a question the county has not answered on any agenda since.

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The density mandate lands hardest here. Forty-three percent of New Castle County’s land is in Investment Levels 1 and 2. The Suburban district that covers most of the southern growth area permits one house an acre, 0.67 gross, and does not permit attached houses or apartments at all; Use Table 40.03.110 marks both “N.”

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By June 1, 2027, under Section 2663 of Title 9, every acre of that district inside a growth area must permit “townhouses, multifamily dwellings, stacked flats, apartments, and mixed-use residential developments” at “a minimum density threshold of 4 units per acre for single-family homes and increasing minimum density thresholds for other housing types,” “notwithstanding … any provision of this Code to the contrary.” That is a rezoning of the southern half of the county by statute, without a hearing on any parcel.

 

 

“New Castle County wrote the strictest traffic rule in Delaware, and the

General Assembly made it a violation. It never finished rezoning to its own plan,

and the General Assembly took the clock away.”

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Council has introduced no ordinance on any of it. Its agendas since July 13 carry Ordinance 26-018 on notice of public hearings, Ordinance 26-106 on impact fees, and Substitute No. 1 to Ordinance 26-084 on redevelopment, which amends Article 31, the plan review article. None names Senate Bill 23 or House Bill 450. The Land Use Committee’s minutes of August 25, 2026, under “Other,” record: “None.”

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Kent County: the county that wrote the case. Kent County is where Ashburn was decided, and its code still reads as if it were. Section 187-12 gives the Levy Court “jurisdiction of subdivision and land development within the County” and designates the Regional Planning Commission to exercise it. Section 187-21(A) requires “a public hearing on the preliminary plan” at a Commission meeting, and 187-21(C) says “interested parties shall have the opportunity to offer testimony both in favor of and in opposition to the proposed plan.” Section 187-24(E) lets the Commission “approve, approve with conditions, disapprove, or table.” Title 9, Section 4811 of the Delaware Code, the section Section 9223(e) names, says “no plat shall be acted upon by the Commission without affording a hearing thereon.”

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The Commission’s “approve with conditions” is the Ashburn power. For a by-right residential plan, it is now limited to objective standards. The testimony 187-21(C) promises “in opposition” is now a letter.

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Kent County adopted an Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance on October 17, 2006, Ordinance 06-41, now Section 187-90.2, “to ensure that essential public facilities needed to support new development meet or exceed the level of service standards established herein.” Its 2018 Comprehensive Plan says a school test with mitigation payments followed in 2007 and that “each of the districts is over capacity.” Kent levies a school surcharge of 1.16 percent of construction value for the local district and 0.09 percent for POLYTECH. A mitigation fee is an objective standard and survives. The Commission’s judgment, under Ashburn, that a plan should carry a further condition for a district over capacity does not.

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Kent’s 2018 plan is due for its ten-year update in 2028. The county’s Planning office began the work in 2026 and expects “2+ years gathering information.” When Levy Court adopts it, the 12-month clock starts, and the must-approve pathway opens in 2029.

Thirteen percent of Kent’s land is in Investment Levels 1 and 2, the Growth Zone Overlay along Route 13 and around Dover, Smyrna, Camden and Milford. The Overlay’s Agricultural Conservation and Agricultural Residential districts with sewer allow 3.5 units an acre on 5,000-square-foot lots. The floor is four. Every acre of the Overlay’s base districts must come up.

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Whether Kent County Levy Court or the Regional Planning Commission has acted on either law since July 13 could not be confirmed; the county’s meeting pages do not return their agendas to a public search. That is its own finding.

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Sussex County: the county that stopped. Sussex County did what the other two did not. It said out loud what the law did. On July 14, 2026, the day after the signing, the county announced that “the State has ripped away the public hearing process for certain types of residential applications,” in the words of Sussex County Council President Douglas Hudson, and that it would “pause public hearings for major subdivision applications.”

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The Sussex County Planning and Zoning Commission’s minutes of July 15, 2026, record that Senate Substitute No. 2 for Senate Bill No. 23 “eliminated public hearings for certain types of residential applications,” that “there no longer would be a requirement for a public hearing for any Major Subdivision within Sussex County,” that “Sussex County needed time to figure out what the new process would be, as there was no process currently for the new changes,” and that “the scheduled public hearings for 2024-10 Windy Acres and 2025-07 Shadowridge were required to be removed from the agenda” and “all Major Subdivision applications were going to be placed on hold for future consideration.” The Commission’s agenda for August 5, 2026, says of Milton Village Residential: “Following adoption of the Housing For Every Delawarean Act (Senate Bill 23) into law, the Public Hearing for this application will not take place.”

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On July 28, 2026, County Administrator Todd F. Lawson and Assistant County Attorney Vincent G. Robertson led Council through “the implementation of Senate Bill 23.” On August 11, a resident, Joe Pika, spoke about it in public comment. Through September 1, no implementing ordinance had been introduced. On September 11, the Cape Gazette reported that Sussex had built 66 percent of Delaware’s new homes over the past five years, that 35 percent of Sussex’s development had gone into rural areas against 18 percent in Kent and 5 percent in New Castle, that the county faced a June 30 deadline to agree a traffic analysis procedure with the Delaware Department of Transportation, and quoted Todd Lawson: “We look forward to seeing the governor’s implementation guidance.”

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David Edgell, Director of the Office of State Planning Coordination, said the laws “both impact comprehensive plans and zoning ordinances.” Senator Russ Huxtable of the 6th Senate District, the bill’s sponsor: “There has been misinformation out in the community.” The Sussex County Council and Planning and Zoning Commission held a joint workshop on Senate Bill 23, House Bill 450, and the Department of Transportation on Monday, September 28, 2026, at 1:00 p.m. at the Sussex County Public Safety Complex, 21911 Rudder Lane in Georgetown, three hours after the Dover hearing, with no virtual option. The county posted the notice on September 21, 2026, at 1:00 p.m., the same day the State posted its one line about SRJC, LLC; its single agenda item, under Todd Lawson’s name, was “Discussion related to Land Use Development, the Delaware Department of Transportation, and Implementation of SB23 & HB450.”

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That morning, Spotlight Delaware’s Olivia Marble had Councilman Matt Lloyd describe the forced rezoning from the county’s side: “So, congratulations. The state just approved your project.” Todd Lawson: “If you’re putting density where there isn’t the transportation system to support it, it’s going to create problems.” John Kane, Director of Policy and Federal Affairs in the Office of Governor Matt Meyer, who had presented at Friday’s training: “Density is necessary,” and “We have to continue to contain the sprawl and to focus our resources into infill areas and cities.”

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The two Sussex projects named that morning were Lantern Cove, 179 homes on 60 acres in the county’s southeast, and Belle Mead, more than 300 apartments and 125,000 square feet of commercial space on the former horse farm on Route 24 near Lewes. The county’s land use ordinances in the pipeline are the ones its Land Use Reform Working Group recommended in September 2025: Ordinance 26-05 on forest preservation, and a draft on design criteria for subdivisions amending Sections 99-9, 99-17 and 115-25.

