“The developer sent his table. The Governor sent his appointees. The Secretary of State sent the room. And every one of them had already sent a check.”
- Karen Hartley-Nagle, The Truthline Network
“The headlines wrote themselves.”
THEY TOOK YOUR HEARING,
YOUR COUNTY'S SAY,
AND $1,900,000 OF YOUR MONEY
Part Two: Everyone in the Room Paid the Man Who Put Them There
By Karen Hartley-Nagle
Former President of New Castle County Council (2016 to 2024)
Published: October 17, 2026 | A Truthline Investigative Report
Delaware’s government gave a developer $1,900,000 of taxpayer money to prepare a warehouse site its seller had already marketed as “shovel-ready and fully approved,” changed the law so residents can no longer stand up at a hearing and object to what is built next to them, and did both for the people whose checks fill the Governor’s campaign filings.
Sequere pecuniam.
Follow the money.
*If you are reading this on your phone, skip past the Table of Contents and scroll straight to the Introduction. The report loads best on a laptop or desktop, but every word is here. Start scrolling. The story is waiting.
The Case in Five Paragraphs
On September 28, 2026, nine people in Dover recommended $1,900,000 of State money to Harvey Hanna & Associates for a warehouse site its seller had marketed as finished. Part One told that story. This is the story of the room, and it begins with a fact Part One did not have: the State had already paid this company from the same Fund. On December 12, 2022, the Council on Development Finance recommended $1,000,000 to Governor Lea Road LLC for a speculative warehouse on a Delaware City brownfield, and the application that company filed with the State in March 2026 is signed by E. Thomas Harvey IV and gives Harvey Hanna & Associates’ address; the $1,900,000 for Scott Run is the firm’s second trip, nine months after the Director who signs the checks presented a rule for returning recipients.
The Chairman of the Council on Development Finance, who ran the vote, Fred Sears II, has written Matt Meyer a check in every race since 2016 and vice-chairs a port corporation whose lobbyist, Douglas Gramiak, is the developer’s lobbyist. That lobbyist works in the same Barnes & Thornburg suite as the developer’s lawyer, Shawn Tucker, and as Wali W. Rushdan II, who co-chaired the transition of Marcus Henry, the County Executive who sponsored the application. On October 29, 2024, the developer, his wife, the lobbyist, the lobbyist’s wife, the lawyer, the lawyer’s wife, and the site’s water company all wrote the Governor checks on one day.
Two homebuilders on the Council on Development Finance, Kevin P. Kelly and Jonathan Horner, saw their companies pay the Governor’s political action committee nineteen and thirty-nine days before the vote, and the laws and orders the Governor signed in 2026 gave their industry by-right density, no hearings, waived road fees, and $388,780,000 in financing. The banker who priced the grant, William “Jack” Riddle, has a wife who gave; the Director who signs it, CJ Bell, gave before he was hired.
Jonathan Horner presides over the Home Builders Association of Delaware and co-chairs the residential committee of Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware, and both associations, their political committees and their boards are in the Governor’s filings. The suite the developer’s lawyers work from came out of the Governor’s fundraiser’s old law firm, whose remaining Wilmington partner, Geoffrey A. Sawyer III, is the Secretary of State’s outside counsel on unclaimed property and gave $11,700, and whose sister, Carrie Sawyer Casey, runs the sponsoring County Executive’s old county department and gave too.
Over all of it sits Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez, Matt Meyer’s county Land Use chief when the warehouse plan was recorded, whose department pays the grant, registered the applicant, hosted the hearing, charters the banker’s bank, sets the water company’s rates, licenses the Governor’s fundraiser’s restaurants and is suing Jonathan Horner, who chairs the port Fred Sears vice-chairs, who sits on the council Alan Levin chairs, and whose household gave sixteen times. The account that elected the Governor, which Alan Levin organized, now holds $393,428.95 with no race to run, raised from nursing homes, hospitals, a sportsbook, a prediction market and a nuclear operator with business before the State, and was spent once in 2026: $50,000 into the primaries, eight days after the Governor endorsed against two senators of his own party, three weeks before the one who asked about hospital prices lost.
“There is no one at any point in the chain whose job is to say no who has not already said
yes with a check, and the one body that said no in August was shown the price.”
Key Facts
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What follows is new. None of it was in Part One, and none of it repeats Part One. It comes from four Change Can’t Wait PAC reports the Delaware Department of Elections posted between January 4 and October 5, 2026, from a line-by-line read of ninety-two older reports for the five Matt Meyer-associated committees, 9,158 itemized receipts, from the minutes of the Council on Development Finance and the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council, from the Delaware Superior Court, from the State Bank Commissioner’s list of chartered banks, and from Truthline’s own prior reporting.
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The Chairman who ran the vote has paid the Governor in every race the Governor has run. Fred Sears II of Wilmington, Chairman of the Council on Development Finance, retired President of WSFS Bank and of the Delaware Community Foundation, wrote Matt Meyer ten checks, $3,350, between November 3, 2016, and May 18, 2025. He is Vice Chairman of the Diamond State Port Corporation. The Chairman of that corporation is Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez. Its registered lobbyist, Douglas Gramiak, is the registered lobbyist for Harvey, Hanna & Associates, the applicant.
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The applicant’s lobbyist, the applicant’s lawyer, the port’s lobbyist, and the County Executive’s transition co-chair are one law firm at one address. Douglas Gramiak is Director of State Government Affairs at Barnes & Thornburg LLP, 222 Delaware Avenue, Suite 1200, Wilmington. Shawn Tucker, the partner who handled Harvey Hanna & Associates’ Middletown purchases and who represents Stoltz Real Estate Partners before the Council, wrote his October 29, 2024, check from that suite. Wali W. Rushdan II, co-chair of County Executive Marcus Henry’s transition, is a real estate partner there. The firm itself gave Meyer for Delaware $3,600 in three checks, the last on November 20, 2025. The suite’s lawyers came to Barnes & Thornburg in June 2021 from Faegre Drinker, the firm Alan Levin joined as Of Counsel when he left State service; the partner who stayed behind, Geoffrey A. Sawyer III, leads Faegre Drinker’s representation of the Secretary of State’s unclaimed property Voluntary Disclosure Agreement program, more than 1,200 companies, and has given the Matt Meyer committees $11,700 in six checks, $5,000 of it on September 8, 2026.
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On Tuesday, October 29, 2024, seven days before the election, seven checks reached Meyer for Delaware from the applicant’s side on one day: E. Thomas Harvey III, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Harvey Hanna & Associates, Inc., and Robin Adair Harvey, his wife, $1,200 each; Douglas Gramiak and Stephanie Gramiak, $600 each; Shawn Tucker and Michele Tucker, $1,000 each; and Artesian Water Company, Inc., which certified the site’s water capacity on August 2, 2022, $1,200. $6,800. An eighth check that day, $250, came from Jordan Seemans, then Deputy State Treasurer and before that Governor John Carney’s Director of Legislative Affairs, whom Harvey Hanna & Associates hired as its Government Affairs and Community Relations Manager on March 11, 2025.
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Harvey Hanna & Associates has been paid by the Site Readiness Fund before. On December 12, 2022, the Council on Development Finance recommended $1,000,000 to Governor Lea Road LLC for 18.5 acres on Governor Lea Road. Governor Lea Road LLC is a Harvey Hanna entity: its Coastal Zone Act status decision application to the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, dated March 30, 2026, and revised September 2, 2026, gives its address as 405 East Marsh Lane, Suite 1, Newport, and is signed by E. Thomas Harvey IV, Authorized Member, for a 353,500-square-foot speculative warehouse on the former Ion Power brownfield at 750 Governor Lea Road, Delaware City. The State posted the notice on October 15, 2026, with comments due October 16. The $1,900,000 for Scott Run is the firm’s second award from the Fund, nine months after CJ Bell presented the Returning Awardees Procedure.
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The Secretary of State, Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez, whose department pays the grant, came from Matt Meyer’s county government and gave with her family. Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez was Matt Meyer’s New Castle County Economic Development Director from 2021 and General Manager of the Department of Land Use from July 1, 2023, the department that recorded the Scott Run Commerce Center plan thirty-three days later, on August 3, 2023. Governor-elect Matt Meyer named Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez Secretary of State on December 11, 2024. Her Department of State holds the Division of Small Business, which pays Site Readiness grants; the Division of Corporations, which registered SRJC, LLC; the Delaware Public Archives, whose Delaware Room held the hearing; the Office of the State Bank Commissioner, which charters the bank Council member William “Jack” Riddle runs; the Public Service Commission, which sets Artesian Water’s and Delmarva Power’s rates; the Alcoholic Beverage Control Commissioner, who licenses the restaurants Alan Levin part-owns; and the Division of Human and Civil Rights, whose Commission is suing Schell Brothers and Jonathan Horner. Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez chairs the Diamond State Port Corporation and sits on the council Alan Levin chairs. She, her husband, and her household gave the Matt Meyer committees $5,566.64 in sixteen contributions, $1,000 of it to the political action committee. On February 9, 2026, Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez attested Executive Order 17, which moved $388,780,000 of bond capacity into the Delaware State Housing Authority.
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Kevin P. Kelly of Hockessin, who holds a New Castle County seat on the Council, is Chairman and Managing Principal of Leon N. Weiner & Associates, Inc., 4 Denny Road, Wilmington, a builder of apartment communities financed with the Low-Income Housing Tax Credits the Delaware State Housing Authority allocates, including the 110-unit, $29,000,000 Owens and Queen Manor renovation in Dover. He gave Change Can’t Wait PAC $5,000 on December 1, 2025. His company gave it $5,000 on September 9, 2026, nineteen days before he voted on SRJC, LLC. He was in the room on January 22, 2024, when the Council set the dollar tiers. Eight checks since 2016, $14,200. Part One listed him as “Kevin Kelly, Hockessin.”
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Schell Brothers Delaware gave Change Can’t Wait PAC $10,000 on August 20, 2026, thirty-nine days before the hearing. With Schell Brothers LLC’s $25,000 on September 10, 2025, Jonathan Horner, General Counsel of Schell Brothers, President of the Home Builders Association of Delaware (2026, Board of Directors) and Residential Committee Co-chair for Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware, saw his employer pay $35,000 between his seating and his vote. On April 28, 2025, four months before Governor Matt Meyer seated him, Judge Mark H. Conner of the Delaware Superior Court let the Delaware Human and Civil Rights Commission’s fair housing discrimination and retaliation claims proceed against Jonathan Horner personally, on an allegation that he cancelled a Selbyville homebuyer’s contract after the buyer invoked his fair housing rights and told him, “I know your kind of people.” The Schell family and companies have given $88,400.
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Both builders’ associations Jonathan Horner leads are in the Governor’s filings. The Home Builders Association of Delaware’s political arm, the Hammers & Nails Club, and “Delaware Home Builders LLC,” both filed from 1600 North Little Creek Road, Dover, gave $3,600 in six checks. Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware’s ABC Merit Shop PAC, filed from the chapter’s office at 31 Blevins Drive, New Castle, gave $10,400 in eight checks, $5,000 of it to Change Can’t Wait PAC on July 17, 2024. On December 15, 2022, thirty-six checks, $24,450, reached Meyer for Delaware in one day; eighteen of them, $15,400, came from that chapter’s political action committee and from the companies and people on its board. M. Davis and Sons, Inc., the company of its First Vice Chair, gave Change Can’t Wait PAC $5,000 on September 15, 2025, five days after Schell Brothers’ $25,000.
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William “Jack” Riddle of Rehoboth Beach, President and Chief Lending Officer of Community Bank Delaware in Lewes, a state-chartered bank regulated by the Office of the State Bank Commissioner inside the Department of State, made the January 22, 2024, motion that created the dollar tier under which 102.57 acres is worth exactly $1,900,000. Susan Riddle, his wife, gave Meyer for Delaware $1,200 in three checks between June 20, 2023, and October 18, 2024.
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CJ Bell, Director of the Delaware Division of Small Business, the one person who signs a Site Readiness grant, gave Meyer for Delaware $500 in three checks between December 30, 2023, and August 27, 2024, before Governor-elect Matt Meyer appointed him on January 9, 2025. He succeeded Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez as Matt Meyer’s county Economic Development Director on July 1, 2023; she had succeeded Marcus Henry.
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Change Can’t Wait PAC, the committee Alan Levin organized, closed the 2024 election with $36,576.80. On October 4, 2026, it held $393,428.95, with no Governor’s race until 2028. Every 2025 dollar is dated after March 17, 2025, the day Governor Matt Meyer made Alan Levin Chairman of the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council. Alan Levin has not written it a check since June 10, 2024.
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The largest 2026 check, $50,000 on May 11, 2026, came from the Delaware Health Care Facilities Association, the nursing home and assisted living trade association at 501 Silverside Road, Wilmington, whose Executive Director, Cheryl Heiks, Governor Matt Meyer reappointed to the Delaware Health Resources Board. The council Alan Levin chairs set the State’s health care spending benchmark at 4.9 percent for 2026 in December 2025; its subcommittee, on which Brian Frazee, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Delaware Healthcare Association, sits and voted yes, recommended 5.0 percent for 2027 on April 29, 2026; the Delaware Healthcare Association’s political action committee gave $5,000 on April 21; the nursing homes gave $50,000 on May 11; Alan Levin called the full council to order on May 18, 2026, and it accepted 5.0 percent.
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The committee spent money on politics once in 2026: $50,000 to Progressive Democrats for Delaware, Inc., 19 East Commons Boulevard, New Castle, on August 25, 2026, eight days after Governor Matt Meyer endorsed Shay Frisby against Senator Ray Seigfried, Democrat of Claymont, 5th Senate District, and Adriana Bohm against Senator Dan Cruce, Democrat of Wilmington, 1st Senate District. On September 15, 2026, Shay Frisby defeated Senator Ray Seigfried, 58 percent to 42. Senator Dan Cruce survived by 146 votes.
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Drawbridge Claymont LLC, paid $1,000,000 by the Fund on March 28, 2022, gave the committee $25,000 on May 12, 2026, after CJ Bell presented, and Linda Parkowski of the Delaware Prosperity Partnership supported, the June 27, 2025, Returning Awardees Procedure that lets a paid developer come back. Drawbridge and its owner, Keith Delaney of the D2 Organization, have given $87,400. The Parkowski household gave $1,900.
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The three people County Executive Marcus Henry chose to run his transition are in the Governor’s filings: Richard Przywara, whose household includes Maribeth Przywara, treasurer of Change Can’t Wait PAC through 2023; Wali W. Rushdan II of Barnes & Thornburg LLP, household $3,600; and Pamela J. Scott of Saul Ewing LLP, whose firm gave $4,800 in nine checks.
Questions Residents Are Asking
What is new in Part Two that was not in Part One?
Everything. Part One had the parcel, the Fund, the tiers, the nine members, the Harvey and Hanna families’ $13,200, Schell Brothers’ first $25,000, Alan Levin’s $29,100, and the two laws. Part Two reads four Change Can’t Wait PAC reports posted after Part One was written and ninety-two older filings line by line, and adds the Chairman’s ten checks, the Secretary of State’s department and household, the Barnes & Thornburg suite, the October 29, 2024, checks, the nineteen-day and thirty-nine-day checks, the banker’s wife, the Director’s three checks, the Returning Awardees Procedure, the $393,428.95 account, who paid into it and why, the $50,000 into the primaries, the County Executive’s transition chairs, and the officials who carried out the pattern.
Who is Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez and why does she matter here?
Delaware’s Secretary of State since January 28, 2025, appointed by Governor Matt Meyer. She was his New Castle County Economic Development Director from 2021 and his General Manager of Land Use from July 1, 2023, the department that recorded the Scott Run warehouse plan thirty-three days later. Her Department of State holds the Division of Small Business, which pays the grant; the Division of Corporations, which registered SRJC, LLC; the Public Archives, which hosted the hearing; the State Bank Commissioner, who charters Jack Riddle’s bank; the Public Service Commission, which sets Artesian Water’s rates; the Alcoholic Beverage Control Commissioner, who licenses Alan Levin’s restaurants; the Public Integrity Commission; and the Division of Human and Civil Rights, whose Commission is suing Jonathan Horner. She chairs the port corporation Fred Sears vice-chairs and sits on the council Alan Levin chairs. Her household gave the Matt Meyer committees $5,566.64 in sixteen contributions.
What is Barnes & Thornburg’s role?
One Wilmington office, 222 Delaware Avenue, Suite 1200, holds the developer’s lawyer, Shawn Tucker; the developer’s and the port corporation’s lobbyist, Douglas Gramiak; and Wali W. Rushdan II, who co-chaired the transition of the County Executive who sponsored the application. The firm gave $3,600, Shawn Tucker and his wife $8,680, the Gramiaks $1,200, the Rushdans $3,600.
Did the Chairman of the Council give money to the Governor?
Yes. Fred Sears II wrote Matt Meyer ten checks, $3,350, between November 3, 2016, and May 18, 2025, in every race Matt Meyer has run and once after there was no race. Appendix A lists each one.
Which Council members, or their companies and households, gave, and when?