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The Working Group also recommended base densities of one unit an acre in AR-1, four in General Residential, six in Medium Residential and eighteen in High Residential, and adding townhouses, stacked flats and cottage courts as permitted uses. None was adopted. House Bill 450 adopted the floor for them.

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Sussex has no adequate public facilities ordinance. Section 99-9(C)(13) requires a subdivision to be “within an established Transportation Improvement District” or to “maintain the current Delaware Department of Transportation Level of Service on all adjacent roads and intersections” and “in no event … allow the Level of Service to degrade below a Level of Service D.” Section 99-9(C) asks for “school district notification.” The Henlopen Transportation Improvement District, adopted October 29, 2020, has drawn more than $14,000,000 in commitments since. A subdivision inside it owes no new statewide fee.

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Twelve percent of Sussex’s land is in Investment Levels 1 and 2; that twelve percent is the coast, where AR-1 allows two houses an acre and multifamily only by conditional use, capped at four. The floor is four, with apartments and stacked flats permitted, by June 1, 2027.

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Sussex’s 2018 plan is due December 4, 2028. Its 2026 annual report says the update must “create an Affordable Housing plan” and that consultants were hired in June 2026. Twelve months after adoption, the must-approve pathway opens: late 2029.

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“Sussex County did the one honest thing available to it. It stopped, and it said why.

The other two counties kept holding hearings the law no longer recognizes.”

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Table 21. What each county loses, by provision

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XVIII. The Ledger in 2031

 

The fee, the surcharge, the waiver, the State’s own balance sheet, and what other states demanded in exchange for the hearing.

 

Every provision in the two laws carries a date. Put the dates in order and the next five years write themselves.

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Table 22. The calendar the two laws set

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The roads. From January 1, 2027, a developer under the 500-trip floor builds his entrance and pays the fee. The intersection a mile from the entrance, where the trips arrive, becomes the Department’s project, paid from a fund whose formula is reevaluated every five years and whose increases are capped at inflation plus two percent no matter what asphalt, steel, and right-of-way cost. Scott Run’s 1,274,950 square feet would generate on the order of 250 peak-hour trips. No one could have required a study.

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The schools. New Castle County’s Article 5 school certification and Kent County’s mitigation fee survive as objective standards. What no county can do after July 13 is what the Supreme Court said Kent County could do in 2008: condition a plan on what the school district says at a hearing. Sussex County never had a school test. The Appoquinimink School District has gone to its voters referendum after referendum because Middletown’s houses arrived before its classrooms. The four-unit-an-acre floor now applies to 43 percent of New Castle County’s land.

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The county books. Section 9222(c) of Title 29 lists the strategies a county may adopt to meet its affordable housing plan. Four of the eleven are “expedited or accelerated permit review,” “fee waivers, reductions, or deferrals,” “reduction or waiver of local impact fees,” and density bonuses with “reduced parking requirements, or reduced open space requirements.” A county that picks the fee waivers to satisfy the State moves the cost of the road and the sewer line onto the general fund. New Castle County raised property taxes 17.2 percent for Fiscal Year 2027. The transportation impact fee the county might have used to replace what it waived is the State’s, set by the Department, and after June 1, 2027, spent “as determined solely by the Department” if the county has not rewritten its traffic ordinance to the State’s floor. The fiscal note funds one analyst and two planners in Dover, $479,891 in Fiscal Year 2027, and nothing in any county building.

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The farmland. The density mandate reaches only growth areas, Investment Levels 1 and 2. The growth areas are drawn in comprehensive plans that the Governor now certifies with no local right to reject, on a standard of “demonstrates consideration of State development policies.” Executive Order 16, January 30, 2026, certified the current maps. A plan that enlarges a growth area enlarges the acreage on which four units an acre is the floor and townhouses and apartments must be permitted.

 

The only money the two laws send to farmland is a share, in an amount the Governor chooses, of a 2 percent surcharge on a fee whose size is “unknown,” in the Controller General’s word, until the Department sets it. The Delaware Farmland Preservation Fund is one of five programs dividing two cents on every dollar of a fee that does not yet exist.

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The rezoning. From mid-2028 in New Castle County and 2029 in Kent and Sussex, an owner whose parcel the future land use map already shows in the use he wants files a rezoning, is deemed complete in 21 days if the county is silent, is approved within 120 days, and has no hearing because the hearing on the plan, years earlier, “shall satisfy all hearing and notice requirements.” County Council still votes. The statute tells it the result.

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“By 2029 the map is the zoning, the fee is the road, the letter is the hearing,

and the Governor is the last word on the plan. That is not a forecast.

It is the statute, read forward.”

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Who the calendar is for. The laws name no one. The provisions describe people, and the record supplies the names.

 

An owner of land already zoned or already mapped. Harvey Hanna & Associates, Inc. of Newport, Delaware, E. Thomas Harvey III, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Thomas J. Hanna, co-founder, bought 102.57 acres at Jamison Corner Road with every approval in hand, inside the Southern New Castle County Transportation Improvement District, and asked the Council on Development Finance for $1,900,000 on September 28, 2026.

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Its project owes nothing under the new statewide fee, because Section 507(b)(1)a of Title 17 places that fee only on land “not located within an established local or regional Transportation Improvement District” and Scott Run sits inside the Southern New Castle County district, paying the $2,642,025 district fee it already owed; it could have been required to do no traffic study under the new floor; and it stood in the room on Monday three days after the State trained the counties on Friday. The Bayberry neighborhoods around it, inside the same growth area, must by June 1, 2027, be zoned for a minimum of four units an acre with townhouses, stacked flats and apartments permitted.

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A developer whose General Counsel sits on the Council that recommends the money. Jonathan Horner of Lewes, General Counsel of Schell Brothers, whose seat on the Council on Development Finance and whose company’s checks are in Sections VI and VIII. Schell Brothers builds in the Sussex County growth areas where AR-1’s two houses an acre became a four-unit floor with apartments permitted, by statute, on July 13, 2026.

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The man who organized the committee. Alan Levin, former Director of the Delaware Economic Development Office, organizer of Change Can’t Wait PAC and Chairman of the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council, whose committee, its donors and its forecasts are in Sections X and XI. The Fund’s recipients paid the committee; the committee’s organizer forecasts the revenue the Fund draws on, $10,000,000 a year.

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The homebuilders in the room. Executive Order 18, the order House Bill 450’s synopsis says the Act builds on, was signed with the Home Builders Association of Delaware present, as Section XIII records. The Act’s evidence base is “more than 52 hours of interviews with 57 stakeholders … across state agencies, local governments, developers, and technical experts.” Residents are not on the list.

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The lawyer on both sides of the table, and two of the Fund’s own recipients. Shawn Tucker of Barnes & Thornburg, counsel to Stoltz Real Estate Partners before the Council on Development Finance and to Harvey Hanna & Associates on its Middletown purchases, and PR-Stoltz Venture LLC and CRISP Partners LLC, whose awards, objections and checks are in Section XI. Every one of them holds land already zoned for what it builds. Section 9223 was written for land already zoned.