Fred Sears II personally, ten checks. Kevin P. Kelly personally, $8,000, and his company Leon N. Weiner & Associates, Inc., $6,200, the last $5,000 on September 9, 2026, nineteen days before the vote. Jonathan Horner’s employer, Schell Brothers, $35,000 in the thirteen months between his seating and the vote, $10,000 of it on August 20, 2026, and the Schell family and companies, $88,400. William “Jack” Riddle’s wife, Susan Riddle, $1,200. Laura Lloyd, Brian Kaye, Darren Stephenson, Representative Edward Osienski, and Senator Nicole Poore do not appear. CJ Bell, who signs, gave $500 before he was appointed.
Is it allowed for a member to vote on a grant weeks after his company gave to the Governor’s committee?
Nothing in Title 29, Section 8707A of the Delaware Code or in the Council’s regulation at Title 1, Section 403 of the Delaware Administrative Code addresses campaign contributions. The State Code of Conduct, Title 29, Chapter 58, administered by the Public Integrity Commission in the Department of State, bars a State officer from acting on a matter in which he or a close relative has a financial interest, and the Council’s own minutes show members recusing on other grounds: Fred Sears on CRISP Partners on March 28, 2022, Jack Riddle on Sussex County the same day, Richard Rowland on Industrial Partners V Heald on December 11, 2023. Whether anyone recused on September 28, 2026, the State has not said; it has not posted the minutes.
What is Jonathan Horner’s court case, and is it over?
Delaware Human and Civil Rights Commission v. Schell Brothers, LLC and Jonathan Horner, Superior Court Civil Action S23C-04-004, brought by the Commission inside the Department of State on behalf of a Selbyville homebuyer who alleges Jonathan Horner cancelled his contract after he invoked his fair housing rights and told him, “I know your kind of people.” On April 28, 2025, Judge Mark H. Conner let the discrimination and retaliation counts proceed against Jonathan Horner personally. As of this writing the case is pending. Governor Matt Meyer seated him on the Council four months after that opinion. Jonathan Horner is also President of the Home Builders Association of Delaware for 2026, and Residential Committee Co-chair for Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware, and both associations’ political committees, officers, and board companies are in the Governor’s filings; Section IV and Table 2A set them out.
What is the health care spending benchmark, and why would nursing homes give $50,000?
A ceiling the State sets on how fast health care providers may grow their costs, set each year by the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council that Alan Levin chairs. The council set 2026 at 4.9 percent in December 2025; its subcommittee, on which the hospital association’s President sits, recommended 5.0 percent for 2027 on April 29, 2026; the hospital association’s political action committee gave $5,000 on April 21; the nursing home association gave $50,000 on May 11; the full council, Alan Levin presiding, accepted 5.0 percent on May 18. The nursing home association’s Executive Director was reappointed by the Governor to the board that approves new nursing home beds. Its members are paid mostly by Medicaid, at rates the State sets.
Why does $50,000 to Progressive Democrats for Delaware matter?
It was the only political spending the committee made in 2026, and it came on August 25, eight days after the Governor endorsed Shay Frisby against Senator Ray Seigfried of Claymont and Adriana Bohm against Senator Dan Cruce of Wilmington, two Democrats who had crossed him on hospital prices and on the county reassessment. Senator Ray Seigfried lost on September 15, 58 to 42. Senator Dan Cruce held on by 146 votes. The committee still has $393,428.95.
How can a committee with no race hold $393,428.95?
Change Can’t Wait PAC is a political action committee, account 02005278, not a candidate committee. Delaware sets no contribution limit on it and no rule that it spend down. It can give to any candidate in any race, including a primary against a sitting senator. It raised $461,100 after Alan Levin became Chairman of the revenue council, and he has not written it a check since June 10, 2024.
Has Harvey Hanna & Associates taken Site Readiness money before?
Yes. Governor Lea Road LLC received a $1,000,000 recommendation on December 12, 2022, for 18.5 acres on Governor Lea Road in Delaware City, and its March 30, 2026, Coastal Zone Act application to the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control gives Harvey Hanna & Associates’ address and is signed by E. Thomas Harvey IV as Authorized Member. The State posted that application for comment on October 15, 2026, with comments closing October 16, by email to CZA_Program@delaware.gov or by mail to the Coastal Zone Act Program, 100 West Water Street, Suite 7B, Dover 19904. The Scott Run request is the firm’s second trip to the Fund.
Where can I see the filings?
Every report is on the Delaware Campaign Finance Reporting System at cfrs.elections.delaware.gov, searchable by committee name or account number. Appendix A lists each check in this report by person, with the committee and date.
What can residents do now?
CJ Bell’s decision on the $1,900,000 has not been announced; written comment to the Delaware Division of Small Business remains open, and any resident may ask under Title 1, Section 403, Section 4.2 of the Delaware Administrative Code to see the application. Any resident may ask the Secretary of State’s office, in writing, whether she has recused herself from matters involving Harvey Hanna & Associates, Schell Brothers, Community Bank Delaware, Artesian Water, or SoDel Concepts, and may file with the Public Integrity Commission under Title 29, Section 5810 of the Delaware Code. The State has not posted the September 28, 2026, minutes; Title 29, Section 10004(f) requires a record of each vote by individual member. Ask for it.
“The State paid them once to get a warehouse ready. They came back for a site the seller sold them as finished. Everyone who had to say yes had already said it with a check.”
If You Read Nothing Else
On the last Tuesday in October 2024, one week before Delaware chose a Governor, seven checks arrived at the campaign of Matt Meyer. Thom Harvey wrote one, and his wife Robin wrote one, $1,200 each, from their house on Center Meeting Road. Their lobbyist, Doug Gramiak, wrote one, and so did his wife Stephanie, $600 each, from Harrington Court. Their lawyer, Shawn Tucker, wrote one from his office on the twelfth floor at 222 Delaware Avenue, and his wife Michele wrote one from their house on Derby Way, $1,000 each. And Artesian Water Company, the utility that had certified two years earlier that the warehouse site at Jamison Corner Road had the water it needed, wrote one for $1,200. Seven checks, one day, $6,800. The developer did not send his money. He sent his table.
Twenty-three months later, on September 28, 2026, that same table sat down in Dover and asked the State for $1,900,000 to prepare a site the seller had sold them as finished, and the people on the other side of the room were, to a chair, people who had also written the Governor checks. The Chairman had. A homebuilder on the Council had, nineteen days earlier. Another homebuilder’s employer had, thirty-nine days earlier. The banker who priced the grant had a wife who had. The man who signs the grant had. And the Secretary of State whose department would cut the check had, with her husband and her household, sixteen times, and had run the county department that recorded the warehouse plan in the first place.
Part One told you what happened in that room. This is the story of how the room was built, who built it, and what each of them is building now with the laws the same Governor signed. It is not a list. It is one machine, and every part of it has a name, a title, a project, and a check.
The machine has four parts. An account that no longer runs a campaign and now holds $393,428.95, raised from the people who have business before the State in the two years since the election. A set of appointments, every one of them the Governor Matt Meyer’s, that put those same people and their lawyers on the boards that recommend the money, in the chair that signs it, at the head of the council that certifies it, and at the head of the department that pays it. A set of laws and orders, signed in the first eighteen months, that give the people on those boards faster approvals, waived fees, no hearings, and a bigger pool of financing for what they build. And a lesson, taught in August to two State senators, about what happens to the ones who ask questions.
And one more thing, which arrived the morning this report was finished. The company at the window had been to it before. Three years and nine months before the Scott Run vote, the same Council on Development Finance recommended $1,000,000 from the same Fund to a company called Governor Lea Road LLC, for a speculative warehouse on a brownfield in Delaware City between a Superfund site and a refinery. On October 15, 2026, the State posted that company’s application for a Coastal Zone decision. It gives Harvey Hanna & Associates’ address on East Marsh Lane and is signed by E. Thomas Harvey IV, Thom Harvey’s son. The $1,900,000 is not a developer’s first ask. It is a returning customer’s second, filed nine months after the man who signs the checks wrote the rule that lets returning customers back in.
I sat across from most of these people for eight years. The filings are the part I could not see from the President’s chair.
PART 2 of: THEY TOOK YOUR HEARING, YOUR COUNTY'S SAY, AND $1,900,000
OF YOUR MONEY
Everyone in the Room Paid the Man Who Put Them There
The lawyer’s suite, the Secretary of State’s department, the Chairman’s checks, the builders’ laws, the account with no race to run, and the senator who paid for asking
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I. The Table Came With Him
Seven checks on one day, one law firm, one suite on the twelfth floor, and a developer who has never had to ask Dover twice
Start on the twelfth floor of 222 Delaware Avenue in Wilmington, because the whole story can be seen from that one suite. It is the Wilmington office of Barnes & Thornburg LLP, an Indianapolis law firm with 700 lawyers in twenty-three cities. Three people in this story work there.
Shawn Tucker is a partner. He is the land use lawyer who handled Harvey Hanna & Associates’ Middletown purchases and who stands up for Stoltz Real Estate Partners when it comes before the Council on Development Finance, as it did on September 23, 2024, for the $2,400,000 Blue Diamond Park award that is still the largest in the Fund’s history. Between September 28, 2016, and October 29, 2024, he wrote the three Matt Meyer committees eleven checks, $6,480, $2,200 of it to the political action committee where there is no limit. Michele Tucker wrote five more. His last check, the $1,000 on October 29, 2024, was filed from the suite.
Douglas Gramiak is the firm’s Director of State Government Affairs, in the same suite. He was Governor John Carney’s chief of staff, and before that the political editor of The News Journal. He has been the registered Delaware lobbyist for the Diamond State Port Corporation, the State authority that owns the Port of Wilmington, since January 20, 2020. On January 1, 2022, in the middle of the thirty-eight-day window in which the Harvey and Hanna families wrote Matt Meyer seven checks at the maximum before he had announced for anything, Douglas Gramiak registered as the lobbyist for Harvey, Hanna & Associates. On October 29, 2024, he and Stephanie Gramiak wrote their $600 checks on the same day the Harveys wrote theirs.
Wali W. Rushdan II is a real estate partner in the same office. On November 20, 2024, fifteen days after the election, County Executive-elect Marcus Henry named him one of three co-chairs of his transition team, the transition team whose Land Use and Economic Development committees produced County Executive Order 2026-06, the expedited land use track the County Executive signed on April 28, 2026, and whose administration then sponsored SRJC, LLC’s application to the State. Wali Rushdan gave Meyer for Delaware $1,200 on December 19, 2022; Yolanda Rushdan gave $2,400 in three checks. Household, $3,600.
And the firm itself, filing from 11 South Meridian Street in Indianapolis, gave Meyer for Delaware $1,200 on September 27, 2023, $1,200 on October 10, 2024, and $1,200 on November 20, 2025, after the election was over and the man it had given to was Governor.
So: the applicant’s lawyer, the applicant’s lobbyist, the port corporation’s lobbyist and the sponsoring County Executive’s transition co-chair are one firm at one address, and that firm and its people put $13,680 into the Governor’s committees. Hold that address. Every other road in this report runs back through it.
The suite has a history, and the history is the same people. Barnes & Thornburg announced its Wilmington office on June 14, 2021, built from a group that walked over together from Faegre Drinker, the firm that was Drinker Biddle & Reath until 2020: Thomas McGonigle, Governor Jack Markell’s chief of staff, to run the office; Shawn Tucker, who by the firm’s own release had been New Castle County’s First Assistant County Attorney and had managed its Department of Land Use before private practice; Douglas Gramiak, who had gone from Governor John Carney’s office to Drinker Biddle in October 2019 and registered as the port corporation’s lobbyist from there on January 20, 2020; Mary Kate McLaughlin; and Michael DeNote. Drinker Biddle & Reath is the firm Alan Levin joined as Of Counsel when he left the Delaware Economic Development Office in June 2015, and the firm gave Matt Meyer $600 on September 26, 2016, from 222 Delaware Avenue, Suite 1410, two floors from the suite its lawyers would later fill under another name, and $600 on November 4, 2019.
One partner stayed. Geoffrey A. Sawyer III of 1406 Gilpin Avenue, Wilmington, was Governor Jack Markell’s deputy chief of staff for economic development in the years Alan Levin ran the Delaware Economic Development Office, and is today the Faegre Drinker partner who leads the firm’s representation of the State of Delaware’s Voluntary Disclosure Agreement program for unclaimed property, the program the Secretary of State has run since 2012, through which more than 1,200 companies settle what they owe the State without audit. The Secretary of State is his client. He gave Meyer for New Castle County $600 on October 25, 2016; Meyer for Delaware $1,200 on December 31, 2022, $1,200 on September 19, 2024, and $1,200 on July 30, 2025; and Change Can’t Wait PAC $2,500 on June 11, 2024, and $5,000 on September 8, 2026, the day before Leon N. Weiner & Associates wrote its $5,000. Six checks, $11,700.
The unclaimed property Geoffrey A. Sawyer III helps companies settle is one of the three largest sources of the State’s General Fund, and the revenue council that certifies it is chaired by his former colleague, Alan Levin. Twelve days after the Governor signed the two land use laws, on July 14, 2026, he signed Executive Order 25, barring from the State’s Unclaimed Property Task Force anyone paid in the preceding five years for unclaimed property consulting; the order does not reach the Secretary’s own contractor.
And Geoffrey Sawyer has a sister in the county building. Carrie Sawyer Casey, who was assistant to Governor Thomas R. Carper and then Senator Carper’s Projects Director and New Castle County Director before she came to the county, is the General Manager of the New Castle County Department of Community Services, the department Marcus Henry ran for County Executive Matt Meyer; she worked under Marcus Henry, for Matt Meyer, for the eight years I sat across from both of them, was nominated by Matt Meyer to succeed Marcus Henry as General Manager when he left to run for County Executive, and holds the job today under County Executive Marcus Henry, the sponsor of the SRJC, LLC application.
From 614 Foulkstone Road in Wilmington, the house the county’s property records list to Francis M. and Carolyn S. Casey, she gave Meyer for Delaware $300 on December 30, 2022, $50 on December 4, 2023, $500 on December 31, 2023, $50 on January 4, 2024, and $500 on November 1, 2024, four days before the election; Mike Casey, same address, gave $500 on December 31, 2023. Household, $1,900. The brother is the Secretary of State’s outside counsel. The sister runs the sponsoring County Executive’s old department. Both wrote the Governor checks.
Table 1. October 29, 2024: one day, seven checks, $6,800, from the applicant’s side, and an eighth from the man the applicant would hire
The water company deserves a sentence of its own. Artesian Water Company, Inc. is the investor-owned utility that serves most of southern New Castle County, and its August 2, 2022, capacity certification is one of the approvals the seller printed under “SHOVEL-READY AND FULLY APPROVED.” It had given Matt Meyer $250 in 2016 and $600 in 2019. Its rates are set by the Delaware Public Service Commission, which sits inside the Department of State. The $1,200 on October 29, 2024, is the only time a Delaware water utility appears in the filings beside the developer it serves, on the developer’s day.
Harvey Hanna & Associates, Inc. knew the way to Dover before Jamison Corner. In November 2019, the firm sold 88 acres of the former General Motors plant on Boxwood Road in Newport, which it had bought two years earlier on a deed that recorded ten dollars, to Dermody Properties of Reno, Nevada, for about $21,600,000. On February 24, 2020, the Council on Development Finance unanimously recommended a $4,500,000 Delaware Strategic Fund grant to Amazon for the 3,800,000-square-foot fulfillment center Dermody Properties built on that ground; Kurt Foreman, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Delaware Prosperity Partnership, presented it.
In May 2026, the firm’s Route 40 LLC received a $1,140,000 Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund grant from the Delaware Department of Transportation for two warehouses on 10.5 acres at 600 Pulaski Highway in Bear. Scott Run is the third time in six years that public money has followed a Harvey Hanna parcel. Thom Harvey, who drove a trash truck and now owns four million square feet of warehouse, has never had to ask twice.
There was an eighth check that Tuesday, and it explains how a firm learns the way to Dover. Jordan Seemans of 1508 North Franklin Street, Wilmington, gave Meyer for Delaware $250 on October 29, 2024. He was then Deputy State Treasurer under State Treasurer Colleen Davis, promoted to that post on March 10, 2023, after three years as the Treasurer’s Director of Policy and Communications, and before that Governor John Carney’s Director of Legislative Affairs and the Governor’s liaison to Delaware’s fifty-seven municipalities.
On March 11, 2025, nine weeks after Matt Meyer took the oath, Harvey Hanna & Associates announced him as its Government Affairs and Community Relations Manager, “overseeing government relations and public policy work with local, state, and federal stakeholders.” Thomas J. Hanna, quoted as President and Chief Executive Officer, said his experience would “advance the company’s economic development efforts in Delaware.” Sixteen months later, the company’s economic development effort in Delaware was a $1,900,000 request to the Council on Development Finance.
The firm’s in-house lobbyist and its outside lobbyist both wrote the Governor checks on the Harveys’ day. A Misty Seemans of 901 West 23rd Street, Wilmington, gave $2,400 in three checks between October 22, 2023, and October 6, 2024; the filings do not state a relationship, and she is not counted with him. Ryan Kennedy of Harvey Hanna & Associates, who once credited Alan Levin by name for the deal that kept a tenant at the firm’s Twin Lakes property, gave $1,658.32 in four checks from 2020 to 2024.
The firm’s own website lists two future projects, and one of them has been to the Fund already.
At 720 to 750 Governor Lea Road in Delaware City, the former Ion Power ground, Harvey Hanna & Associates says it plans “approximately 250,000 square feet of industrial space” on 18.5 acres. On December 12, 2022, the Council on Development Finance recommended $1,000,000 from the Site Readiness Fund to an entity called Governor Lea Road LLC for 18.5 acres on Governor Lea Road, 6 to 0; the State does not publish the members of a limited liability company, and the county’s active plan at 750 Governor Lea Road, Application 2023-0190-S, is a 330,000-square-foot warehouse on a brownfield, zoned Heavy Industrial, in the 12th Council District. Whether Governor Lea Road LLC is the firm’s, the application on file with the Division of Small Business would say. If it is, Scott Run is not the third time public money has followed a Harvey Hanna parcel. It is the fourth, and the second from the Site Readiness Fund.
The State answered the question on October 15, 2026, while this report was being finished. That morning, the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control posted Notice CCE20260360: a request for a Coastal Zone Act status decision, Project CZA-449SD, from Governor Lea Road, LLC, for “a 353,500 square foot warehouse building with vehicle loading docks at 750 Governor Lea Road,” with the demolition of two existing buildings, no manufacturing proposed, and public comment closing at the end of the next day, October 16.
The application behind the notice is on the Department’s site. It gives the applicant’s address as 405 East Marsh Lane, Suite 1, Newport, which is Harvey Hanna & Associates’ front door, lists the primary contact as E. Thomas Harvey IV at a harveyhanna.com address, and is certified, on March 30, 2026, and again on September 2, 2026, by “E. Thomas Harvey, IV, Authorized Member,” one of the three sons, Thom Harvey, named Managing Directors on July 24, 2026.
The agent is Stephen G. Davies of Apex Engineering in Newport; the environmental assessment is by Ten Bears Environmental Associates of Newark, first dated January 26, 2023, six weeks after the Fund’s $1,000,000. The parcels are 12-008.00-004 and 12-008.00-006, 18.5 acres, the former Ion Power laboratory on a certified brownfield, with the Metachem Superfund site to the north, the Delaware City Refinery to the south, and the old Kaneka plant to the east. The building will be built on speculation, the application says, with no tenant, for “general warehousing and distribution,” $36,600,000 in construction, 380 construction jobs and “more than 180” permanent ones.
The Delaware Department of Transportation reviewed its traffic study on January 29, 2025, at 330,000 square feet and 560 daily trips, and noted that the signal the site needs at River Road and Hamburg Road is being installed by the developer of Blue Diamond Park, which is Stoltz Real Estate Partners, the Fund’s $2,400,000 recipient.
So the Governor Lea Road LLC that took $1,000,000 from the Site Readiness Fund on December 12, 2022, is Harvey Hanna & Associates, and the SRJC, LLC that asked for $1,900,000 on September 28, 2026, is Harvey Hanna & Associates coming back for more, nine months after CJ Bell presented the procedure that lets a paid developer return and five weeks after its own warehouse plan was revised and refiled with the State. Part One counted the firm among the people who paid the Governor. It belongs, as well, in Section VI, among the recipients the Fund had already paid.
The county had the neighbor on its desk the same week. On October 13, 2026, New Castle County Council took up Resolution 26-191, the plan for 755 Governor Lea Road, seven warehouse buildings across the road from the Harvey Hanna parcel, owned by Governor Lea Associates, LLC of 761 Grantham Lane, New Castle, Application 2022-0562-S, in the 12th Council District, sponsored by Councilman Kevin Caneco, the man who wrote the Scott Run petition in 2022.
On the same agenda, under Ordinance 26-106, sponsored by Councilman David Tackett and Councilwoman Dee Durham, the county began rewriting Article 14 of its Unified Development Code, its impact fees, for the first time since the 2023 study, eleven weeks before the State’s own transportation impact fee takes effect on January 1, 2027, under House Substitute 1 to House Bill 450, and eight months before the June 1, 2027, deadline by which the county must conform or lose any say over how that fee is spent inside its borders.
The Land Use Committee had reviewed both on October 6. Harvey Hanna & Associates’ own 750 Governor Lea Road plan, Application 2023-0190-S, was not on either agenda; it is still under review at the Department of Land Use, where it will be approved administratively, with no hearing, if it qualifies under the law Governor Matt Meyer promoted and signed on July 13.
And the Boxwood Road ground the firm bought on a ten-dollar deed tells the rest of the arithmetic. Harvey Hanna & Associates paid about $10,400,000 for the 142-acre General Motors plant in October 2017, cleared it, remediated it, got it entitled, and sold the 88 acres to Dermody Properties for more than $31,000,000 in two closings in November 2019 and February 2020. The same month as the second closing, on February 24, 2020, the Council on Development Finance recommended $4,500,000 of Strategic Fund money to Amazon for the building Dermody put on it. When that building traded again, Macquarie Asset Management of Sydney paid about $392,000,000 for it, $818 a square foot, through an account that bought out the investors in DPIF2 DE 1 New Castle LLC.
Whitney Sweeney of Macquarie Asset Management sits on the board of the Delaware Prosperity Partnership, the body that receives every Site Readiness application before the State does, beside Governor Matt Meyer, its co-chair.
The firm’s own affiliations list, on its website, includes the Port of Wilmington Maritime Society, whose port corporation is chaired by the Secretary of State and lobbied by Douglas Gramiak; the Wilmington Area Planning Council, the body that programs the federal road money the Southern New Castle County Transportation Improvement District draws on; the Delaware Committee of 100; and the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce, whose new Foundation John C. Fannin III, the firm’s President until June 30, 2026, was named on January 14, 2026, to chair.
“The owner and his wife, $2,400. The lobbyist and his wife, $1,200. The lawyer and his wife, $2,000. The water company, $1,200. One date, one week before the election. And the lawyer and the lobbyist work in the same suite as the man who ran the County Executive’s transition. That is not a donor list. That is a floor plan.”
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II. The Department That Pays, and the Woman Who Runs It
Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez, from Matt Meyer’s county Land Use chief to the department that registered the applicant, hosted the hearing, charters the banker’s bank, and cuts the check
Part One said the Director of the Delaware Division of Small Business signs the grant. It did not say whose department the Division is in, or who she is, or where she came from. She came from the same building I did.
Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez grew up in Delaware, went to Tower Hill School and the Red Clay public schools, took economics degrees at the University of Southern California and a law degree at Emory, and practiced land use and government contracts law in Los Angeles at Sheppard Mullin and Glaser Weil, where she co-founded a political strategy shop called The McOsker Group for hospitality, media, health care and development clients. On October 23, 2019, from an apartment at 424 South Broadway in Los Angeles, she gave Meyer for New Castle County $400. In 2021, New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer made her his Economic Development Director, the job Marcus Henry had held. On June 13, 2023, Matt Meyer nominated Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez to run the New Castle County Department of Land Use, more than 100 employees, every development plan, every inspection, every rezoning, and named CJ Bell, his Manager of Special Projects, to take her old job. Both moves took effect July 1, 2023.
Thirty-three days later, on August 3, 2023, Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez's department recorded the Scott Run Commerce Center plan, Microfilm Number 20230803-0051629, three buildings, 1,274,950 square feet, 233 truck doors, a 600,000-square-foot Building A. Nine days before that recording, on July 25, 2023, Ordinance 23-104, the 200,000-square-foot warehouse cap, had been introduced in County Council; Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez's department carried it through the Planning Board hearing of November 7, 2023, and County Council’s vote of January 9, 2024, to the signature that made it law on January 25, 2024, five months and twenty-two days after her department had recorded the plan the cap could no longer reach. She ran the Department of Land Use for the whole of that sequence. I know her work from the other side of the table: by Truthline’s prior reporting, Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez ran the 87-parcel mass rezoning that I helped defeat as Council President.
On December 11, 2024, Governor-elect Matt Meyer named Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez Secretary of State. The Senate confirmed her, and she was sworn in on January 28, 2025. The Department of State she now runs is not a filing office. It is the department that, in its own words, has “responsibilities in virtually every aspect of Delaware state government,” and in this story it has a hand in nearly every piece.
It includes the Division of Small Business, whose Director, CJ Bell, Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez's successor at the county, signs Site Readiness grants, and whose budget line, 20-10-01, has received $10,000,000 a year from the General Assembly for the Fund since 2021. It holds the Division of Corporations, which registered SRJC, LLC on file number 10649718 and DSM, LLC on file number 4046958, which keeps about two million entities on its rolls, and which produces close to a third of the State’s General Fund. It holds the Delaware Public Archives, whose Delaware Room at 121 Martin Luther King Jr.
Boulevard North is where the Council on Development Finance met on September 28, 2026. It holds the Office of the State Bank Commissioner, which charters and examines Delaware’s state banks, among them Community Bank Delaware of Lewes, whose President and Chief Lending Officer is Council member William “Jack” Riddle. It holds the Public Service Commission, which sets the rates of Artesian Water Company, Inc., the utility that wrote the October 29 check, and of Delmarva Power, whose supply rate rose 17 to 20 percent on June 1, 2026. It holds the Alcoholic Beverage Control Commissioner, who licenses every restaurant in SoDel Concepts, the Sussex County group Alan Levin part-owns.
It holds the Public Integrity Commission, the State’s ethics body. It runs the unclaimed property Voluntary Disclosure Agreement program whose outside counsel, Geoffrey A. Sawyer III of Faegre Drinker, Alan Levin’s former firm, gave the Governor’s committees $11,700. And it holds the Division of Human and Civil Rights, whose Commission is, as of this writing, the plaintiff in a fair housing case against Schell Brothers, LLC and its General Counsel, Jonathan Horner, who sits on the Council. Section IV has that case.
Outside her department, Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez chairs the Diamond State Port Corporation, the body Alan Levin chaired from 2009 to 2015, whose Vice Chairman is Fred Sears II, the man who ran the September 28 vote, and whose lobbyist is Douglas Gramiak of Barnes & Thornburg, the man who wrote his check on the Harveys’ day. House Bill 500, the Fiscal Year 2027 Bond Bill, gave the corporation $110,000,000; on April 20, 2026, Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez told its board that the projected cost of the Edgemoor container terminal’s first phase had risen from $484,000,000 to about $669,000,000 before construction began, and described the operator as “a partner who is trying to push all of the cost over onto the state and put no skin in the game on their side.” And Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez sits on the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council, at the table Chairman Alan Levin has gaveled since March 17, 2025.
The filings put Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez's household in the ledger sixteen times. Charuni Patibanda, from 2719 Pickering Road in Wilmington, gave Meyer for Delaware $250 on November 16, 2021, $258.32 twice on September 30, 2022, $100 on June 6, 2023, $250 on December 31, 2023, and $191.68 on July 1, 2024, the last one rounding her aggregate to exactly $1,050; with the 2019 check from Los Angeles, $1,708.32 in seven contributions, none filed under her hyphenated name. Madhava Patibanda, same address, gave $1,200 in three checks. Patibanda Sarma, same address, gave $1,000 on December 28, 2022. Pvln Sarma, same address, gave Change Can’t Wait PAC $500 and $500 on May 15, 2024. Marcos Sanchez, her husband, gave $658.32 in three checks from Washington, D.C.; the household gave $5,566.64, $4,508.32 of it from Pickering Road.
Then, on February 9, 2026, as Secretary of State, Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez attested Executive Order 17, the order that swept $388,780,000 of unused private activity bond capacity into the Delaware State Housing Authority, the one agency whose loan excuses a homebuilder from the transportation impact fee the law of July 13 created. Section V explains why a man on the Council cared about that.
“Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez recorded the warehouse plan at the county. She chairs the port whose lobbyist works for the developer. She sits on the council the Governor’s fundraiser chairs. Her department registered the applicant, hosted the hearing,
licenses the banker’s bank, and will cut the check. And her family wrote sixteen of them. There is no part of this that does not pass through her desk.”
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III. The Chairman Who Never Missed a Race
Fred Sears II, ten checks in nine years, and the lobbyist his port shares with the applicant
Fred Sears II lives on Derbyshire Way in Wilmington, in the 19807 zip code where most of the money in this report lives. He ran WSFS Bank, Delaware’s largest locally based bank, and retired as its President. He ran the Delaware Community Foundation, the State’s largest charitable endowment, and retired as its President. He is Vice Chairman of the Diamond State Port Corporation under Chairman Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez. And he is Chairman of the Council on Development Finance, named by the Governor, serving, in the words of Title 29, Section 8707A of the Delaware Code, “at the pleasure of the Governor,” which means the Governor can replace him any afternoon he likes.
Part One gave his titles. The filings give his checks, and they are a calendar of Matt Meyer’s career. To Meyer for New Castle County: $500 on November 3, 2016, two days before Matt Meyer’s first election; $100 on December 2, 2016; $200 on December 7, 2017, the same day Alan Levin, Ellen Levin, Marcus Henry and Saul Ewing LLP each wrote Matt Meyer a check; $250 on December 4, 2019, the year of the county re-election. To Meyer for Delaware: $250 on December 1, 2021, two weeks before the Harveys and the Levins wrote theirs; two checks of $500 on October 7, 2022; $450 on June 15, 2023; $500 on October 1, 2024, five weeks before the general election; and $100 on May 18, 2025, when Matt Meyer was already the Governor who held his chair, two months after that Governor had handed Alan Levin the gavel of the revenue council.
Ten checks, $3,350, small by the standards of this committee. But read what they are. The Chairman of the board that votes the State’s site money has written the man who appoints him a check in every campaign that man has ever run, and the last one after there was no campaign left to give to. And the corporation he vice-chairs, the one the Secretary of State chairs, pays Douglas Gramiak of Barnes & Thornburg to lobby for it, the same Douglas Gramiak who lobbies for the developer whose request Fred Sears gaveled through on September 28. The Chairman and the applicant share a lobbyist. The lobbyist shares a suite with the applicant’s lawyer. The lawyer’s partner co-chaired the sponsoring County Executive’s transition. Pull any one of those threads and the others move.
“Ten checks over nine years. One in 2016, when Matt Meyer was a candidate for
County Executive. One in May 2025, when Matt Meyer was the Governor
who could keep him or replace him. The Chairman did not miss a race.
And the man who lobbies for his port lobbies for the developer.”
IV. The Two Homebuilders at the Table, and What the Laws Built for Them
Kevin P. Kelly’s tax-credit apartments, Jonathan Horner’s employer and his association, and the laws, orders, and fee waivers signed for both
Kevin P. Kelly, who builds the apartments the State finances
Kevin P. Kelly of Hockessin holds one of the two Council on Development Finance seats the statute reserves for a New Castle County resident. He has held it since before the meeting that matters most to this story. On January 22, 2024, when Regina Mitchell, then Director of the Delaware Division of Small Business, and Kurt Foreman of the Delaware Prosperity Partnership presented the new dollar tiers that turn a 102.57-acre parcel into a $1,900,000 claim, the minutes list Kevin Kelly present.
He is the Chairman and Managing Principal of Leon N. Weiner & Associates, Inc., 4 Denny Road, Wilmington, the company Leon Weiner, a fifty-three-year veteran of the housing industry and a past President of the National Association of Home Builders, ran until his death in November 2002, which builds, owns, and manages apartment communities, more than 14,000 homes and apartments in ten states, much of it affordable housing financed through the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, the federal credit that the Delaware State Housing Authority allocates in this State.
Its management arm is Arbor Management, LLC. Its Executive Vice President is Sean Kelly. Its Delaware work includes Owens and Queen Manor at 426 South New Street in Dover, 110 apartments, a $29,000,000 renovation financed with those tax credits and $1,000,000 in congressionally directed spending, where United States Senator Chris Coons, United States Senator Tom Carper, Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester, and Delaware State Housing Authority Director Eugene Young Jr. stood with Sean Kelly on September 8, 2023, to break ground. The National Association of Home Builders put Kevin Kelly in its Housing Hall of Fame in October 2021.
Now look at what the Governor signed in his first eighteen months, and ask who it was written for. Both laws reached his desk as substitutes for the bills as introduced, rewritten in the spring of 2026 before the two-thirds votes that passed them.
Senate Substitute 2 to Senate Bill 23, the Housing for Every Delawarean Act, sponsored by Senator Russ Huxtable of the 6th Senate District and Representative Kendra Johnson of the 5th Representative District, requires every county and every municipality of more than 2,000 residents to write an affordable housing plan into its comprehensive plan, with six mandatory elements including an increase in maximum permitted residential density, sets a goal of 20 percent affordable housing for each of them, measured annually by the Delaware State Housing Authority, shortens the rezoning deadline to twelve months, and, where the deadline is missed, requires a conforming rezoning to be approved within twenty-one days of filing.
House Substitute 1 to House Bill 450, the Reforming Opportunities and Accelerated Development for Delaware Act, sponsored by Representative William Bush of the 29th Representative District with Senator Nicole Poore, Senator Ray Seigfried and Representative Edward Osienski among its co-sponsors, builds, in its own synopsis, on Executive Order 18 and the Permitting Accelerator: it sets the traffic study threshold at 500 peak-hour trips, orders the Delaware Department of Transportation to establish statewide transportation impact fees by January 1, 2027, and raised the surcharge on those fees from the 1 percent in the original bill to 2 percent. Senate Substitute 2 to Senate Bill 23, signed July 13, 2026, requires every county to permit townhouses, apartments, and stacked flats at four units an acre and up, by right, with no public hearing, across the growth areas that cover 43 percent of New Castle County, 13 percent of Kent and 12 percent of Sussex, by June 1, 2027.