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What the other states asked for, and Delaware did not. Every state that has taken the hearing away from by-right housing in the last decade has asked for something in return, and Table 23 sets each of them beside Delaware. California, Florida and Massachusetts require ten to forty percent of units affordable before a project may skip the hearing; Montgomery County, Maryland tests every subdivision against school and road capacity and keeps its own impact tax; New Jersey gives every town a numeric obligation with a builder’s remedy behind it.

 

Delaware’s Section 9223 requires no affordable unit, its 20 percent is “a strategic goal,” its fee is the State’s, its traffic threshold is a floor the counties may not go under, and its comprehensive plans are certified by the Governor with no local right to reject.

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Table 23. What other states demanded in exchange for the hearing, and what Delaware demanded

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Every line in the middle column was available to the General Assembly in April 2026, and three of them were in Senator Huxtable’s bill as he introduced it: a required twenty percent, a Director’s approval, and the force of law. The Senate took them out. A trade that was offered and refused is not amended back in; the bill that refused it is repealed, and the trade is made in the open or not at all.

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“Other states sold the hearing and got affordable housing for it. Delaware gave the hearing away, called the receipt a goal, and put the Governor’s name on the deed.”

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Where a resident still stands. On what the two laws left, and it is thin. The comprehensive plan hearing is now the only hearing, once every five years; Section 9221(e) requires the affordable housing plan to be developed “through an open and inclusive process … concurrently with the comprehensive plan development process,” and New Castle County’s comes in 2027, Kent’s and Sussex’s in 2028. The Board of Adjustment appeal survives, by Section 9223(e), and a resident must file it herself. The written record is what the law leaves; a written objection tied to a measurable standard is now the only comment with legal weight.

 

And Section 2660(e)(5) ends with a sentence the Governor’s guidance did not quote: “This provision does not prevent a local land use agency from adopting hearing and notice requirements.” A county ordinance requiring a hearing on every post-deadline rezoning is lawful, and whether New Castle County Council, Kent County Levy Court or Sussex County Council writes one before their clocks start is a question each of them owns. That is the ground. It is not enough to stand on, and the report does not pretend it is. The remedy is in the next section, and it is not an ordinance.

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XIX. How the Pattern Was Built, and What Each County Pays for It in 2028, 2031 and 2036

 

The ten-year record, the three hands on the levers, the county books, and what the General Assembly can do by June 1, 2027.

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Sanjay Bhatnagar fell asleep at his desk on the evening of July 8, 2020. He had worked through the Fourth of July weekend on ten tax-exemption applications a County Solicitor had handed him on July 1, 2020, on top of the lead legal role in New Castle County’s $322,000,000 CARES Act program, on top of the sheriff sale overhaul, a $550,000 sewer dispute at Glasgow Mobile Home Park, and the negotiation, “at the direction of Meyer,” that would recover the county’s $3,000,000 from the Delaware Board of Trade. Two weeks earlier, his brother had gone into a hospital in Arizona with COVID-19, “close to death.” Nineteen days earlier, County Executive Matt Meyer had told two CARES Act committees that Sanjay Bhatnagar would represent them because he was “the best of the best.”

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At 5:30 p.m., the telephone woke him. It was County Attorney Wilson B. Davis, calling from vacation. “You serve at my pleasure,” Wilson Davis said, and it was time “to go.” Sanjay Bhatnagar asked for mercy. The complaint he later filed says the County Solicitor, Karen Sullivan, was on the line, and laughed. His offense, in an email the day before, was that he had asked a law school friend at Akin Gump for basic research help. Akin Gump and Young Conaway were the two firms the county had already retained for its CARES Act work. Wilson Davis called the email a violation of an “unwritten protocol.”

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After the call, he texted the County Executive: “Matt, please call me. My brother almost died last week, and I haven’t slept in days. I’ve given NCC my life for 3 years. I really love it here and want to continue to serve. 5 min. That’s it.” Matt Meyer did not respond. Wilson Davis has said he was authorized by Matt Meyer to make the call. Sanjay Bhatnagar was never allowed back into his office for his belongings, among them a figure of Ganesh, the remover of obstacles. The county told an unemployment hearing he was fired for being “grossly insubordinate,” then that it was for an “isolated act”; the hearing officer found the county failed to establish just cause.

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His lawyer, Thomas S. Neuberger, filed the fifty-six-page federal suit on January 31, 2021, naming the county, Matt Meyer and Wilson Davis: “County Executive Matt Meyer heartlessly fired a well-respected minority attorney with a lead role in the Cares Act initiative while the attorney’s brother was near death from COVID.” The county’s spokesman, Brian Cunningham: “We dispute the allegations in the complaint and look forward to proving the truth in court.”

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Seven months earlier, I had watched the same man be thrown away in public. This section is about why that matters to a report about land use. Every provision in the two laws Governor Matt Meyer signed on July 13, 2026, depends on someone in a county or State building saying no: no, the application is not complete; no, the plan does not meet the objective standard; no, the county will not waive the fee; no, the revenue figures on the table are not current.

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What follows is the record, in order, of what has happened for ten years to people in Delaware who said no to Matt Meyer, and, since November 2024, to those who have said it to Marcus Henry. Then it is the ledger of what the three counties will pay, in 2028, in 2031 and in 2036, for a government in which no one says it.

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“The laws took the hearing from the resident.

The pattern took the word no from everyone else.”

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Table 24. The pattern, 2016 to 2026

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How the pattern was built. It began before he held office. In 2016, Matt Meyer defeated County Executive Thomas P. Gordon by attacking him over a 2004 federal indictment; every corruption count had been dropped, and Thomas Gordon had pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors about campaign work on county time. “It was unfair because it was all dropped,” Thomas Gordon told The News Journal. “Nobody defended me on it.” Matt Meyer stood by the attacks.

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In 2017 and 2019, the county police unions picketed him over contracts. His answer was not about the contracts: “I’m not going to give double or triple the salary increases to senior union leadership over the union membership.” On September 6, 2019, Master Corporal Gina Collini, nineteen years on the force, answered a campaign fundraising email he had sent on August 30 to her personal account with an angry reply. Five days later, on September 11, 2019, Police Chief Colonel Vaughn Bond opened an internal investigation of her for “Conduct Unbecoming of an Officer.” The charge was withdrawn on November 20, 2019, before any suspension was served.

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On November 18, 2019, she filed an ethics complaint against him under Section 2.03.104(J) of the county Code of Conduct, the rule against soliciting subordinates; the Ethics Commission opened an investigation in January 2020. His answer: “name-calling and personal attacks come with the territory of being an elected official.”

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The Delaware Board of Trade is where every habit appears at once. On November 12, 2019, County Council voted 11 to 1 for a resolution, sponsored by Councilman John Cartier at the request of the County Executive’s office, to swap the county’s worthless collateral on the $3,000,000 loan for shares of Ideanomics, Inc., the company that had bought the exchange earlier in 2019 in a share deal valued at $18,000,000. Its chairman was Bruno Wu. The exchange’s original investors, alongside Dennis Toner and John Wallace, had included Representative Mike Ramone of Pike Creek and the automobile dealer John Hynansky.