House Substitute 1 to House Bill 450, signed the same day, creates a State transportation impact fee on new development and, in Section 507(b)(1)f, orders the Secretary of Transportation to waive or reduce it for any residential development “financed in whole, or in part, by the Delaware State Housing Authority.” Executive Order 17, signed February 9, 2026, and attested by Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez, moved $388,780,000 of private activity bond capacity into that Authority.
Executive Order 18, signed February 26, 2026, with the Home Builders Association of Delaware in the room, created a 120-business-day “Housing Fast Lane” inside the Delaware Permitting Accelerator. A company that builds State-financed apartment communities in Delaware had, by the summer of 2026, a faster approval, no hearing, a waived road fee, and a bigger pool of financing, every piece of it signed by the same Governor. And the Home Builders Association of Delaware that stood in the room for Executive Order 18 is the association Jonathan Horner presides over: its 2026 board lists him as President, the National Association of Home Builders’ March 3, 2026, account of the signing names him in the photograph beside the Governor, Richard Forsten of Saul Ewing LLP, Pamela J. Scott’s firm, is its Secretary and Government Relations Co-chair, and Debra Finocchiaro of Leon N. Weiner & Associates, Kevin P. Kelly’s firm, sits on its board. The two homebuilders on the Council share an association, and its President was at the Governor’s elbow when the fast lane was signed.
Kevin P. Kelly and his company have written that Governor checks in every race he has run. Leon N. Weiner & Associates, Inc. gave Meyer for New Castle County $600 on October 18, 2016, and $600 on October 31, 2019. Kevin Kelly gave it $600 on August 17, 2020, from 4 Denny Road. He gave Meyer for Delaware $600 on June 28, 2023, $600 on February 6, 2024, and $1,200 on September 20, 2024, ten days after the primary, from 305 High Ridge Road in Greenville. Then the two that land on this story. On December 1, 2025, with Matt Meyer in his first year as the Governor who seats the Council, Kevin Kelly gave Change Can’t Wait PAC $5,000 from 4 Denny Road. On September 9, 2026, nineteen days before the Council took up SRJC, LLC, Leon N. Weiner & Associates, Inc. gave it $5,000 more, from the same address. Eight checks, $14,200. The committee filed the company’s check on October 5, 2026, one week after the hearing, which is why Part One could not see it.
“$600 in 2016. $600 in 2019. $600 in 2020. $600 in 2023. $600 and $1,200 in 2024. $5,000 in December 2025, after the Governor had the pen. $5,000 on September 9, 2026. Nineteen days later he sat down and voted. Count the days, and
then count what the laws gave his company.”
Jonathan Horner, whose employer paid at both ends, and whose own case is in the Secretary’s department
Jonathan Horner of Lewes is the General Counsel of Schell Brothers, President of the Home Builders Association of Delaware (2026, Board of Directors) and Residential Committee Co-chair for Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware. Schell Brothers is the Rehoboth Beach homebuilder at 20184 Phillips Street that Chris Schell and Preston A. Schell built into the largest builder in coastal Sussex County, where the AR-1 farmland that allowed two houses an acre must, by June 1, 2027, under the same Senate Substitute 2 to Senate Bill 23, allow four, with apartments permitted, across the 12 percent of the county the State calls growth area. Schell Brothers’ real estate arm, Ocean Atlantic Companies, owned all four corners of the Route 301 interchange at Jamison Corner, the interchange the Scott Run traffic signal feeds, and sold the ground across Route 301 from the Scott Run site to Dermody Properties for the 1,409,850-square-foot warehouse the neighbors at Traditions at Whitehall fought with red yard signs.
Part One set out the $25,000 that Schell Brothers LLC wrote to Change Can’t Wait PAC on September 10, 2025, fifteen days after Governor Matt Meyer seated Jonathan Horner on the Council on August 26, 2025. The 8-day primary report, filed September 8, 2026, adds the other end: Schell Brothers Delaware, same Phillips Street address, $10,000 on August 20, 2026, thirty-nine days before the Council took up SRJC, LLC. The family had been paying since the Harveys and the Levins did. Chris Schell gave Meyer for Delaware $600 on December 27, 2021, nine days after that first Saturday, and $22,400 in all; Preston A. Schell $17,400; Joseph M. Schell of Vero Beach, Florida, $11,200; Deborah Schell and Lori J. Schell $1,200 each. Family and companies, twenty checks, $88,400, and $600 more to Marcus Henry two days after he was elected County Executive, filed as “Schoell Brothers LLC.”
What Part One did not have is the case. On November 20, 2020, Mohammed Sedghi and Paula Burkhardt-Sedghi signed a contract for a new Schell Brothers house in Selbyville and paid an $82,925 deposit. On April 19, 2021, by the complaint, Mohammed Sedghi telephoned Jonathan Horner about an addendum; Jonathan Horner threatened to cancel the contract under a clause about “community, culture, or operations”; Mohammed Sedghi said he would exercise his fair housing rights; Jonathan Horner cancelled the contract and, by the complaint, said, “I know your kind of people.”
The buyers filed with the Delaware Division of Human and Civil Rights and with the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development on May 28, 2021. The Division issued a charge of discrimination on July 25, 2022. The Delaware Human and Civil Rights Commission sued in the Superior Court, Civil Action S23C-04-004, alleging refusal to sell, retaliation, and discrimination on the basis of religion and national origin. On April 28, 2025, Judge Mark H. Conner dismissed the contract counts against Jonathan Horner personally and let the discrimination and retaliation counts against him proceed. Four months later, Governor Matt Meyer put him on the Council on Development Finance. The Division of Human and Civil Rights that brought the case is a division of the Department of State. The Secretary of State is Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez. The Governor who seated the defendant is the Governor who appointed her.
“Seated August 26, 2025. $25,000 from his employer on September 10, 2025. $10,000
from his employer on August 20, 2026. The vote on September 28, 2026. And the whole
time, the State’s own civil rights commission was suing him by name in Superior Court.
The Governor read the opinion, or he did not. Either way, he gave the man a vote.”
The two associations he leads, and the day the contractors came
Jonathan Horner is not only Schell Brothers’ lawyer. For 2026 he is President of the Home Builders Association of Delaware, the trade association of the State’s homebuilders at 13 Noble’s Pond Crossing in Dover, and Co-chair, with Nathan Walter of NVR Homes, of the Residential Committee of Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware, the merit-shop contractors’ chapter at 31 Blevins Drive in New Castle. Run both rosters against the Governor’s filings, and both associations, their officers, and their political committees are there.
The homebuilders first. The Home Builders Association of Delaware keeps a committee called Hammer & Nails; its political arm, filed as the “Hammers & Nails Club” from 1600 North Little Creek Road in Dover, gave Matt Meyer $600 on October 18, 2016, $600 on August 7, 2020, and $600 on October 24, 2024, and “Delaware Home Builders LLC,” from the same address, gave $600 on September 27, 2016, and $1,200 on August 13, 2024. Six checks, $3,600, from the association whose President sits on the Council. Its Past President and Government Affairs Co-chair, Michael Riemann of Becker Morgan Group, gave $1,600 in four checks.
Its Secretary and the other Government Affairs Co-chair is Richard Forsten of Saul Ewing LLP, Pamela J. Scott’s partner; Saul Ewing’s own September 28, 2016, check was filed from 222 Delaware Avenue, Suite 1200, the suite Barnes & Thornburg occupies today. Chesapeake Utilities Corporation, the company of its Associate Vice President, Dave Detrick, gave $2,400 in three checks. And Debra Finocchiaro, a director, is of Leon N. Weiner & Associates, Kevin P. Kelly’s firm.
Now the contractors. The chapter’s ABC Merit Shop PAC gave the three Matt Meyer committees $10,400 in eight checks between June 7, 2016, and October 18, 2024, including $5,000 to Change Can’t Wait PAC on July 17, 2024. And on Thursday, December 15, 2022, the chapter came in a body.
Thirty-six checks reached Meyer for Delaware that day, $24,450, the largest single day in the committee’s first two years, and eighteen of them, $15,400, came from the chapter’s political action committee and from the companies and people on its board: Master Interiors, Inc., the company of Chairman R. Jeffrey Faull, $1,200; R.C. Fabricators, Inc., the company of director Matthew Suppe, $1,200; GFP Cement Contractors LLC, the company of director Dominic J. Papa, $1,200; Jeffrey DiSabatino, Chair of the chapter’s Legislative and Legal Rights Committee, $1,200; Lawrence DiSabatino, $500; Todd Moran of M. Davis & Sons, Inc., First Vice Chair, $500; Stephen Lex of Pettinaro Construction, Membership Chair, $500; Assurance Media LLC, the company of Events Chair Matt Laird, $1,200; Pace Electric & Generator Services, the company of Work Force Excellence Chair Corrine Peters, $1,000; P&C Roofing Inc., the company of Immediate Past Chairwoman Angela P. Mariano, $250; and Nickle Electrical Companies, George & Lynch, Service Unlimited, Ralph G. Degli Obizzi & Sons, Landmark Engineering, Powell Insurance Agency and The Borsello Companies. Rodger Levenson, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of WSFS Bank, where the chapter’s Treasurer, Mark Lucey, works, wrote $1,200 the same day.
The families on that board kept paying. The DiSabatinos, who hold the chapter’s Secretary’s chair through Kevin DiSabatino and its Legislative chair through Jeffrey DiSabatino, gave $15,600 in twenty-five checks across the three committees. Stephen Julian, a director, is of Eastern States Construction Service, Inc., 702 First State Boulevard, Wilmington, the family firm founded in 1953 and managed by its second generation, Francis Julian and Richard Julian; Richard J. Julian of Greenspring Road, Greenville, who gave Change Can’t Wait PAC $20,000 on March 11, 2024, and $5,000 on August 3, 2026, is that family, and the Julians gave $35,500 in fourteen checks. The Pettinaro family and the Verino Pettinaro Revocable Trust gave $14,000, $10,000 of it to the political action committee on April 4, 2024. And on September 15, 2025, five days after Schell Brothers LLC wrote its $25,000, M. Davis and Sons, Inc. of 9 Tyler Way, Newark, Todd Moran’s company, wrote Change Can’t Wait PAC $5,000.
Table 2A. The two trade associations Jonathan Horner leads, in the Matt Meyer filings
“One man, one Council seat, two trade associations. The homebuilders’ political arm, $3,600. The contractors’ political arm, $10,400. The contractors’ board, $15,400 in a single December day. The Governor did not just seat a lawyer. He seated the industry.”
V. The Banker Who Priced It, and the Man Who Signs It
William “Jack” Riddle’s motion and his wife’s three checks; CJ Bell’s three checks and his signature
William “Jack” Riddle of Rehoboth Beach is the Governor’s appointee for the Sussex County seat. He is President and Chief Lending Officer of Community Bank Delaware, the Lewes bank he helped open in 2006 after twenty-four years in management at Citizens Bank, a University of Delaware finance graduate with a master’s from Salisbury, the Delmarva Council of the Boy Scouts of America’s 2023 Sussex County Distinguished Citizen, for fifteen years the treasurer of Nanticoke Health Services, which is now TidalHealth, and a board member of the Delaware Health Facilities Authority, the State body that issues tax-exempt bonds for hospitals and nursing homes, and of the Delaware Solid Waste Authority. Community Bank Delaware is a state-chartered bank. The Office of the State Bank Commissioner, which charters it, examines it, and can take its charter, sits inside the Department of State, under Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez. Governor Matt Meyer's appointee, William “Jack” Riddle, votes on the Governor’s grants, and the Governor’s Secretary of State, Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez, regulates his bank.
William “Jack” Riddle is also the member who, on January 22, 2024, made the motion by which the Council adopted the Site Readiness Fund’s dollar tiers, seconded by Richard Rowland, a certified public accountant who has since left the Council, and carried 6 to 0 with one abstention. Those tiers are the reason Seaford Industrial, LLC got $1,900,000 for 106 acres on January 27, 2025, and the reason SRJC, LLC asked for exactly $1,900,000 for 102.57. No check appears in his own name. Susan Riddle, his wife, gave Meyer for Delaware $600 on June 20, 2023, $100 on August 16, 2024, and $500 on October 18, 2024, eighteen days before the general election, from 34846 Picnic Basket Court, Rehoboth Beach. Three checks, $1,200, from the house of the man who priced the grant.
CJ Bell is not at the table. He is the table. By Title 29, Section 8753A of the Delaware Code, the Delaware Economic Development Authority “shall consist of the Director” of the Division of Small Business, and by Section 8711A(h), the authority to approve a Site Readiness grant and sign it is his alone; the nine only recommend. Christopher “CJ” Bell worked for United States Senator Tom Carper and for Governor John Carney, then for Matt Meyer at New Castle County as Manager of Special Projects, and on July 1, 2023, took the Economic Development Director’s job from Charuni Patibanda when Matt Meyer moved her to Land Use; Marcus Henry had held it before her.
Governor-elect Matt Meyer named him Director of the Division of Small Business on January 9, 2025, which put CJ Bell back under Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez, in her department, signing the money. Before the appointment, from 5304 Winterhaven Drive in Newark, CJ Bell gave Meyer for Delaware $150 on December 30, 2023, $150 on March 13, 2024, and $200 on August 27, 2024, fourteen days before the primary. Three checks, $500. The amounts are small. The order is not: the employee wrote the candidate three checks, the candidate won, and the candidate made the employee the one man in Delaware who signs this money, in a department run by the woman he had replaced at the county.
Table 2. The Council on Development Finance and the Director, with every Matt Meyer check
The Council recommended SRJC, LLC on September 28, 2026, 7 to 1, with 1 reported abstention; Senator Nicole Poore cast the no. Part One has the hearing. This report has the ledger behind the chairs.
RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
VI. The Circuit, and the Rule Written for the Second Trip
Drawbridge, Stoltz, the Returning Awardees Procedure, and $207,500,000 of farmland sold to Amazon
Part One drew the circuit once: the Fund paid Drawbridge Claymont LLC $1,000,000 on March 28, 2022, to clear 58 acres of the old General Chemical ground at 6300 Philadelphia Pike, and Drawbridge and its owner, Keith Delaney, founder and Chief Executive Officer of the D2 Organization of Norristown, Pennsylvania, put $60,000 into Change Can’t Wait PAC in 2024, one check filed from the address of the parcel the State had paid to clear. What Part One could not see is that the Council wrote itself a rule for the return trip, and that the developer used it.
On June 27, 2025, CJ Bell, five months into the job, presented the Returning Awardees Procedure to the Council on Development Finance, the rule under which a developer the Fund has already paid may come back for more. Kurt Foreman and Linda Parkowski of the Delaware Prosperity Partnership spoke in support. Linda Parkowski, from 1442 Skeeter Neck Road in Frederica, had given Meyer for Delaware $600 on September 13, 2024, and $100 on September 30, 2024; Mike Parkowski, same address, $1,200 on October 18, 2024; household, $1,900, in the six weeks before the election; and the Dover law firm Parkowski, Guerke & Swayze, P.A. had given $1,800 in three checks.
The Partnership is the private nonprofit that receives every Site Readiness application before the State does. Its board, co-chaired by Governor Matt Meyer and by Rodger Levenson, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of WSFS Bank, the bank Fred Sears once ran, voted on August 18, 2025, to expand itself to thirty-five seats, and on August 21 the Governor filled one with Robert Wittig, co-founder of DSM Commercial, whose network Part One traced at $29,400.
On May 12, 2026, ten and a half months after the Returning Awardees Procedure was presented, Drawbridge Claymont LLC gave Change Can’t Wait PAC $25,000, filed from 34 East Germantown Pike in Norristown. Drawbridge, $55,000 in two checks; Keith Delaney, $30,000 in two and $1,200 to Meyer for Delaware; Alissa Delaney, $1,200. $87,400, and Drawbridge Claymont LLC is now the fifth-largest contributor in the committee’s history, ahead of Alan Levin.
Stoltz Real Estate Partners closed the other kind of circuit. PR-Stoltz Venture LLC took $2,400,000 from the Fund on September 23, 2024, the largest award in its history, over Senator Nicole Poore’s objection, with Shawn Tucker of Barnes & Thornburg at the table for it. Jack Stoltz and Susan Stoltz wrote Meyer for Delaware $1,200 each thirty-one days later. Then the firm sold the next farm. Its 301 Logistics LLC sold 130 acres west of Middletown to Amazon on May 9, 2025, for $87,500,000, and the adjacent 117 acres in April 2026 for $120,000,000: $207,500,000 for land that had cost $6,500,000 in March 2023. Its lawyer at Barley Mill Plaza in 2010 was Pamela J. Scott of Saul Ewing LLP, who would chair Marcus Henry’s transition.