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I cast the one vote against it. That night Sanjay Bhatnagar told Council, “My understanding is I’ve been directed to proceed with the execution of the amendment,” whether or not Council acted. On December 5, 2019, the day the papers were to be signed, Matt Meyer refused. “Giving the taxpayers a Chinese penny stock is not the way out,” he said. “There’s one way out of it: to pay us back.” The Council’s vote changed nothing for him: “It was a bad deal before the (county council) resolution was proposed. It was a bad deal after the resolution finished.”

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Ideanomics said it had “worked daily with the County Executive’s office in good faith” and that “despite repeated assurances from the County Executive’s office, and approval by the County Council, Mr. Meyer walked away from the transaction the day we were to sign.” I said then: “None of this came from council. It was all the executive working with Ideanomics and DBOT.” And: “Matt sort of threw him under the bus and then ran over him a few times.” I was speaking of Sanjay Bhatnagar. Seven months later, he was fired.

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In the same week, in a telephone interview with The News Journal’s Karl Baker, Matt Meyer said the exchange’s founders were “probably criminal” in 2015 when they secured the loan, and named John Wallace, former chief executive of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, and Dennis Toner, for decades an aide to Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the Senate and a governor of the Postal Service while he was Vice President, as the men the county would sue. Asked what credibility the founders had, given that he had called their actions “probably criminal”: “their level of credibility is they better pay the county taxpayers their money back.” The article ran December 20, 2019.

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The next day he called Dennis Toner, left a message, and when the call was returned, told him he had “never made such comments.” The paper’s executive editor, Mike Feeley, stood by the quotation. Dennis Toner: “I have never heard the word ‘criminal’ associated with my name.” He asked for a retraction; Matt Meyer said he had spoken to the editor and “I just don’t know what I can do,” then that he would “try to get that done.”

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On January 11, 2020, he called Dennis Toner again. On January 13, Dennis Toner’s lawyer, Bartholomew J. Dalton, wrote the county that the call was “at a minimum, inappropriate,” because “any communications in this matter must go through counsel,” and asked for a published apology within five days. None came. The defamation suit was filed in Superior Court on January 22, 2020; The News Journal’s headline of January 30 called the County Executive “defiant.” Asked about the words the suit attributed to him, Matt Meyer said: “There’s a lot of stuff in there that they say I said.”

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His office called the suit “wasteful.” A judge dismissed it on October 2, 2020. On November 25, 2020, Ideanomics repaid the $3,000,000 and a final $180,000 in interest, in the same month it disclosed in a securities filing that it was the subject of a federal investigation into its overseas operations. Matt Meyer said the county had “made it clear they had a legal obligation to pay,” declined to say whether Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s election three weeks earlier had anything to do with it, and said the exchange employed no one in Delaware. The lawyer who negotiated that repayment was Sanjay Bhatnagar.

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On December 19, 2019, the Fraternal Order of Police, Lodge 5, filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the Public Employment Relations Board: grievances its members filed in June had come back unopened. Its president, Jonathon Yard: “They don’t even know; they can’t even tell you what was on those documents because they never read them.” The grievances concerned Lieutenant Colonel Quinton Watson, the department’s second in command, whom six women officers had accused, in complaints to the Attorney General’s office in July 2019, of more than a decade of sexual harassment. A Wilmington Police investigation sustained five of the six. Quinton Watson had been placed on leave and allowed to retire on December 5, 2018, in good standing.

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Matt Meyer: “Everything that was done in my administration was done to the ‘T’, to the law.” In June 2020, the six women filed a forty-page federal suit naming Colonel Vaughn Bond, Chief Administrative Officer Vanessa Phillips and Matt Meyer. It said the county had allowed “a sanctuary for sexual harassers” to exist; that Quinton Watson “set workplace precedent and spawned a hostile environment of rampant sexual harassment, sexual assault, overt misogyny, and retaliation among female employees within the NCC government”; and that Matt Meyer had promoted Vaughn Bond to chief “knowing that Bond would then promote Watson to his second-in-command despite warnings from several former law enforcement officials about Watson’s known misconduct.”

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A seventh officer sued separately, naming the county, Matt Meyer and Quinton Watson, saying she had been put on his “hit list” for being pregnant and injured on the job. In January 2022, the county settled the six officers’ case for $1,700,000, on top of more than $1,200,000 in legal fees, and agreed to three years of monitoring of its Public Safety Department by the Delaware Department of Justice. Three weeks after the six women sued, Sanjay Bhatnagar was fired.

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Three weeks after that, on July 24, 2020, in the middle of his primary against Maggie Jones, The News Journal’s Esteban Parra asked in a headline, “Was Matt Meyer ‘belligerent’ to those supporting his opponent?” Elsmere Mayor Eric Scott Thompson and Newark Mayor Jerry Clifton had put their names on her flyer, alongside Senators Nicole Poore and Jack Walsh and Representative Valerie Longhurst. Each said the County Executive telephoned him afterward. Jerry Clifton: “Essentially, he reamed me out for supporting his opponent.

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I definitely can say it was a belligerent call, and it was upsetting. It really was. One, that I would be treated like that by a public official for exercising what I feel is my candidate of choice.” Eric Scott Thompson: “I expected displeasure. If you reverse the roles, I would not be happy if somebody supported my opponent, but to get a call and to be yelled at and the tone and then the comment that it would be remembered. Yes, I was taken aback by that.” And: “I don’t know how else to take that threat because I’m not running for another office. I’m just the mayor of Elsmere.” Both reported the same sentence: “I will remember this.”

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Delaware City Mayor Paul Johnson was the third mayor to describe the same treatment. Maggie Jones offered to take the mayors’ names off the flyer; they refused. “I just think bullying is not what we represent in Delaware,” she said. Matt Meyer “refused to specifically address the accusations” and sent a statement: “In the midst of a pandemic, historic unemployment rates and the seeds of a civil rights movement, we are not going to address manufactured political controversies with zero basis in fact.

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We let others play insider games. We have no time for this.” Samuel B. Hoff, professor of history and political science at Delaware State University, said it was unusual for such confrontations “to turn nasty”: “I use the word boomerang; what comes around goes around.” Matt Meyer won the primary on September 15, 2020, 43,833 votes to 33,735.

 

I was President of New Castle County Council for all eight years he was County Executive. I can report from my own experience that he telephoned me, more than once, and most often in his first term, and that the calls turned to shouting and profanity. My practice was to tell him that I was ending the call and that he was welcome to call back when he was ready to speak respectfully, and to hang up. That is my account, and I stand by it.

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The pattern did not end with the police case. On July 9, 2022, six months after the county settled it, property assessment services administrator John Farnan began sending certified assessor Susan Oberlander sexually explicit texts; on November 8, 2022, at 4:21 a.m., he sent dozens more. She reported him. The county’s own investigation substantiated her complaint. The county “demoted” him “to an equal position,” left him in the office, told her to work from home, and passed her over for two promotions. The Delaware Department of Labor found “reasonable cause to believe that an unlawful employment practice has occurred.”

 

On August 15, 2024, she sued in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware, naming the county, Matt Meyer, Human Resources Officer Jacqueline Jenkins and Chief Financial Officer Michael R. Smith. Her complaint says the county, “under Meyer’s direction,” “continues to permit the willful suppression of complaints of sexual harassment by female employees,” and that

“Defendant Meyer and his administration continue to turn a blind eye to blatant acts of sexual harassment which includes male supervisors propositioning female subordinates for sex and naked photos.”

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Chief Administrative Officer Vanessa Phillips said “inappropriate behavior like this is not tolerated” and that “severe disciplinary action” had been taken. Lieutenant Governor Bethany Hall-Long, his opponent in the primary three weeks away, said his county had become “a sanctuary for sexual harassment” where women “have suffered in silence.” He won that primary too.

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“Two primaries, two lawsuits by women he employed, three mayors on the record,

one lawyer fired while his brother lay dying. He won both primaries.

That is the lesson everyone in the building learned.”

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As Governor. The method did not change; the offices got larger. On March 17, 2025, he gave the chair of the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council to Alan Levin, who organized and raised money for the committee that spent $1,568,590.17 to elect him and who had never served a day on that Council, over Michael Houghton, who had chaired it for eight years, although Governor John Carney’s Executive Order 62 of August 27, 2024, required the chair to come “from among its members.”

 

Governor Meyer appointed Jonathan Horner, General Counsel of Schell Brothers, to the Council on Development Finance in August 2025; Schell Brothers LLC gave the committee $25,000 fifteen days later. He seated Regina Mitchell, Deputy Secretary of State, on the Advisory Council on December 15, 2025, and Beebe Healthcare Chief Executive Officer David Tam on it and its benchmark subcommittee. Truthline’s report of August 8, 2026, found that the fifty-five people who have sat on that Council since he took office gave $228,866.64 to his committees and the political action committee, $174,000 of it into the committee Alan Levin organized.

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Michael Houghton stayed on as a member, the only one who had also served under Governor John Carney, who had endorsed Bethany Hall-Long. At the Council’s March 2026 meeting, he asked why the Division of Corporations, the source of about a third of the State’s general fund, had not supplied January and February revenue figures; the numbers on the table matched December’s. “I didn’t say anything about transparency. What I said was I thought there was more information that was available. And it would be best to have it.” WHYY reported that three current or former members called the missing data “unusual,” “confusing,” and lacking transparency.

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On Wednesday, March 25, 2026, the day after that report, Michael Houghton was removed from the Council after nine years. Senate President Pro Tempore David Sokola called it “undue political interference,” said it was done “for publicly asking questions about our State’s corporate franchise tax revenue,” and asked for his reinstatement. Alan Levin confirmed he had asked the Governor the year before to keep Michael Houghton, called him “very helpful,” and said of the December numbers, “There is no way in hell it would be the exact same number.” Michael Houghton said he was troubled by the “nexus between asking questions about available information” and his removal. The Governor’s office declined to comment.

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Spotlight Delaware described the Governor’s relationship with the Senate of his own party as “acrimonious” through his first year. Under Alan Levin’s gavel, the Council’s meetings shortened from 179 minutes to 75; across roughly eighty pages of Fiscal Year 2026 minutes, the word “port” appears zero times; the June 15, 2026, minutes have not been published.

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Seven months before the removal, on August 29, 2025, the Governor had vetoed Senate Bill 75, which would have limited towns’ zoning power over cannabis stores, with these words: “The way to do that is to work with our counties as partners, not by stripping communities of their voice in where these stores belong.” Ten and a half months after that, he signed the two laws that stripped every community in Delaware of its voice on where four units an acre, townhouses and apartments belong.

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In New Castle County, under his former economic development director, the method continued. Councilman Kevin Caneco is the Bayberry North resident who wrote the 2022 petition. He was one of the two members who voted no on the 17.2 percent increase, and he would not vote for County Executive Marcus Henry’s Fiscal Year 2027 operating budget. The county then bond-funded $13,720,000 of capital in his district. When Senator Nicole Poore, whose name had been on Maggie Jones’s flyer in 2020, voted no on Site Readiness Fund awards in 2024, 2025, and 2026, the minutes recorded a dissent and not a name.

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When the Department of Land Use certified DPML Jamison Corner’s plan as compliant in November 2023 and Council sent it back twice, the Department reversed itself months later and demanded a study the county’s own agreement had waived, a reversal Judge Charles E. Butler called “legally indefensible.” Since November 2024, elected officials and county employees have described to me the same pattern from County Executive Marcus Henry: calls and public call-outs over small matters, in the same language. Those accounts are theirs to put their names to.

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Why it is the reason the laws pass. Members of the General Assembly, county council members, and State employees have told me, in conversations they asked me not to attribute, that they do not oppose what the Governor wants because of what happens to people who do. David Sokola is the one legislator who has said it on the record, about Michael Houghton, and he is the President Pro Tempore of the Senate. The record above is why that fear is rational.

 

A county planner who has read the Bhatnagar complaint, a Council member who has seen a colleague’s district lose its capital funding, an advisory council member who watched a nine-year colleague removed the day after he asked for numbers, a mayor who was told “I will remember this,” and a Council President who was shouted at over the telephone have all been told what the price of no is.

 

Senate Bill 23 passed with the twenty percent requirement softened to a goal, the Director’s approval removed and the force of law struck; House Bill 450 passed with a traffic threshold no county may go under, and a fee the counties do not control; and both passed by the two-thirds margins the Constitution requires for a law that amends every town charter in the State. The laws removed the resident’s hearing. The pattern removed everyone else’s.

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“They did not have to write ‘yes’ into the statute. They only had to make sure

everyone in the building already knew the answer.”

 

 

The three hands on the levers. With that pattern in place, three officials hold the instruments this report describes. Governor Matt Meyer holds the orders and the appointments: Executive Order 16, January 30, 2026, which drew the growth-area maps; Executive Order 18, February 26, 2026, signed with the Home Builders Association of Delaware in the room, which built the 120-business-day Housing Fast Lane and called for “leaders of yes and now”; Executive Order 23, June 26, 2026, which lets the Accelerator be revised by version number with “No Rights Created”; and the two laws of July 13.

 

Alan Levin holds the number: the Council he chairs certifies the revenue the General Assembly may spend, and the Fiscal Year 2027 Bond and Capital Improvements Act, House Bill 500, appropriates $1,255,978,059, a 29 percent increase over the $977,000,000 capital budget it replaced and the fourth largest in State history, with $110,000,000 for the Port of Wilmington, $30,000,000 to buy Summit North Marina, $10,000,000 for the Site Readiness Fund routed to the University of Delaware and Delaware State University, Section 66’s permission to move money among the economic development funds, and a cap on unclaimed property revenue raised from $554,000,000 to $614,000,000.