The State money goes out as a grant and comes back as a check, the land goes out as a farm and comes back as an Amazon, and the same two or three lawyers stand at every window. And the applicant itself belongs in this section. Section I set out the Coastal Zone Act application that identifies Governor Lea Road LLC, the recipient of $1,000,000 from the Fund on December 12, 2022, as a Harvey Hanna & Associates entity signed by E. Thomas Harvey IV. That makes Harvey Hanna & Associates the third Site Readiness recipient in the Governor’s filings, beside Drawbridge Claymont LLC and Stoltz Real Estate Partners, and the second, after Drawbridge, to come back to the window after CJ Bell presented the Returning Awardees Procedure on June 27, 2025.
Drawbridge came back with a $25,000 check. Harvey Hanna came back with a $1,900,000 request. The Harvey and Hanna families had already written the Governor $13,200; their lobbyist, their lawyer, their water company and their incoming government affairs manager had written him $4,650 more on a single Tuesday; and the family’s first seven checks, the ones written before Matt Meyer had announced for anything, were a year old when the firm took its first grant, for a speculative warehouse on a brownfield between a Superfund site and a refinery.
“The Fund gave Drawbridge $1,000,000. Drawbridge and its owner gave the Governor $87,400. The Fund gave Stoltz $2,400,000. Stoltz gave the Governor $2,400 and sold
the next farm to Amazon for $207,500,000. Then the Director who signs the checks presented a rule so they could come back. They came back.”
RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
VII. The Account That Stopped Being a Campaign
$36,576 the day after the election; $393,428.95 with no race to run; every 2025 dollar dated after Alan Levin took the gavel
On Wednesday, November 6, 2024, Change Can’t Wait PAC, account 02005278, had done what it was built to do. Alan Levin had organized it in June 2021, a year before Matt Meyer announced for Governor, with Maribeth Przywara as treasurer. It had raised $1,773,981.02, taken $250,000 from Michael R. Bloomberg six days before the primary, paid $500,000 to Targeted Platform Media of Crownsville, Maryland, and moved $762,060.64 to its own third-party advertiser in the four weeks before the primary. It had spent $1,568,590.17 to make a County Executive a Governor. It closed the year with $36,576.80.
A committee like that usually goes quiet. This one did not. Its 2025 year-end report, filed January 4, 2026, and signed by Thomas Meitzler, a traffic engineer with Traffic Planning and Design of Elkton, Maryland, shows $172,600 in new money, every dollar of it dated after Monday, March 17, 2025. That is the day Alan Levin walked into his first meeting of the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council as its Chairman, a council he had never sat on, and, by the minutes, “called the meeting to order at 1:30 p.m. He introduced himself and welcomed the other new members.”
Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez was at that table as a member. The man Alan Levin replaced, Michael Houghton, had chaired the council for eight years and had given Matt Meyer $300 in 2019 and $1,200 in September 2024. The Governor would remove him from the council altogether on March 25, 2026, the day after his question about two months of missing corporate revenue figures was reported, and Senate President Pro Tempore David Sokola would call it “undue political interference.”
The 2026 reports show the account becoming something else. $246,000 between January 1 and August 16. $20,000 in the three weeks to September 7. $22,500 in the four weeks to October 4. Twenty-five contributors, fifteen of them new, slightly more than half the money from outside Delaware. Twelve of the twenty-six checks, $111,000, arrived between April 8 and April 29, the month the committee paid Dover Motor Speedway LLC $28,750 on April 14 and Levy Restaurants at Dover Motor Speedway $10,577.40 on April 19. That is a fundraiser at the speedway, in the spring of a year with no Governor’s race, for a Governor three years from his next one.
Table 3. Change Can’t Wait PAC, the four reports filed after the election
“$36,576 the day after the election. $393,428 two years later, with no race to run.
Raised under the gavel of the man who certifies what Delaware can spend, at a table where the Secretary of State also sits. That is not a campaign fund. That is a retainer.”
VIII. Who Came to the Speedway, and What Each of Them Had Before the State
Nursing homes, hospitals, a nuclear operator, a sportsbook, a prediction market, and the decision each was waiting on in Dover
Look at who paid in 2026, and then look at what each of them was waiting on in Dover. None of them is a warehouse developer. All of them have a decision pending with the government the Governor runs.
The nursing homes. On May 11, 2026, the Delaware Health Care Facilities Association, the trade association for Delaware’s nursing homes and assisted living facilities, at 501 Silverside Road, Suite 51, Wilmington, gave $50,000, the largest single check the committee has received since Michael R. Bloomberg’s $250,000. Its Executive Director is Cheryl Heiks, whom Governor Matt Meyer reappointed to the Delaware Health Resources Board, the body that decides whether a new nursing home or hospital wing may be built, and whom the Division of Medicaid and Medical Services reappointed to the Delaware Medicaid Advisory Committee. Its members are paid, for most of their residents, by Medicaid, at rates the State sets; the Fiscal Year 2025 budget had added $7,000,000 to a $5,000,000 enhancement of those rates, $12,000,000 a year, on the association’s own account. Now put the check on the State’s calendar.
In December 2025, the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council, under Chairman Alan Levin, set the State’s health care spending benchmark for 2026 at 4.9 percent, the ceiling the State sets on how fast providers may grow their costs, up from the 3 percent of 2024. On April 29, 2026, the council’s Health Care Spending Benchmark Subcommittee, on which Brian Frazee, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Delaware Healthcare Association, the hospital association, sits and voted yes, and on which David Tam, President and Chief Executive Officer of Beebe Healthcare, and Gary Siegelman, Chief Medical Officer of Bayhealth, also sit, recommended 5.0 percent for 2027.
On April 21, 2026, eight days before that vote, the Delaware Healthcare Association’s political action committee gave the Governor’s committee $5,000. On May 11, the nursing homes gave $50,000. On May 18, 2026, at Buena Vista, Alan Levin called the full council to order, Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez among the thirty-one members present, and the council voted to accept 5.0 percent. Senator Ray Seigfried, who had called the spending trend “totally unacceptable” and co-sponsored Senate Bill 1 to cap hospital prices at 250 percent of Medicare, would be endorsed against by the Governor three months later. Section X has that.
The rest of the health care money reads the same way. The Glen E. Tullman Irrevocable Trust of 645 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, the trust of the health care technology executive who founded Livongo and Transcarent, gave $10,000 on February 27, 2026. Carlos Zaffirini, whose Austin firm structures the supplemental Medicaid payments hospitals receive, had given $2,500 on November 11, 2025. Align Technology gave $7,500 on November 5, 2025. Health care was 22.5 percent of the committee’s 2026 money, and the Fiscal Year 2027 operating budget the House passed on June 24, 2026, added $128,500,000 for Medicaid and $54,000,000 in spending authority for hospital quality assessments.
The nuclear plant. PSE&G Services Corp., Post Office Box 1868, Newark, New Jersey, the Public Service Enterprise Group subsidiary that operates the Salem and Hope Creek nuclear generating stations on Artificial Island, across the Delaware River from Delaware City and in plain sight of it, gave $10,000 on July 15, 2026. It had never given before. Executive Order 18, signed February 26, 2026, created a category of “Priority Energy Projects” with a State concierge, while a 1,200-megawatt data center with 516 diesel generators sat in appeal at Delaware City and Delmarva Power’s supply rate went up 17 to 20 percent on June 1. Delaware is a partner in the MACH2 hydrogen hub that runs on Salem’s power, and the Public Service Commission that sits inside the Department of State decides what Delmarva’s customers pay for it.
The gambling money. Rush Street Interactive, the Chicago company whose BetRivers app is the only online sportsbook and online casino the State of Delaware allows, under a five-year exclusive contract the Delaware Lottery signed in August 2023 after 888 Holdings walked away, gave $18,800 in two checks on November 19 and 21, 2025. Its Chairman, Neil G. Bluhm, the Chicago real estate and casino billionaire, gave $5,000 on November 20, 2025, and four members of the Bluhm family gave Meyer for Delaware $1,200 each the same week.
In 2024, Representative Franklin D. Cooke of the 16th Representative District had carried House Bill 365 to open Delaware to six online operators; it died, and on September 15, 2026, he lost his primary. Kalshi Inc., the prediction-market company, filing from 20118 North 67th Street in Glendale, Arizona, gave $10,000 on August 25, 2026, the same day the committee wrote its $50,000 check into the primaries. By October 12, 2026, New Jersey, Maryland, Nevada, Massachusetts, and Missouri had sued Kalshi or sent it cease-and-desist letters over sports contracts they call unlicensed gambling. Delaware had done nothing.
And the builders. Drawbridge Claymont LLC, $25,000 on May 12. Schell Brothers Delaware, $10,000 on August 20. Leon N. Weiner & Associates, Inc., $5,000 on September 9. Dennis Salter of 621 Delaware Street, New Castle, the address of Edinburgh Capital Management LLC, which gave $5,000 on June 17, 2024, $5,000 on September 26. R&M Recycling, LLC of 242 North James Street, Newport, which holds a Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control permit to process asphalt shingles at 924 Heald Street, Wilmington, $10,000 on April 9.
Michael Hynansky of 1700 Walnut Green Road, Wilmington, of the automobile dealership family, $20,000 on March 27, his fourth check, $50,000 in all, $100,000 with John Hynansky. Todd Fryatt of Boston, $25,000 on April 16, his twelfth check since 2022, $73,000 lifetime. Salvatore Vitale of 401 East Pratt Street, Baltimore, the World Trade Center, $25,000 on April 13, new. Jason Gordon of Narberth, Pennsylvania, two checks of $12,500 on April 29, new.
Table 4. Every 2026 receipt, largest first, through October 4, 2026
Table 4. Every 2026 receipt, largest first, through October 4, 2026
“The nursing homes gave $50,000 between the subcommittee vote and the full vote.
The hospitals gave $5,000 the week before theirs. The sportsbook with the only
license gave $18,800. The prediction market five states have sued gave $10,000,
and Delaware has not sued. Nobody at the Speedway was there for the racing.”
IX. The County’s Hands
Marcus Henry’s transition chairs, the Governor’s bookkeeper, the lawyers, and the officials who carried out the pattern
The statute will not let a developer into the Delaware Room alone. Section 8711A(c) requires the county or municipality with planning jurisdiction to sponsor, and for the Scott Run parcel, in unincorporated New Castle County, the sponsor is the administration of County Executive Marcus Henry, who took office January 7, 2025, and who was Matt Meyer’s Director of Economic Development and Policy and then his General Manager of Community Services across the eight years I sat in the Council President’s chair. Marcus Henry gave Matt Meyer $600 on December 7, 2017, the same day as Fred Sears, Alan Levin and Saul Ewing LLP, and $1,200 on September 7, 2022, while on the county payroll. Harvey Hanna & Associates, Inc. gave his committee $600 three weeks before he was elected; Schell Brothers LLC gave $600 two days after.
On November 20, 2024, County Executive-elect Marcus Henry named three people to run his transition, whose Land Use and Economic Development committees produced County Executive Order 2026-06, the expedited land use track he signed on April 28, 2026. All three are in the Governor’s filings, and one of them kept the Governor’s books.
Richard Przywara, Chief Executive Officer of Woodlawn Trustees, the Todmorden Foundation and the Rockford Woodlawn Fund, the land trust that owns the Brandywine Valley north of Wilmington, gave Meyer for New Castle County $300 on November 4, 2019, from 5515 East Timberview Court, Wilmington. Maribeth Przywara, at the same address, was the treasurer of Change Can’t Wait PAC from its first report in 2021 through 2023, the years in which it raised $273,460 and Alan Levin wrote his first two $5,000 checks; she gave Meyer for Delaware $250 on May 15, 2024, and Christopher Przywara, same address, gave $300 on August 28, 2024. The household that kept the books of the committee that elected the Governor co-chaired the transition of the County Executive who would sponsor the developer’s application.
Wali W. Rushdan II is the Barnes & Thornburg partner of Section I, in the suite with Shawn Tucker and Douglas Gramiak. The County Executive’s transition co-chair practices in the law firm that represents the developer the County Executive sponsored and lobbies for the port the Secretary of State chairs.
Pamela J. Scott is a land use partner at Saul Ewing LLP and the wife of former County Executive Paul G. Clark, about whose practice the New Castle County Ethics Commission wrote in February 2011 that “there seems to be no remedy within the Commission’s authority which will eliminate the potential for conflict of interests or appearances of impropriety.” She represented Stoltz Real Estate Partners at Barley Mill Plaza in 2010. Saul Ewing LLP gave Meyer for New Castle County $600 in each of 2016, 2017, 2019 and 2020, and Meyer for Delaware $300 in 2021, $600 in 2022, $300 in 2023, and $1,200 on October 10, 2024, three weeks before the election and six weeks before she was named. Nine checks, $4,800.
Around the three chairs stand the firms that build and get it approved. EDiS, the Wilmington construction manager, $1,200. Delaware Home Builders LLC, $1,800. The Heisler family of the Reybold development company, $10,400, including Jerome S. Heisler Jr.’s $5,000 to the political action committee on December 16, 2023. Max Walton of Connolly Gallagher, who argued the county’s losing Supreme Court appeal in the Dermody Properties traffic study case, $1,350. Vincent G. Robertson, Assistant County Attorney of Sussex County, who led Sussex County Council through Senate Substitute 2 to Senate Bill 23 on July 28, 2026, $1,200 on October 18, 2024.
Table 5. The county side: role, checks to Matt Meyer, checks to Marcus Henry
And the officials who carried out the pattern Part One’s Section XIX describes gave him money while they did it. Wilson B. Davis, the County Attorney who telephoned Sanjay Bhatnagar from vacation on July 8, 2020, and told him, “you serve at my pleasure,” $600 in 2019 and $1,150 in 2021. Colonel Vaughn Bond, the Police Chief who opened the “Conduct Unbecoming” file on Master Corporal Gina Collini five days after she answered the fundraising email, $1,600 in three checks. Vanessa Phillips, Chief Administrative Officer, $1,750 in five. Jacqueline Jenkins, Human Resources Officer, $1,050 in three. William B. Larson Jr., the MG+M partner and Senate ethics advisor who stood up at the September 25, 2026, training to explain the laws to the counties, $200 on August 23, 2024.
“The County Attorney who made the call, $1,750. The police chief who opened the file, $1,600. The Chief Administrative Officer, $1,750. The Human Resources Officer, $1,050. The Land Use chief who recorded the plan, $1,708, and her house $5,566. The revenue chairman who was removed for asking a question, $1,500. Everyone in the building paid. Only one of them was shown the door, and it was the one who asked.”
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X. The Price of No, Paid in August
$50,000, eight days after the endorsements, twenty-one days before Senator Ray Seigfried lost
Part One ended on the price of no: ten years of what happened to people who said it to Matt Meyer. The 8-day primary report, filed September 8, 2026, puts a dollar figure and a date on it.
Senator Ray Seigfried, Democrat of Claymont, represents the 5th Senate District, Claymont, Arden and the north end of Brandywine Hundred. Senator Dan Cruce, Democrat of Wilmington, represents the 1st Senate District, Wilmington’s north side and the Brandywine. Both came to the Senate in February 2025 special elections, Senator Ray Seigfried for the seat Lieutenant Governor Kyle Evans Gay vacated and Senator Dan Cruce for the seat Sarah McBride vacated when she went to Congress, after Governor-elect Matt Meyer had tried in December 2024 to force open special primaries for those seats and party leaders had told him the Delaware Code did not allow it.
Both spent their first session on health care costs. Senator Ray Seigfried co-sponsored Senate Bill 1, which would hold hospitals to 250 percent of Medicare pricing unless they adopt global budgets, called the State’s health care spending growth “totally unacceptable,” and criticized in public a State Employee Benefits Committee report on lowering prescription drug prices for State employees and retirees, a committee chaired by the Governor’s own Director of the Office of Management and Budget, saying it lacked initiative. Senator Dan Cruce sponsored Senate Bill 228, which let New Castle County correct the outlier commercial assessments from the reassessment conducted while Matt Meyer was County Executive; the Governor let it become law without his signature.
On Monday, August 17, 2026, Governor Matt Meyer endorsed Shay Frisby, a State social services supervisor and Working Families Party candidate, against Senator Ray Seigfried, and Adriana Bohm, a sociology professor and Working Families Party candidate, against Senator Dan Cruce, saying each was “committed to taking on the state’s toughest battles, regardless of the odds.” Senator Ray Seigfried said the Governor’s office had never contacted him and that the Governor was retaliating: “He is angry mostly because I exposed the bureaucratic inertia of his team.” Senate President Pro Tempore David Sokola said it was hard to think the motive toward Senator Dan Cruce was anything but personal hostility, and that a party should not try to undo elections that did not go its way; the Governor’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Nick Merlino, answered by wishing the retiring President Pro Tempore well.
Representative Debra Heffernan had said in July, of the Governor’s line-item veto of the Legislative Hall expansion, that “Governor Meyer has a tendency to take retaliation action.” Senator Trey Paradee of Dover, Chairman of the Joint Finance Committee, said the veto itself was retaliation for the General Assembly’s override of the Governor’s veto of a cannabis zoning bill.
On Tuesday, August 25, 2026, eight days after the endorsements, the committee Alan Levin organized paid $50,000 to Progressive Democrats for Delaware, Inc., 19 East Commons Boulevard, New Castle, the grassroots organization that raises money for progressive candidates in Democratic primaries. It was the committee’s only political expenditure of the year, and it was two-and-a-half times what the committee had spent on anything but the speedway since the election. The same day, Kalshi Inc. put $10,000 in.