 

Alan Levin and his household gave Matt Meyer’s committees $33,100; he holds an ownership interest in SoDel Concepts on the Route 1 corridor Executive Order 16 placed under State corridor planning. Marcus Henry holds the county’s books and its signature. The signature is on County Executive Order 2026-06, the SPUR fast lane, April 28, 2026, recommended by a transition chaired by the land use attorney Pamela J. Scott; on the May 13, 2026, joint letter with the Sussex and Kent presidents calling the State’s version “heavy-handed”; and on the sponsorship that put SRJC, LLC before the Council on Development Finance.

 

County Executive Marcus Henry was Matt Meyer’s economic development and policy director and his General Manager of Community Services, gave him $1,800, ran on the same calendar with many of the same contributors, and took office January 7, 2025. His Fiscal Year 2027 budget, $387,600,000, the largest in county history, passed 11 to 2 on May 26, 2026, with a 17.2 percent residential rate increase, from 15.75 to 18.46 cents per $100 of assessed value, and a 5 percent sewer rate increase effective July 1, 2026. His Office of Finance had posted a $47,900,000 Fiscal Year 2027 gap to the county’s own archive on August 31, 2025, seven months before he announced a $42,000,000 surprise on March 24, 2026.

 

The county’s committed long-term debt service is roughly $1,189,000,000; its six-year capital program is $511,000,000 with zero anticipated federal funding; its unassigned General Fund balance fell 56 percent to $5,100,000 in Fiscal Year 2025; it drew $36,000,000 from two reserves in Fiscal Year 2026; its own April 16, 2026, projection shows the Tax Stabilization Reserve negative in Fiscal Year 2028 and at negative $28,800,000 by mid-2029, with the operating gap reopening at $19,400,000 and $21,000,000; its sewer fund carries debt service at 28.2 percent of revenue against a 20 percent ceiling; in July 2025 Moody’s scorecard put it at Aa2, two notches below its Aaa; its appointed executive assistants grew from about 21 under Thomas P. Gordon to 44 under Matt Meyer to 48 under Marcus Henry, about $8,400,000 a year.

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“One man draws the map and names the board. One man certifies the money.

One man signs the county’s name. Between them there is no one whose job is to say no, and everyone who might has seen what it costs.”

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The State’s own baseline. The rest of this section reaches forward, by arithmetic from dates the statutes set and figures the governments have published. The figures first. The Census Bureau counted 1,059,952 people in the three counties on July 1, 2025.

 

Delaware had 522,834 acres in farms in 2022 on 2,158 farms, six percent fewer farms than in 2017. The Delaware Agricultural Lands Preservation Foundation has preserved more than 160,000 acres on more than 1,250 farms in thirty years; in 2025 it preserved 2,800 acres on 36 farms for $14,900,000, about $5,321 an acre, with $1,917,156 of county money from Sussex, $225,769 from New Castle and $100,000 from Kent.

 

Delmarva Power’s standard offer supply rate rose 17 to 20 percent on June 1, 2026, about $14.64 a month for a typical household, on top of a $67,800,000 base rate request in Public Service Commission Docket 25-1555 whose interim increase took effect July 9, 2026; the Public Advocate, Jameson Tweedie, called the combined effect “brutal.”

 

The Delaware Population Consortium projects the State at 1,083,164 people in 2030 and 1,112,376 in 2035. The Delaware State Housing Authority’s needs assessment, cited in Senate Bill 23’s own preamble, puts the shortage at nearly 20,000 units for renters below 50 percent of area median income; the Act defines “affordable” at up to 120 percent. In the first quarter of 2025 Delaware had the highest foreclosure rate in the nation, one in every 761 housing units, ahead of Illinois, Nevada, Indiana and South Carolina; in March 2025 it was first again, one in every 2,256; in the first half of 2026 it was fourth, with filings up 11.13 percent, against a national rate of one in 632; in August 2026 it was seventh, one in every 2,796 against a national one in 3,569.

 

Standard & Poor’s kept the State’s AAA on April 15, 2026. The same report put the State’s share of its retiree health obligation at $6,200,000,000, funded at “over 18%,” and named “significant unfunded OPEB liabilities” as the weakness offsetting its strengths. It put general obligation debt at $1,800,000,000 on June 30, 2025, net pension liability at $1,681,000,000 at 86.8 percent funded, and tax-supported debt at $2,712 per person. It called the Fiscal Year 2027 budget “slightly imbalanced.”

 

The $6,990,000,000 operating budget the House passed on June 24, 2026, added $128,500,000 for Medicaid, $34,100,000 for prison health services, $16,200,000 for the State’s share of employee and retiree health premiums, $72,000,000 for a post-retirement increase, and $146,200,000 in one-time money. The health care spending benchmark subcommittee on which David Tam sits with Alan Levin raised the benchmark from 4.2 to 4.9 percent on April 29, 2026.

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“The State kept its triple-A by borrowing against a retiree health bill it has funded

at eighteen cents on the dollar. The counties will not be offered the same courtesy.”

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Table 25. The three counties’ books on the day the laws took effect

 

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Table 26. What residents will see, by county and by year

 

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​New Castle County

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Traffic study threshold raised tenfold to 500 peak-hour trips or the county forfeits its say over fee revenue (June 1, 2027). Suburban district in the southern growth area rezoned by statute to four units an acre, with apartments permitted. Comprehensive plan five-year review and first affordable housing plan (mid-2027). Tax Stabilization Reserve goes negative; operating gap reopens at $19,400,000. Second property tax increase or service cuts. By-right subdivisions approved without hearings.

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Twelve-month rezoning clock expired (mid-2028); map-consistent rezonings approved within 120 days with no hearing. Reserve at negative $28,800,000; gap $21,000,000. Sewer fund debt service above its ceiling for a fifth year; rate increases annually. Schools built on referendum, if referendums pass. Warehouse floor space along Route 301 and Route 1 approved 2021 to 2024 comes online; truck volumes on roads once studied at 50 trips now governed at 500.

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Rating downgrade risk on the county’s own scorecard. Growth-area build-out at four units an acre on land zoned at 0.67 in 2026. Level 4 farmland outside the growth areas under annexation pressure from towns with by-right obligations. Stormwater from density approved without Ashburn conditions arriving in neighborhoods built to 2005 standards.

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Kent County

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Growth Zone Overlay base districts raised from 3.5 to at least four units an acre (June 1, 2027). Regional Planning Commission hearings ended for by-right residential plans; its “approve with conditions” power limited to objective standards. Sewer unit fees continue up. Plan update begins without the hearing that used to follow it.

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2028 plan adopted; first affordable housing plan; twelve-month clock; must-approve pathway opens 2029. School mitigation fee survives, the Commission’s school-capacity conditions do not; districts the 2018 plan already called “over capacity” absorb four-unit-an-acre growth. Farm irrigation and public water supply compete in peak summers, the conflict the Water Supply Coordinating Council warned of “by 2020 or 2025.”