On September 15, 2026, Shay Frisby defeated Senator Ray Seigfried, 58 percent to 42. Senator Dan Cruce held the 1st District by 146 votes.
That is what the standing account is for. It does not need a Governor’s race. It needs a senator who asks about hospital prices, and it has $393,428.95 for the next one.
“They did not have to write ‘yes’ into the statute. They only had to make sure
everyone in the building already knew the answer, and in August they showed
the Senate the price of the other one. $50,000, eight days after the endorsement,
twenty-one days before the primary, against the senator who asked about
hospital prices in the year the hospitals and the nursing homes paid $55,000.”
XI. How It Works, in One Page
The account, the appointments, the laws, and the lawyers at every window
Read the names once more, not down the list but across it, and the machine shows itself.
Money comes in to one account, Change Can’t Wait PAC, from people who have something pending before the State: nursing homes before the revenue council’s spending benchmark, hospitals before the same subcommittee, a sportsbook holding the only license, a prediction market no one in Dover has sued, a nuclear operator across the river, and the builders of apartments and warehouses. The account is chaired, in effect, by Alan Levin, who organized it, who sits at the head of the council that certifies every dollar the Bond Bill can spend, and who no longer has to write a check himself.
Appointments go out from one office, the Governor’s, to the same people and their lawyers. Fred Sears II, who has paid in every race, chairs the Council that recommends the grant. Kevin P. Kelly and Jonathan Horner, whose companies paid nineteen and thirty-nine days before the vote, sit on it; Jack Riddle, whose wife paid, priced it. CJ Bell, who paid before he was hired, signs it.
Robert Wittig, whose firm’s network paid $29,400, sits on the Prosperity Partnership board that receives the application before the State does, beside Kurt Foreman, who presents it, and Linda Parkowski, whose household paid. And Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez, who recorded the warehouse plan at the county, whose household paid sixteen times, runs the department that pays the grant, registered the applicant, hosted the hearing, licenses the banker’s bank, sets the water company’s rates, licenses the fundraiser’s restaurants, and is suing one of the Council members; she chairs the port whose lobbyist works for the developer and whose Vice Chairman ran the vote; and she sits on the council the fundraiser chairs.
Laws and orders go out from the same office to the same people. Senate Substitute 2 to Senate Bill 23 and House Substitute 1 to House Bill 450 take the hearing and the traffic study from the counties and give the by-right density to the homebuilders at the table. Executive Order 17, which the Secretary of State attested, fills the Delaware State Housing Authority with $388,780,000, and House Substitute 1 to House Bill 450 excuses from the new road fee any builder the Authority finances, which is Kevin Kelly’s business. Executive Order 18 gives them a 120-day lane. The Returning Awardees Procedure lets Drawbridge come back, and it did, with $25,000. The county builds its own lane by order, on the recommendation of a transition run by the Governor’s bookkeeper’s household, the developer’s law firm, and the Stoltz lawyer, and then sponsors the developer.
And the lawyers stand at every window. Barnes & Thornburg, 222 Delaware Avenue, Suite 1200: Shawn Tucker for the applicant and for Stoltz, Douglas Gramiak for the applicant and for the port, Wali Rushdan for the County Executive. Saul Ewing: Pamela Scott for Stoltz in 2010 and for the County Executive in 2024. Faegre Drinker, the suite’s old firm: Alan Levin Of Counsel, and Geoffrey A. Sawyer III for the Secretary of State’s unclaimed property program. There is no one at any point in that chain whose job is to say no who has not already said yes with a check, and the one body that said no in August, the Senate, was shown the price.
Table 6. The web: who is tied to whom, and how
XII. The Calendar
June 17, 2021, to October 4, 2026, in order
Set every check, every appointment, and every rule change on one page, and the sequence is the finding.
Table 7. June 17, 2021, to October 4, 2026
“From the day he took office to the day they voted, every hand on the $1,900,000
was a hand that had written him a check: the Chairman, the Secretary of State, the homebuilder, the lawyer’s company, the banker’s household, the Director, the applicant, the lobbyist, the law firm, the Prosperity Partnership’s presenter, and the last recipient to come back for more. The record does not show a conspiracy. It shows a membership.”
XIII. What the Filings Do Not Contain
What is absent from the record, and the questions the record cannot answer
No check from E. Thomas Harvey III, Robin Adair Harvey, Thomas J. Hanna, Lexie Hanna, Michael Kinnard, Katherine Kinnard, Murray Dingwall, John C. Fannin III, Harvey Hanna & Associates, Inc., or any SRJC entity appears in Change Can’t Wait PAC’s 2025 or 2026 reports; the Harvey and Hanna money went into the accounts with limits, all of it before Election Day 2024.
No check in the name of Jonathan Horner, William “Jack” Riddle, Laura Lloyd, Brian Kaye, Darren Stephenson, Representative Edward Osienski, or Senator Nicole Poore appears in any of the five committees. No check from Kurt Foreman or Regina Mitchell appears. No check from Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez appears under her hyphenated name; the seven in her name are filed as Charuni Patibanda or Charuni P. Patibanda. The filings do not say what, if anything, the Secretary of State knew of the SRJC, LLC application before September 28, 2026, or whether she has recused herself from any matter touching Harvey Hanna & Associates, Schell Brothers, Community Bank Delaware, Artesian Water or SoDel Concepts; the Public Integrity Commission, which would hold such a recusal, is in her department.
R&M Recycling, LLC of Newport shares a town with Harvey Hanna & Associates, Inc. and nothing else on the record. Robert Weiner, Lucinda Weiner, Jeffrey M. Weiner and Marilyn Weiner, who gave the Matt Meyer committees $7,400 in fourteen checks from addresses on Larkal Drive, Marsh Road and Hertford Road in Wilmington, are not shown on any filing at the address of Leon N. Weiner & Associates, Inc., and are not counted with it.
RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
Author’s Disclosure
I served as President of New Castle County Council from November 2016 to November 2024, for all eight years that Matt Meyer was County Executive, and as an appointee to the New Castle County Board of Adjustment from 2012 to 2016. In that time, I worked across the table from Marcus Henry, Charuni Patibanda, CJ Bell, Wilson B. Davis, Vanessa Phillips, and the others named in Section IX, and I opposed, as Council President, the mass rezoning the Department of Land Use proposed under Charuni Patibanda. I was a candidate for New Castle County Executive in 2024 and did not win; Marcus Henry did. I followed the September 28, 2026, hearing of the Council on Development Finance remotely, as it was carried live, and attended the Governor’s September 25, 2026, implementation training remotely by Microsoft Teams; I was not physically present at either.
This report is Part Two of They Took Your Hearing, Your County’s Say, and $1,900,000 of Your Money (September 28, 2026), and builds on Everyone in the Fight Paid the Man Who Would Decide It (August 8, 2026), and The Quiet Dismantling of Delaware’s Democratic Guardrails (March 10, 2026). I have no financial interest in any party named in this report.
Appendix A. Every Check, by Person
From the itemized receipt schedules of the attached filings. Committees: NCC is Meyer for New Castle County, account 01003643; DE is Meyer for Delaware, account 01005311; PAC is Change Can’t Wait PAC, account 02005278. Addresses are as filed.
A-1. Fred Sears II, Chairman, Council on Development Finance
Ten checks, $3,350.
A-2. Kevin P. Kelly (4 Denny Road, Wilmington, and 305 High Ridge Road, Greenville) and Leon N. Weiner & Associates, Inc., 4 Denny Road, Wilmington
Kevin P. Kelly, own $8,000 in five checks; firm $6,200 in three; combined $14,200.
A-3. The Schell Family and Schell Brothers, 20184 Phillips Street and 18949 Coastal Highway, Rehoboth Beach
Chris Schell $22,400; Preston A. Schell $17,400; Joseph M. Schell $11,200; Deborah Schell $1,200; Lori J. Schell $1,200; Schell Brothers LLC and Schell Brothers Delaware $35,000. Family and companies: twenty checks, $88,400. Plus Schell Brothers LLC to Marcus Henry for New Castle County Executive, $600, November 7, 2024.
A-4. CJ Bell, Director, Delaware Division of Small Business
Three checks, $500.
A-4a. Susan Riddle, wife of William “Jack” Riddle, Sussex County member, Council on Development Finance
A-5. The Harvey and Hanna Families and the Harvey Hanna & Associates, Inc. Circle
Harvey and Hanna families, eleven checks, $13,200. Circle with the Kinnards, Murray Dingwall, and the Fannins, $16,800. Firm and circle: $17,400. With the Gramiaks, $18,600.
A-6. Barnes & Thornburg LLP, Shawn Tucker and Michele Tucker
The Evidence File: Receipts, Sources, and Primary Documents
THE TRUTHLINE NETWORK
Everyone in the Room Paid the Man Who Put Them There: Part Two of They Took Your Hearing, Your County’s Say, and $1,900,000 of Your Money. The Truthline Network. Karen Hartley-Nagle, Founder, Publisher, and Editor-in-Chief. Compiled October 17, 2026. All URLs verified as of October 15, 2026.
Citations follow the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, seventh edition. Legal materials, including court decisions, statutes, session laws, and executive orders, follow The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, as the seventh edition directs. Categories are alphabetical. Entries are alphabetical within each category, with initial articles disregarded. Each entry carries a permanent source number, S-001 onward, continuing the numbering convention of Part One’s Evidence File, which runs S-001 through S-237 on its own page.
114 documents.
8 the State has not published.
Nothing in this report came from a leak. It came from the documents below: four campaign finance reports the State posted after Part One was written and ninety-two older ones, read line by line; the minutes of two State councils; a Superior Court opinion; the State Bank Commissioner’s list of chartered banks; the Secretary of State’s own biography and division listing; two trade associations’ published rosters; a developer’s Coastal Zone application signed by its authorized member; and a County Council agenda posted seven days before its meeting. Every one of them was public the entire time, and every one of them is listed here, with a link, so you can read it yourself.
“The checks are public. The rosters are public. The application with the son’s signature on it is public. Nobody had read them in the same week. Now you can.”
Part I. What the State Has Not Published
This list belongs in an evidence file for the same reason the sources do. It records what the State holds and has not put where a resident can read it. Each item is a document the State’s own statute, regulation, agenda, or program page says exists. None was posted as of October 17, 2026.
NP-01. The SRJC, LLC application for a Level II Site Readiness Fund grant of $1,900,000, heard September 28, 2026, and the New Castle County sponsorship letter required by Title 29, Section 8711A(c)(1) of the Delaware Code. Title 1, Section 403, Section 4.2 of the Delaware Administrative Code provides that application information is available to the public on written request. Not posted.
NP-02. The minutes of the September 28, 2026, Council on Development Finance hearing, with each member’s vote recorded by name as Title 29, Section 10004(f) requires, and any recusal. As of October 17, 2026, no minutes are posted at the address the State calendar uses for every prior set of Council minutes.
NP-03. The Governor Lea Road LLC application for the $1,000,000 Level II Site Readiness Fund grant recommended December 12, 2022, and its sponsorship letter, scope of eligible expenditures, disbursement record, and any clawback terms. Not posted.
NP-04. The members and managers of Governor Lea Road LLC and of SRJC, LLC. The Delaware Division of Corporations, a division of the Department of State, does not publish the members or managers of a limited liability company. The Governor Lea Road LLC identification in this report rests on the Coastal Zone Act application its authorized member signed.
NP-05. Any recusal by Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez from matters involving Harvey Hanna & Associates, Schell Brothers, Community Bank Delaware, Artesian Water Company, or SoDel Concepts, and any disclosure filed with the Public Integrity Commission, which sits inside her department. Title 29, Chapter 58 of the Delaware Code. Not posted.
NP-06. The Department of State’s contract with Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP for the Secretary of State’s unclaimed property Voluntary Disclosure Agreement program, its term, and its compensation. Not posted on the program site.
NP-07. The dollar tiers adopted by the Council on Development Finance on January 22, 2024, on the motion of William “Jack” Riddle. The minutes record a 6 to 0 vote with one abstention “to approve the proposed changes to the program as presented” and do not state the tiers; the Division of Small Business has never published them.
NP-08. Change Can’t Wait PAC’s 2026 year-end report, due January 2027, which will show whether the $393,428.95 held on October 4, 2026, was spent in the November 3, 2026, general election.
Part II. The Record
114 sources, numbered S-001 through S-114, in 13 categories. Compiled October 17, 2026. All URLs verified as of October 15, 2026.
The report these sources support: https://www.karenhartleynagle.com/
Part One and its Evidence File: https://www.karenhartleynagle.com/they-took-your-hearing
I. Campaign Finance and Election Records
S-001. Delaware Department of Elections, Campaign Finance Section. (2016 to 2021). Financial reports, Meyer for New Castle County, account 01003643 [Twenty-four reports, latest amended versions; Schedule A receipts including Fred Sears, Kevin Kelly, Leon N. Weiner & Associates, Inc., Geoffrey Sawyer, Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP, Saul Ewing LLP, ABC Merit Shop PAC, Hammers & Nails Club, Delaware Home Builders LLC, Charuni P. Patibanda]. https://cfrs.elections.delaware.gov/Public/ViewReceipts
S-002. Delaware Department of Elections, Campaign Finance Section. (2021 to 2026). Financial reports, Change Can’t Wait PAC, account 02005278 [Seventeen reports with amendments, June 17, 2021, to October 4, 2026, including the year end report dated January 4, 2026, the 30-day primary report dated August 17, 2026, the 8-day primary report dated September 8, 2026, and the 30-day general report dated October 5, 2026, each signed by Thomas Meitzler, treasurer; Schedule A receipts including Delaware Health Care Facilities Association, Drawbridge Claymont LLC, Schell Brothers Delaware, Leon N. Weiner & Associates, Inc., Kevin P. Kelly, Geoffrey Sawyer, PSE&G Services Corp., Kalshi Inc., Rush Street Interactive, M. Davis and Sons, Inc., ABC Merit Shop PAC, Pvln Sarma; Schedule B expenditures to Dover Motor Speedway LLC, Levy Restaurants and Progressive Democrats for Delaware, Inc.]. https://cfrs.elections.delaware.gov/Public/ViewReceipts
S-003. Delaware Department of Elections, Campaign Finance Section. (2021 to 2026). Financial reports, Meyer for Delaware, account 01005311 [Twenty-two reports, August 9, 2021, to December 31, 2025, latest amended versions; Schedule A receipts including the Harvey, Hanna, Gramiak, Tucker, Artesian Water, Seemans, Sears, Kelly, Riddle, Bell, Patibanda, Sarma, Sanchez, Sawyer, Casey, Przywara, Rushdan, Parkowski, Davis, Bond, Phillips, Jenkins, DiSabatino, Julian, Pettinaro and Riemann contributions cited in Appendix A]. https://cfrs.elections.delaware.gov/Public/ViewReceipts
S-004. Delaware Department of Elections, Campaign Finance Section. (2024 to 2026). Financial reports, Citizens for a New Delaware Way PAC, account 02006097, and Citizens for a New Delaware Way 3rd Party Advertiser, account 04006103 [Sixteen reports, May 24, 2024, to December 31, 2025]. https://cfrs.elections.delaware.gov/Public/ViewReceipts
S-005. Delaware Department of Elections, Campaign Finance Section. (2025 and 2026). Financial reports, Marcus Henry for New Castle County Executive, account 01005347 [October 29, 2024, to December 31, 2025; Schedule A receipts including Harvey Hanna & Associates, Inc., Schell Brothers LLC, EDIS, Joshua Heisler and Michael Houghton]. https://cfrs.elections.delaware.gov/Public/ViewReceipts
S-006. Delaware Department of Elections. (n.d.). Campaign Finance Reporting System: View receipts [Searches September 28 and October 10 to 15, 2026, by name and address: Michele Tucker (five contributions, $3,900); Charuni Patibanda and 2719 Pickering Road; Geoffrey Sawyer and 1406 Gilpin Avenue; Carrie Casey and 614 Foulkstone Road; Jordan Seemans; Governor Lea Road; 405 East Marsh Lane]. https://cfrs.elections.delaware.gov/Public/ViewReceipts
S-007. Delaware Public Media. (2026, September 15). Several incumbents fall in legislative primary races, Gov. Meyer-backed primary challengers see split result [Shay Frisby over Senator Ray Seigfried, 58 percent to 42; Senator Dan Cruce over Adriana Bohm by 146 votes; Representative Franklin Cooke defeated]. https://www.delawarepublic.org/politics-government/2026-09-15/gov-meyer-backed-primary-challengers-see-split-result-in-legislative-primary-races
S-008. Progressive Democrats for Delaware. (n.d.). Home [19 East Commons Boulevard, New Castle; recipient of $50,000 from Change Can’t Wait PAC, August 25, 2026]. https://www.pdd-de.org/
II. Constitutional Provisions, Statutes, Session Laws, and Legislation
S-009. 1 Del. Admin. Code § 403, Administration and operation of Council on Development Finance [§ 4.2, public availability of application information]. https://regulations.delaware.gov/AdminCode/title1/400/403.shtml
S-010. Del. Code Ann. tit. 29, § 8707A (Council on Development Finance) [Membership, appointment, chair serving at the pleasure of the Governor, quorum]. https://delcode.delaware.gov/title29/c087a/sc01/index.html
S-011. Del. Code Ann. tit. 29, § 8711A (Site Readiness Fund) [§ 8711A(c)(1), public entity sponsorship; § 8711A(h), Director’s authority to approve]. https://delcode.delaware.gov/title29/c087a/sc01/index.html
S-012. Del. Code Ann. tit. 29, §§ 8751A to 8756A (Delaware Economic Development Authority) [§ 8753A, the Authority consists of the Director of the Division of Small Business]. https://delcode.delaware.gov/title29/c087a/sc07/index.html
S-013. Del. Code Ann. tit. 29, ch. 100 (Freedom of Information Act), § 10004 [§ 10004(e)(2), seven-day notice; § 10004(f), minutes recording each vote by individual member]. https://delcode.delaware.gov/title29/c100/index.html
S-014. Del. Code Ann. tit. 29, ch. 58 (State Employees’, Officers’ and Officials’ Code of Conduct; Public Integrity Commission) [§ 5805, conflicts of interest; § 5810, complaints]. https://delcode.delaware.gov/title29/c058/index.html
S-015. H.B. 365, 152nd Gen. Assemb. (Del. 2024) [Online sports betting operators; Representative Franklin D. Cooke; not enacted]. https://legis.delaware.gov/AllLegislation
S-016. H.B. 500, 153rd Gen. Assemb. (Del. 2026) [Fiscal Year 2027 Bond and Capital Improvements Act, signed July 6, 2026; Diamond State Port Corporation appropriation of $110,000,000; § 68, Site Readiness Fund]. https://legis.delaware.gov/json/BillDetail/GetPdfDocument?fileAttachmentId=656550
S-017. H.S. 1 for H.B. 450, 153rd Gen. Assemb. (Del. 2026), 85 Del. Laws c. 344, Reforming Opportunities and Accelerated Development for Delaware Act [Representative William Bush, primary sponsor; co-sponsors including Senator Nicole Poore, Senator Ray Seigfried and Representative Edward Osienski; synopsis building on Executive Order 18; 500 peak-hour trip threshold; statewide transportation impact fee by January 1, 2027; § 507(b)(1)f, Delaware State Housing Authority fee waiver; surcharge raised from 1 to 2 percent; signed and effective July 13, 2026]. https://legis.delaware.gov/BillDetail/143497
S-018. S.B. 23, 153rd Gen. Assemb. (Del. 2025) [As introduced; Senator Russ Huxtable, primary sponsor; Representative Kendra Johnson; substituted May 11, 2026]. https://legis.delaware.gov/BillDetail/143155
S-019. S.B. 325 and S.B. 327, 152nd Gen. Assemb. (Del. 2024) [Fiscal Year 2025 operating budget and Grants-in-Aid; § 201, nursing facility rate enhancement, $12,000,000 a year from January 2025, as summarized by the Delaware Health Care Facilities Association, Legislative
Summary June 30, 2024]. https://www.dhcfa.org/legislative-news/
S-020. S.B. 335, 153rd Gen. Assemb. (Del. 2026) [Fiscal Year 2027 operating budget; $128,500,000 added for Medicaid; $54,000,000 hospital quality assessment authority; passed the House June 24, 2026]. https://housedems.delaware.gov/2026/06/25/house-passes-6-9-billion-operating-budget-for-fiscal-year-2027/
S-021. S.S. 2 for S.B. 23, 153rd Gen. Assemb. (Del. 2026), 85 Del. Laws c. 343, Housing for Every Delawarean Act [Affordable housing plan for every county and municipality over 2,000 residents; twelve-month rezoning deadline; by-right administrative review; § 9223, meeting “does not constitute and is not conducted as a public hearing”; signed July 13, 2026]. https://legis.delaware.gov/BillDetail/143471
III. Contemporaneous News Coverage and Trade Press
S-022. Bouthier, B. (2026, August 18). Gov. Meyer backs primary challengers to State Senators Cruce and Seigfried. Delaware Public Media [Endorsements of Adriana Bohm and Shay Frisby; Seigfried on the State Employee Benefits Committee report; Sokola on personal hostility; Senate Bill 228]. https://www.delawarepublic.org/politics-government/2026-08-18/gov-meyer-backs-primary-challengers-to-state-senators-cruce-and-seigfried
S-023. Builder. (2002, November). Leon N. Weiner, builder and developer, dies at 82 [Fifty-three years in housing; more than 5,000 homes and 10,000 apartments]. https://builderonline.com/design/projects/leon-n-weiner-builder-and-developer-dies-at-82_o
S-024. Cape Gazette. (2023). Riddle named Sussex County Distinguished Citizen [William Jack Riddle, President and Chief Lending Officer, Community Bank Delaware; Citizens Bank; Delaware Health Facilities Authority; Delaware Solid Waste Authority; wife Susan]. https://capegazette.com/node/264882
S-025. Cape Gazette. (2024, December 12). New secretary of state named by incoming governor [Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez; New Castle County Land Use General Manager; former county Economic Development Director]. https://www.capegazette.com/article/new-secretary-state-named-incoming-governor/284874
S-026. Cape Gazette. (2025, March). Harvey Hanna & Associates welcomes Jordan Seemans as new government affairs and community relations manager [Deputy State Treasurer; Governor Carney’s Director of Legislative Affairs; Thomas J. Hanna quoted as President and Chief Executive Officer]. https://capegazette.com/node/288081
S-027. CBS Sports. (2026, October 12). Are sports prediction markets legal? Status of Kalshi and Polymarket in all 50 states [Delaware listed as live, “has not moved to limit”]. https://www.cbssports.com/prediction/news/prediction-market-legal-states/
S-028. Delaware Business Now. (2023, July 6). Personnel file: July 6, 2023 [Charuni Patibanda nominated General Manager of Land Use, succeeding Rich Hall; CJ Bell to Economic Development Director]. https://www.delawarebusinessnow.com/archives/personnel-file-july-6-2023/article_f8ea3ebe-ec07-5600-8cf0-5edb360b4860.html
S-029. Delaware Business Times. (2021, October). Leon Weiner builder Kevin Kelly receives national housing honor [National Association of Home Builders Housing Hall of Fame]. https://delawarebusinesstimes.com/news/commercial-real-estate/lnwa-kelly-nhhof/
S-030. Delaware Business Times. (2022, December 15). Industrial projects get site readiness funds [December 12, 2022, awards including Governor Lea Road LLC; Harvey Hanna plans for the Ion Power site, Delaware City]. https://delawarebusinesstimes.com/news/site-readiness-dec-22/
S-031. Delaware Business Times. (2024, December). Meyer names key NCC officials to cabinet positions. https://delawarebusinesstimes.com/news/meyer-names-cabinet-positions/
S-032. Delaware Business Times. (2025, December 16). Delaware 222: Alan Levin [Advisor to Governor Meyer during the 2024 election; Chairman, Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council]. https://delawarebusinesstimes.com/supplements/de222/alan-levin/
S-033. Delaware Business Times. (2026, June 10). Bear warehouses receive $1.14 million Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund grant [Route 40 LLC, 600 Pulaski Highway]. https://delawarebusinesstimes.com/news/bear-warehouses-tiif-grant/
S-034. Delaware Business Times. (2026, July 24). Harvey Hanna elevates Harvey sons to managing directors [John Harvey, E. Thomas Harvey IV, William Harvey]. https://delawarebusinesstimes.com/news/harvey-hanna-sons-leadership/
S-035. Delaware Business Times. (n.d.). Macquarie buys Boxwood Amazon plant for $392M in Delaware [Harvey Hanna purchase about $10,400,000, October 2017; sale to Dermody Properties more than $31,000,000; Macquarie Asset Management, about $818 a square foot]. https://delawarebusinesstimes.com/news/macquarie-buys-boxwood-amazon-plant-for-392m-in-delaware/
S-036. Delaware Business Times. (n.d.). DE222 honoree: Kevin Kelly, Leon N. Weiner & Associates. https://delawarebusinesstimes.com/supplements/de222/de222-honoree-kevin-kelly/
S-037. Delaware Live. (2024, February). Fish v. electricity: Could Salem nuclear plant be shut down? [PSEG; Salem and Hope Creek on Artificial Island; MACH2 hydrogen hub]. https://delawarelive.com/fish-v-electricity-could-salem-be-shut-down/
S-038. Delaware Public Media. (2026, April 30). Benchmarks to control hospital costs increase for 2027 [Subcommittee vote; Brian Frazee, Delaware Healthcare Association, voted yes; Gary Siegelman, Bayhealth]. https://www.delawarepublic.org/politics-government/2026-04-30/benchmarks-to-control-hospital-costs-increase-for-2027
S-039. Delaware Public Media. (2026, May 11). Healthcare spending benchmark missed for fifth year in a row [Senator Ray Seigfried: “totally unacceptable”; Senate Bill 1]. https://www.delawarepublic.org/politics-government/2026-05-11/healthcare-spending-benchmark-missed-for-fifth-year-in-a-row
S-040. iGaming Business. (2023, August 17). Sole remaining bidder RSI to power Delaware Lottery [Five-year exclusive contract; 888 Holdings withdrew; Richard Schwartz; Helene Keeley]. https://igamingbusiness.com/lottery/sole-remaining-bidder-rsi-to-power-delaware-lottery/
S-041. Law360. (2019, October). Drinker Biddle adds Del. Gov.’s chief of staff to ranks [Douglas Gramiak]. https://www.law360.co.uk/articles/1210557
S-042. National Association of Home Builders. (2026, March 3). Delaware home builders score permitting victory [Executive Order 18 signing; Jon Horner, President, Home Builders Association of Delaware, in the photograph; Katie Gillis; Richard Forsten and Mike Riemann, Government Relations Co-Chairs]. https://www.nahb.org/blog/2026/03/delaware-builders-score-victory
S-043. Sports Betting Dime. (2024, May 24). Delaware online sports betting expansion bill advancing through committee [House Bill 365; Rush Street Interactive’s exclusive contract]. https://www.sportsbettingdime.com/news/industry/delaware-online-sports-betting-expansion-bill-advancing-through-committee/
S-044. Spotlight Delaware. (2025, December 17). Delaware budget officials OK increased health care spending benchmark [4.9 percent for 2026; Secretary Christen Linke Young]. https://spotlightdelaware.org/2025/12/17/delaware-budget-officials-ok-increased-health-care-spending-benchmark/
S-045. Spotlight Delaware. (2026, April 28). Delaware revenue officials to vote on health care spending goals [Subcommittee meeting of April 29, 2026]. https://spotlightdelaware.org/2026/04/28/delaware-revenue-officials-to-vote-on-health-care-spending-goals/
S-046. Spotlight Delaware. (2026, July 14). Delaware General Assembly roundup: Housing reforms [Senate Bill 23’s 20 percent goal; 2,000-resident threshold; House Bill 450’s 500 peak-hour trips and 2 percent surcharge]. https://spotlightdelaware.org/2026/07/14/delaware-general-assembly-roundup-housing-reforms/
S-047. Spotlight Delaware. (2026, August 19). Meyer endorsements draw swift Senate criticism; create election deja vu. https://spotlightdelaware.org/2026/08/19/meyer-endorsements-draw-swift-senate-criticism-create-election-deja-vu/
S-048. Tabeling, K. (2026, July 6). Harvey Hanna & Associates buys 103-acre Middletown site for $25.3 million from EQT Real Estate. Delaware Business Times. https://delawarebusinesstimes.com/insider-only/harvey-hanna-associates-middletown/
S-049. WDEL. (2023, June 13). Cabinet changes proposed by New Castle Co. Executive Meyer [Patibanda to Land Use; Bell to Economic Development; effective July 1, 2023]. https://www.wdel.com/news/cabinet-changes-proposed-by-new-castle-co-executive-meyer/article_fe148a4c-0a08-11ee-ad4b-6fd83424c16a.html
S-050. WHYY. (2026, March). Delaware Gov. Meyer removes former budget advisory chair Mike Houghton from DEFAC [Alan Levin: “I was surprised because I didn’t know it was coming”]. https://whyy.org/articles/delaware-former-budget-advisory-chair-mike-houghton/
S-051. WHYY. (2026, August). Some Delaware lawmakers call Gov. Matt Meyer’s endorsements ‘retaliatory’ [Senator Ray Seigfried, Democrat of Claymont; Senator Dan Cruce, Democrat of Wilmington; Senator Trey Paradee; Representative Debra Heffernan; Nick Merlino]. https://whyy.org/articles/governor-meyer-delaware-endorses-state-progressive-challengers/
IV. Corporate, Firm, Organizational, and Biographical Records
S-052. ACLU of Delaware. (n.d.). Carrie Casey [Biography: Carrie Sawyer Casey; Manager, New Castle County Division of Community Development and Housing; assistant to Governor Thomas R. Carper; Senator Carper’s New Castle County Director; lives in Wilmington with her husband, Mike]. https://www.aclu-de.org/bios/carrie-casey/
S-053. Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware. (n.d.). Board of directors [2025 officers and directors: R. Jeffrey Faull, Chairman, Master Interiors; Todd Moran, First Vice Chair, M. Davis & Sons; Kevin DiSabatino, Secretary; Mark Lucey, Treasurer, WSFS Bank; Angela P. Mariano, Immediate Past Chairwoman; directors including Dominic J. Papa, Matthew Suppe and Stephen Julian]. https://www.abcdelaware.com/information/board-of-directors/
S-054. Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware. (n.d.). Committees [Residential Committee: Chair Nathan Walter, NVR Homes; Co-Chair Jon Horner, Schell Brothers LLC; Legislative and Legal Rights, Jeff DiSabatino; Membership, Steve Lex, Pettinaro Construction; Events, Matt Laird, Assurance Media; Work Force Excellence, Corrine Peters, Pace Electric]. https://www.abcdelaware.com/membership/committees/
S-055. Barnes & Thornburg LLP. (2021, June 14). Barnes & Thornburg expands in Delaware as strong national growth continues [Thomas McGonigle, Shawn Tucker, Michael Maimone, Doug Gramiak, Mary Kate McLaughlin and Michael DeNote join the Wilmington office from Faegre Drinker; Tucker formerly New Castle County First Assistant County Attorney and Land Use manager]. https://btlaw.com/en/insights/news/2021/barnes-thornburg-expands-in-delaware-as-strong-national-growth-continues
S-056. Barnes & Thornburg LLP. (n.d.). Doug Gramiak [Director of State Government Affairs, Wilmington, 222 Delaware Avenue, Suite 1200; former chief of staff to Governor John Carney]. https://btlaw.com/people/offices/delaware/doug-gramiak
S-057. Delaware Health Care Facilities Association. (n.d.). DHCFA ED reappointed to MAC, DHRB [Cheryl Heiks, Executive Director; reappointed by Governor Matt Meyer to the Delaware Health Resources Board; 501 Silverside Road, Suite 51, Wilmington].