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Route 13 corridor built to the State’s density floor. Kent’s 13 percent of land in growth areas full; pressure moves to Level 3 and 4 farmland by plan amendment, certified by the Governor with no local right to reject.

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Sussex County

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Hearings on major subdivisions ended July 15, 2026; applications resumed under an administrative process the county had to invent. AR-1’s two units an acre raised to four with townhouses and apartments permitted in the 12 percent of the county that is coastal growth area (June 1, 2027). $74,600,000 in sewer capital begins; $5 per $1,000 school surcharge in force. Electric bills up 17 to 20 percent on a population 32.8 percent over 65.

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2028 plan and first affordable housing plan; the Working Group’s Growth and Conservation Areas either adopted or overtaken by the statute; rezoning clock; must-approve pathway opens late 2029. Henlopen district commitments past $14,000,000 and rising. Drainage on coastal soils handled by objective standards alone; the Fox Haven testimony that saved Lot 64 has no forum.

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The 16.8 percent five-year growth rate compounding on a coast with the State’s lowest elevations. Wells and septic on Level 3 and 4 land outside the sewer districts serving a population the 2014 water plan did not model. Farmland preserved at $5,321 an acre against building lots priced by the four-unit floor.

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The roads. In New Castle County, the Unified Development Code’s 50-trip trigger must go by June 1, 2027. The county that fought EQT Exeter’s 1,800,000 square feet at Jamison Corner, that wrote 500-foot buffers and berms into Ordinance 23-104, that took Dermody Properties to the Supreme Court over a traffic study, will not be able to require one of a 450-home subdivision on Route 299. The trips arrive at the Route 301 interchange, the Summit Bridge, the Route 1 and Route 273 merges, and the Department of Transportation builds what a fee fund capped at inflation plus two percent can afford; Scott Run’s 1,274,950 square feet would generate on the order of 250 peak-hour trips, and no one could have required a study.

 

In Kent County, Route 13 through Camden and Dover carries the Growth Zone; the Overlay’s 3.5 units an acre becomes four, and a county that always deferred to the Department’s 50-trip manual defers now to a 500-trip statute.

 

In Sussex County, Route 1 from Lewes to Fenwick and Route 24 past Love Creek, where the Department estimated Belle Mead’s 334 apartments at 6,800 trips a day, sit in the 12 percent of the county the density floor governs; Section 99-9(C)(13)’s level of service D standard survives, but the study that would prove a project breaks it can no longer be required below 500 peak-hour trips.

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The schools. The Appoquinimink School District went back to its voters on April 23, 2024, because Middletown’s houses arrived before its classrooms; New Castle County’s Article 5 school certification survives only as a district’s signature on a form. Kent County’s 2018 plan says “each of the districts is over capacity”; its mitigation fee survives, the Commission’s judgment does not.

 

Sussex County adopted a $5 per $1,000 construction surcharge for its districts in June 2026; it has no school test in its code and now cannot condition a plan on one. Ashburn let a commission do that. Section 9223 does not.

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The sewer and the water. New Castle County’s sewer fund carries debt service at 28.2 percent of revenue against a 20 percent ceiling and raised rates 5 percent on July 1, 2026, before the density floor added a unit. Sussex County budgeted $74,600,000 for plant expansion and new service areas in one year. Kent County raised its quarterly unit fee $12.62 in most districts.

 

Every one of those numbers was set before Section 2663 required four units an acre on 43, 13, and 12 percent of the three counties. Outside the sewer districts, growth goes on wells and septic; the Delaware Geological Survey has documented since the 1970s that septic systems in unsewered suburbanized areas are “the major contributor to groundwater contamination by nitrates,” and the Water Supply Coordinating Council’s last full report on Kent and Sussex, in 2014, warned of “increased competition between the public water supply and farm irrigation sectors for limited groundwater availability” by 2020 or 2025. No newer statewide plan has been published.

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The electric bill. The supply rate rose 17 to 20 percent on June 1, 2026, about $14.64 a month for a household using 811 kilowatt-hours, with a $67,800,000 base rate increase pending in Docket 25-1555 and its interim portion on bills since July 9. The PJM Interconnection capacity market that sets those prices is driven by load, and Executive Order 18 made “Priority Energy Projects” and a concierge for them a State function while a 1,200-megawatt data center at Delaware City with 516 diesel generators sat in appeal. Four units an acre with apartments permitted is load. Sussex County, where 32.8 percent of residents are 65 or older and most live on fixed incomes, pays the same rate.

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The taxes and the fees. New Castle County’s 17.2 percent was described by the County Executive as closing a gap; the county’s own April 16, 2026, projection reopens it at $19,400,000 in Fiscal Year 2028 and drives the Tax Stabilization Reserve to negative $28,800,000 by mid-2029. The next increase is already in the county’s documents. Senate Bill 23’s Section 9222(c) invites the county to waive impact fees and permit fees to satisfy the State; every dollar waived widens that gap. House Bill 450 takes the transportation impact fee to Dover. Sussex County kept its 2.14-cent rate and added a construction surcharge; Kent held its rate and raised sewer. The State’s capital budget rose 29 percent in one year. The debt is being placed now, at the county and the State, against revenue that Alan Levin’s Council certifies, in meetings that have grown shorter.

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The farms and the food. Delaware has 522,834 acres in farms and lost six percent of its farms between 2017 and 2022. The Foundation preserves about 2,800 acres a year at $5,321 an acre. House Bill 450 places a four-unit-an-acre floor on every acre inside a growth area and prices the land accordingly; the parcel at Dexter Corner in Townsend, Level 4 farmland assessed at $80,300, was listed at $2,500,000 with “potential for annexation.”

 

The growth areas are drawn in comprehensive plans the Governor now certifies with the county’s “right to accept or reject” struck from the statute. The only money the two laws send to farmland preservation is a share, at the Governor’s direction, of a two percent surcharge on a fee the Controller General calls “unknown.” Every acre that leaves farming in Kent and Sussex leaves the local food supply of a state whose southern county is 32.8 percent over 65.

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The water in the yard. Delaware has the lowest mean elevation of any state. The Fox Haven neighbors were right about Lot 64, and the Supreme Court said the Commission could act on it once the evidence was in. Section 9223 leaves stormwater to objective standards in the sediment and stormwater regulations, which are written for the site, not the neighborhood downstream. New Castle County’s southern growth area drains to Scott Run, Drawyer Creek, and the Appoquinimink; Sussex’s coastal growth area drains to the Inland Bays. The homes approved without hearings from 2026 forward will be the ones the counties are asked to buy out in 2036.

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The housing that is called affordable. Senate Bill 23’s definition reaches a household at 120 percent of area median income buying a home. Executive Order 18’s Priority Housing Project needs 15 percent of rentals at 80 percent of area median income for twenty years or 15 percent of for-sale units at 120 percent for fifteen; its Qualified Opportunity Fund track needs no affordability at all. Belle Mead on Route 24 offered 51 units at 80 percent and 283 at market rate.

 

The Delaware State Housing Authority’s shortage is nearly 20,000 units for renters below 50 percent of area median income. None of the instruments in this report requires a single unit at that level; the by-right section requires none at any level. A family of four at 80 percent of area median income earns about $65,000; the units the laws produce will be priced for the median and above, the waiting lists at 30 percent will not move, and the households in foreclosure at one in 761 are not helped by a by-right subdivision priced at 120.

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The elderly and the homeless. Sussex County is 32.8 percent over 65. The electric increase, the sewer capital, the construction surcharge, and the assessment that follows a four-unit floor land on fixed incomes first. New Castle County’s Hope Center, the former Sheraton Marcus Henry purchased with federal funds, is the county’s homeless facility, and the county’s General Fund reserve is $5,100,000. When the Fiscal Year 2028 gap opens, the services that cannot be bonded are the ones cut.

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The jobs. The Site Readiness Fund has recommended $34,880,000 across 32 awards for industrial sites; the Council on Development Finance received a “Site Readiness Fund Assessment” on October 27, 2025, promising “Job Totals,” and its minutes record no number. Amazon’s Boxwood Road property tax bill fell from about $3,500,000 to about $1,000,000 in the reassessment.

 

Fisker, the State’s $22,000,000 bet under Alan Levin’s Delaware Economic Development Office, built no car and hired no Delaware worker. The Delaware Board of Trade, which promised 100 jobs, employed about a dozen and then none. Warehouse employment per square foot is among the lowest of any commercial use; the 1,274,950 square feet at Scott Run will employ a fraction of the office park, restaurants and daycare the 2005 plan approved.

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“In 2028 the counties will still be able to say they did not know. In 2031 they will have the receipts. In 2036 the receipts will be the only thing left to give the residents.”

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What is documented, and what the pattern shows. This report does not say why Governor Matt Meyer removed Michael Houghton, or why Alan Levin’s meetings grew shorter, or why New Castle County bond-funded $13,720,000 in the district of the Councilman who voted no. It says when, and it says what came after, and it says it in the words of the people it happened to and the reporters who wrote it down.

 

Truthline’s five prior reports documented sixty-four instances in one county fiscal year in which the administration’s own records contradicted what the County Executive told residents; documented that every party to the Edgemoor litigation paid Matt Meyer’s committee in the thirty-six days around the ruling; documented that the fifty-five people who have advised the State on how much it can spend gave the Governor’s committees $228,866.64; and documented that Senator Nicole Poore’s no votes on Site Readiness awards were never recorded by name until this report attended the hearing.

 

The pattern is a government that has removed the places where a resident, a council member, or an advisory council member could ask a question on the record, and replaced them with an administrative process, a certification, a designation, and a version number, and that has shown, case by case for ten years, what happens to the person who asks anyway. The people who benefit are named throughout this report, with their contributions and their dates. The people who pay are in Table 26.

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What the General Assembly can do, and by when. Eric Scott Thompson is still the mayor of Elsmere. In July 2020, he put his name on a flyer for a candidate he believed in and got a telephone call that ended with “I will remember this.” He said then that he did not know how else to take the threat, because he was not running for anything; he was just the mayor of a town of 6,233 people. 

 

Under Senate Bill 23, Elsmere is one of the fifty-seven municipalities that must now write an affordable housing plan, give up the hearing on any residential project that fits its zoning, and send its comprehensive plan to the office of the man who made that call, for certification, with no right to reject what comes back. That is what the two laws do to a small town and the man who runs it. The remedy is not to help Elsmere live with it. The remedy is to give Elsmere back July 12.

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Repeal both laws, in full, and restore the Code to what it was the day before the Governor signed them. One bill, two sections: Senate Substitute No. 2 for Senate Bill No. 23 is repealed; House Substitute No. 1 for House Bill No. 450 is repealed; the provisions of Titles 9, 17, 22 and 29 as they stood on July 12, 2026, are restored. Not amended. Not softened. Not the hearing put back while the fee stays in Dover, or the county’s last word restored while the four-unit floor stands. Everything the two Acts added comes out, and nothing the two Acts added stays. The 153rd General Assembly returns in January 2027. Its session ends June 30, 2027.

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The counties’ first deadline under the laws is June 1, 2027. The window is the first five months of the year. The two Acts passed by the two-thirds margins the Constitution requires to amend a town charter, which means the same two-thirds can repeal them without the Governor’s signature, and over his veto if he uses it.

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Repeal, in full, is the right remedy because of how the laws were made. Between April 21 and June 8, 2026, the twenty percent requirement, the Director’s approval, and the force of law were taken out of the housing bill, and the owner’s must-approve rezoning and the no-hearing section were put in. The traffic floor and the fee were written so that no county could go under one or keep the other. Not one provision binds a developer to build a unit a nurse or a teacher can afford, and every provision binds a county. A law built that way cannot be amended into fairness, because the structure is the unfairness.

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It is withdrawn, whole, and the people who want faster approvals come back to Dover and make their case in a public hearing, with the trade California, Florida, and Massachusetts made: affordable units in exchange for the hearing, on a table where Eric Scott Thompson and Kevin Caneco and the six neighbors from Fox Haven can see it. That is the process the two Acts ended. It is the only process that should decide whether anything like them returns.

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Repeal takes from no one anything they held on July 12. The counties keep the comprehensive plans they adopted and the zoning they wrote. The Transportation Improvement Districts, which existed long before these laws, keep collecting. The Site Readiness Fund keeps its $10,000,000 a year. Every developer keeps every approval already recorded. Nothing the two Acts created is preserved, and nothing that existed before them is lost. What comes back is the hearing, the county’s last word on its own plan, the 50-trip traffic study, the Ashburn conditions for schools and drainage, and a Council vote that is a vote.

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The people who can file that bill are known. Senator Russ Huxtable of the 6th District and Representative Kendra Johnson of the 5th wrote Senate Bill 23. Representative William Bush of the 29th and Senators Jack Walsh of the 9th and Kyra Hoffner of the 14th wrote House Bill 450. Senator Nicole Poore of the 12th and Representative Edward Osienski of the 24th co-sponsored it and sit on the Council on Development Finance; Senator Poore’s name was on the same 2020 flyer as the mayor’s. Senate President Pro Tempore David Sokola called the removal of Michael Houghton “undue political interference”; he controls the Senate calendar.

 

The question for each of them is one word long, and the mayor of Elsmere, the councilman from Bayberry North and the neighbors from Fox Haven are entitled to the answer.

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“They passed it with two-thirds. Two-thirds can give it back. Not a piece of it. All of it.”

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Three things need no bill and can happen tomorrow. The Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council can publish its June 15, 2026, minutes and reinstate Michael Houghton, as its own Senate President Pro Tempore asked. The Council on Development Finance can record each member’s vote by name, beginning with the one Senator Nicole Poore cast on September 28. And any legislator, council member, or State employee who has been told “I will remember this” can say so, on the record.

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