https://www.dhcfa.org/dhcfa-ed-reappointed-to-mac-dhrb/
S-058. Delaware State Chamber of Commerce. (n.d.). Eastern States Construction Service, Inc. [Member listing: 702 First State Boulevard, Wilmington; Stephen Julian; Francis Julian and Richard Julian, second generation]. https://web.dscc.com/Construction-Heavy-Highway/Eastern-States-Construction-Service,-Inc-265
S-059. Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP. (n.d.). Geoffrey A. Sawyer III [Partner, Wilmington; leads the firm’s representation of the State of Delaware’s Voluntary Disclosure Agreement program, more than 1,200 enrolled companies; former deputy chief of staff to Governor Jack Markell]. https://www.faegredrinker.com/en/professionals/s/sawyer-geoffrey-a
S-060. Harvey Hanna & Associates, Inc. (n.d.). About [405 East Marsh Lane, Suite 1, Newport; affiliations including the Port of Wilmington Maritime Society, the Wilmington Area Planning Council, the Delaware Committee of 100 and the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce]. https://harveyhanna.com/about/
S-061. Harvey Hanna & Associates, Inc. (n.d.). Future projects [720 to 750 Governor Lea Road, Delaware City, 18.5 acres, approximately 250,000 square feet of industrial space; Newport redevelopment]. https://harveyhanna.com/our-work/future-projects/
S-062. Harvey Hanna & Associates, Inc. (n.d.). News [June 30, 2026, executive leadership transition; January 14, 2026, John C. Fannin III named inaugural chair of the Delaware State Chamber Foundation; March 11, 2025, Jordan Seemans]. https://harveyhanna.com/news/
S-063. Home Builders Association of Delaware. (n.d.). Home [13 Noble’s Pond Crossing, Dover; Hammer & Nails Committee]. https://www.hbade.org/
S-064. Home Builders Association of Delaware. (n.d.). Leadership and staff: Meet your 2026 Board of Directors [Jon Horner, President, Schell Brothers; Mike Riemann, Past President, Becker Morgan Group; Richard Forsten, Secretary, Saul Ewing; Dave Detrick, Chesapeake Utilities; Debra Finocchiaro, Leon N. Weiner & Associates; Government Affairs Co-chairs Forsten and Riemann]. https://www.hbade.org/home-2/about-us/leadership-staff/
S-065. Leon N. Weiner & Associates, Inc. (n.d.). What we do [Arbor Management, LLC; Village at Eastlake]. https://lnwa.com/what-we-do/
S-066. Saul Ewing LLP. (2026). Delaware adopts Affordable Housing Act to respond to lack of affordable housing in Delaware [Client alert on Senate Substitute 2 to Senate Bill 23: 2,000-resident threshold; six mandatory and five of eleven optional elements; twelve-month rezoning; twenty-one-day approval; by-right administrative review]. https://www.saul.com/insights/alert/delaware-adopts-affordable-housing-act-respond-lack-affordable-housing-delaware
V. County Legislation, Land Use, Planning, and Ethics Records
S-068. New Castle County Council. (2026, October 6). Land Use Committee meeting, revised agenda [Resolution on the plan of 755 Governor Lea Road, Application 2022-0562-S; Ordinance 26-106, impact fees; Substitute No. 1 to Ordinance 26-045, electrical capacity]. https://newcastlecode.portal.civicclerk.com/event/2778/overview
S-069. New Castle County Council. (2026, October 13). County Council meeting agenda and packet [Resolution 26-191, Plan of 755 Governor Lea Road, Governor Lea Associates, LLC, 12th Council District, Councilman Kevin Caneco, prime sponsor; Ordinance 26-106, impact fees, Councilman David Tackett and Councilwoman Dee Durham, with the Department of Land Use’s September 15, 2026, analysis]. https://newcastlecode.portal.civicclerk.com/event/2604/overview
S-070. New Castle County Department of Land Use. (2023, August 3). Scott Run Commerce Center record plan [Microfilm Number 20230803-0051629; recorded under General Manager Charuni Patibanda]. https://www.newcastlede.gov/410/Active-Plans
S-071. New Castle County Department of Land Use. (n.d.). Active plans [Application 2023-0190-S, 750 Governor Lea Road, 330,000-square-foot warehouse, brownfield, HI zoning, Council District 12; Application 2022-0562-S, 755 Governor Lea Road]. https://www.newcastlede.gov/410/Active-Plans
S-072. New Castle County Ethics Commission. (2011, February). Advisory Opinion 10-12, Conflict of Interest [County Executive Paul G. Clark and the land use practice of his spouse, Pamela J. Scott]. https://www.advisory.nccethics.org/document/224.htm
S-073. New Castle County. (2023, June 13). County Executive Meyer announces leadership changes in Executive Cabinet, Patibanda, Bell [Charuni Patibanda to General Manager, Department of Land Use; Christopher “CJ” Bell to Director of Economic Development; effective July 1, 2023]. https://www.newcastlede.gov/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=2332
S-074. New Castle County. (2024, November 20). New Castle County Executive-elect Marcus Henry announces transition team chairpersons [Richard Przywara; Wali W. Rushdan II; Pamela J. Scott]. https://www.newcastlede.gov/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=2465
S-075. New Castle County. (2026, April 28). County Executive Order 2026-06, Establishing Expedited Land Development Reviews for Economic and Affordable Housing Opportunities (SPUR). https://www.newcastlede.gov/3149/SPUR---Streamlined-Planning-Unified-Revi
VI. Executive Orders, Guidance, and Implementation Records
S-076. Office of Governor Matt Meyer. (2026, February 9). Executive Order No. 17, Allocation and sub-allocation of State private activity bond volume cap for 2026 [$388,780,000 carried forward to the Delaware State Housing Authority; attested by Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez]. https://governor.delaware.gov/executive-orders/executive-order-16-2/
S-077. Office of Governor Matt Meyer. (2026, February 26). Executive Order No. 18, Implementing the Delaware Permitting Accelerator [Housing Fast Lane; Priority Energy Projects; signed with the Home Builders Association of Delaware present]. https://governor.delaware.gov/executive-orders/executive-order-18/
S-078. Office of Governor Matt Meyer. (2026, July 14). Executive Order No. 25, Safeguarding the Unclaimed Property Task Force from conflicts of interest [Five-year bar on paid unclaimed property consultants]. https://governor.delaware.gov/executive-orders/executive-order-25/
S-079. Office of State Planning Coordination and Office of the Governor. (2026, September 25). Town hall presentation: SB 23 and HB 450 [Implementation training on the two laws]. https://stateplanning.delaware.gov/lup/documents/town-hall-presentation-sb23-hb450-20260925.pdf
VII. Firsthand and Original Research Records
S-080. Hartley-Nagle, K. (2016 to 2024). [Firsthand account as President of New Castle County Council of the service of Marcus Henry, Charuni Patibanda, CJ Bell, Carrie Casey, Wilson B. Davis, Vanessa Phillips, Jacqueline Jenkins and Colonel Vaughn Bond under County Executive Matt Meyer, and of the Department of Land Use’s proposed mass rezoning] [Published under the author’s byline in Sections I, II and IX of this report].
S-081. Hartley-Nagle, K. (2026, September 28). [Contemporaneous notes of the Council on Development Finance hearing on SRJC, LLC, followed by remote connection as carried live] [Published in Part One and Section V of this report].
S-082. Hartley-Nagle, K. (2026, October 10 to 15). [Line-by-line read of ninety-six Delaware Department of Elections reports for five committees, 9,158 itemized receipts, deduplicated across amended filings, matched by name and address against the rosters named in this report; working files held by The Truthline Network] [Published as Appendix A and Tables 1 through 7 of this report].
VIII. Government Communications, Statements, and Official Web Records
S-083. Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control. (2026, February 3). Coastal Zone Act status decision, Project Washington, Starwood Digital Ventures, Project CZA-448SD [Data center campus at Governor Lea Road and South DuPont Highway prohibited as heavy industry; Secretary Gregory Patterson]. https://documents.dnrec.delaware.gov/Admin/Public-Notices/CCE20260043/Status-Decision.pdf
S-084. Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control. (2026, October 15). Public Notice CCE20260360: Governor Lea Road request for status decision, Project CZA-449SD [Governor Lea Road, LLC; 353,500-square-foot warehouse at 750 Governor Lea Road; comments to CZA_Program@delaware.gov by October 16, 2026]. https://dnrec.delaware.gov/public-notices/cce20260360/
S-085. Delaware Department of State. (n.d.). Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez: Official biography [Sworn in January 28, 2025; Board of Pardons; Cash Management Policy Board; Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council; Chair, Diamond State Port Corporation; former New Castle County Land Use General Manager and Economic Development Director]. https://sos.delaware.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/14/2026/04/Official-Biography_Charuni-Patibanda-Sanchez.pdf
S-086. Delaware Department of State. (n.d.). Department of State responsibilities [Division of Small Business; Division of Corporations; Delaware Public Archives; Office of the State Bank Commissioner; Public Service Commission; Alcoholic Beverage Control; Division of Human and Civil Rights; Public Integrity Commission; Division of Professional Regulation; Delaware Veterans Home]. https://www.sos.delaware.gov/department-state-responsibilities/
S-087. Delaware Department of Transportation. (2025, January 29). 750 Governor Lea Road traffic impact study review letter [McCormick Taylor, Inc.; 18.54 acres; 330,000 square feet; 560 daily trips; signal at River Road and Hamburg Road being installed by the Blue Diamond Park developer]. https://deldot.gov/Business/subdivisions/pdfs/Traffic_Studies/2025/750%20Governor%20Lea%20Road%20TIS%20Review%20Letter.pdf
S-088. Delaware Secretary of State. (n.d.). Voluntary Disclosure Agreement program [Established 2012; unclaimed property compliance]. https://vda.delaware.gov/
S-089. Diamond State Port Corporation. (n.d.). Board of directors: The Honorable Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez, Chair. https://port.delaware.gov/board-of-directors/the-honorable-charuni-patibanda-sanchez
S-090. Governor Lea Road LLC. (2026, March 30; revised September 2, 2026). Application for a Coastal Zone Act status decision, Project CZA-449SD [405 East Marsh Lane, Suite 1, Newport; certified by E. Thomas Harvey IV, Authorized Member; agent Stephen G. Davies, Apex Engineering; environmental assessment by Ten Bears Environmental Associates, January 26, 2023; parcels 12-008.00-004 and 12-008.00-006; former Ion Power brownfield; speculative warehouse, $36,600,000 construction]. https://documents.dnrec.delaware.gov/Admin/Public-Notices/CCE20260360/Status-Decision-Application.pdf
S-091. Office of the State Bank Commissioner. (2026, August). Delaware financial institutions list [Community Bank Delaware, Lewes, state-chartered bank, President Wm. Jack Riddle]. https://banking.delaware.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/73/2026/08/Delaware-Financial-Institutions-List.pdf
S-092. Office of the State Treasurer. (2023, March 10). Treasurer Davis announces changes to leadership team [Jordan Seemans named Deputy State Treasurer; former Director of Legislative Affairs to Governor John Carney]. https://news.delaware.gov/2023/03/10/ost/
S-093. Office of United States Senator Chris Coons. (2023, September 8). Senator Coons visits Dover to kick off $1M renovation project for affordable housing apartment complex [Owens and Queen Manor, 426 South New Street, Dover, 110 units, $29,000,000, Low-Income Housing Tax Credits; Sean Kelly, Executive Vice President, Leon N. Weiner & Associates; Eugene Young Jr., Delaware State Housing Authority]. https://www.coons.senate.gov/news/press-releases/senator-coons-visits-dover-to-kickoff-1m-renovation-project-for-affordable-housing-apartment-complex
S-094. State of Delaware. (2025, August 21). Governor Meyer appoints new board members to Delaware Prosperity Partnership [Board expanded to thirty-five; Robert Wittig]. https://news.delaware.gov/2025/08/21/governor-meyer-appoints-new-board-members-to-delaware-prosperity-partnership/
IX. Judicial Records
S-095. Delaware Human and Civil Rights Commission ex rel. Mohammed Sedghi and Paula Burkhardt-Sedghi v. Schell Brothers, LLC and Jonathan Horner, C.A. No. S23C-04-004 MHC (Del. Super. Apr. 28, 2025) (Conner, J.) [Fair housing discrimination and retaliation counts proceed against Jonathan Horner personally; “I know your kind of people”; $82,925 deposit; Selbyville]. https://courts.delaware.gov/Opinions/Download.aspx?id=378670
S-096. DPML Jamison Corner, LLC v. New Castle County, C.A. No. 2024-0403-CEB (Del. Ch. Nov. 3, 2025); aff’d, New Castle County v. DPML Jamison Corner, LLC, Nos. 508 and 509, 2025 (Del. May 26, 2026) [Traffic study waiver; Max Walton of Connolly Gallagher for the county]. https://courts.delaware.gov/Opinions/
X. Prior Truthline Reporting
S-097. Hartley-Nagle, K. (2026, February 18). The battle for Delaware’s waterfront: Power, bananas, and the fight over Wilmington’s port. The Truthline Network. https://www.karenhartleynagle.com/battle-for-wilmingtons-waterfront-port-of-wilmington-truthline-report
S-098. Hartley-Nagle, K. (2026, March 10). The quiet dismantling of Delaware’s democratic guardrails: Executive Order 18 and the pattern of developer-driven policy. The Truthline Network. https://www.karenhartleynagle.com/eo18-report-developer-money-democratic-guardrails
S-099. Hartley-Nagle, K. (2026, March 31). The port they gave away: The $684 million contract, the exposed lies, and the collapse of Delaware’s waterfront. The Truthline Network [Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez as Chair of the Diamond State Port Corporation; the 87-parcel mass rezoning; the April 20, 2026, cost disclosure, working report]. https://www.karenhartleynagle.com/
S-100. Hartley-Nagle, K. (2026, August 8). Everyone in the fight paid the man who would decide it. The Truthline Network [Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez household contributions, $5,566.64; Executive Order 17 attestation; Douglas Gramiak of Barnes & Thornburg; the Levin-Hanna friendship]. https://www.karenhartleynagle.com/everyone-in-the-fight-paid
S-101. Hartley-Nagle, K. (2026, September 28). They took your hearing, your county’s say, and $1,900,000 of your money. The Truthline Network [Part One of this report; its Evidence File, 237 sources, S-001 to S-237]. https://www.karenhartleynagle.com/they-took-your-hearing
S-102. Hartley-Nagle, K. (2026, October 9). Change Can’t Wait PAC: What the 2025 annual and the three 2026 reports add. The Truthline Network [working report]. https://www.karenhartleynagle.com/
XI. The Report Itself
S-103. Hartley-Nagle, K. (2026, October 15). Everyone in the room paid the man who put them there: Part Two of They took your hearing, your county’s say, and $1,900,000 of your money [this report]. The Truthline Network. https://www.karenhartleynagle.com/part-two/they-took-your-hearing/everyone-in-the-room-paid-the-man-who-put-them-there
XII. Site Readiness Fund and Council on Development Finance Records
S-104. Council on Development Finance. (2020, February 24). Minutes [$4,500,000 Delaware Strategic Fund grant to Amazon, Boxwood Road, Newport, presented by Kurt Foreman; reported in Delaware Business Times]. https://delawarebusinesstimes.com/news/breaking-state-approves-4-5-amazon-grant-for-boxwood/
S-105. Council on Development Finance. (2022, December 12). Minutes [Governor Lea Road LLC, Level II, $1,000,000, 18.5 acres, Governor Lea Road, 6 to 0; LPC First State Holding Co., $1,000,000; search the State calendar by agency and date]. https://publicmeetings.delaware.gov/
S-106. Council on Development Finance. (2024, January 22). Minutes [Program changes approved 6 to 0 with one abstention on the motion of William “Jack” Riddle, seconded by Richard Rowland; Kevin Kelly present; Regina Mitchell and Kurt Foreman presenting]. https://publicmeetings.delaware.gov/Document/77763_Minutes-Final.pdf
S-107. Council on Development Finance. (2024, September 23). Minutes [PR-Stoltz Venture LLC, $2,400,000, 246 acres, 7 to 1; Shawn Tucker for the applicant]. https://publicmeetings.delaware.gov/Document/79732_Minutes-Final.pdf
S-108. Council on Development Finance. (2025, June 30). Minutes [Returning Awardees Procedure presented by Director CJ Bell with Kurt Foreman and Linda Parkowski of the Delaware Prosperity Partnership]. https://publicmeetings.delaware.gov/Document/82557_Minutes-Final.pdf
S-109. Delaware Division of Small Business. (2025, June 27). Site Readiness Fund returning awardees procedure. https://business.delaware.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/118/2025/12/DSB-Site-Readiness-Returning-Awardees-Procedure-6.27.25.pdf
S-110. Delaware Economic Development Authority, Council on Development Finance. (2026, September 21). Notice of public hearing before the Council on Development Finance, September 28, 2026 [Meeting 86406; SRJC, LLC, $1,900,000]. https://publicmeetings.delaware.gov/Document/86406_Agenda.pdf
S-111. Delaware Prosperity Partnership. (2025, August 18). Board of directors minutes [Board expansion to thirty-five; co-chairs Governor Matt Meyer and Rodger Levenson, WSFS; members including Whitney Sweeney, Macquarie Asset Management]. https://www.choosedelaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/2025-08-25-Minutes.pdf
XIII. State Fiscal, Revenue Council, and Health Care Benchmark Records
S-112. Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council, Health Care Spending Benchmark Subcommittee. (n.d.). Membership and reports [Delaware Department of Health and Social Services; members including David Tam, Beebe Healthcare, and Gary Siegelman, Bayhealth]. https://dhss.delaware.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/dhcc/pdf/delawareeconomicfinancialadvisory.pdf
S-113. Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council. (2025, March 17). Minutes [“Mr. Levin called the meeting to order at 1:30 p.m.”; Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez, a member]. https://financefiles.delaware.gov/DEFAC/minutes/Minutes_03.17.25_FINAL.pdf
S-114. Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council. (2026, May 18). Minutes [Buena Vista; Alan Levin presiding; thirty-one of thirty-three members present; calendar year 2027 health care spending benchmark accepted at 5.0 percent]. https://financefiles.delaware.gov/DEFAC/minutes/Minutes_05_2026_FINAL.pdf
How to Read the Record
Every campaign finance figure in Part Two can be checked at the Delaware Campaign Finance Reporting System by committee name or account number: Meyer for New Castle County, 01003643; Meyer for Delaware, 01005311; Change Can’t Wait PAC, 02005278; Marcus Henry for New Castle County Executive, 01005347. Search by contributor name and the address printed in Appendix A. Every Council on Development Finance minute is on the State’s public meeting calendar under the Delaware Economic Development Authority, by date. Every revenue council minute is on the Department of Finance’s DEFAC page. The Coastal Zone Act application is on the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control’s public notice page under CCE20260360. The County Council agendas are on the county’s CivicClerk portal by meeting date.
Corrections: karen@karenhartleynagle.com. A source that has moved will be re-linked and noted here with the date of the change.
Cite This Report
Hartley-Nagle, K. (2026, October 15). Everyone in the Room Paid the Man Who Put Them There: Part Two of They Took Your Hearing, Your County’s Say, and $1,900,000 of Your Money. The Truthline Network. https://www.karenhartleynagle.com/part-two/they-took-your-hearing
Excerpts, data, or quotations may be reproduced for noncommercial use with attribution to The Truthline Network and a direct link to the original report. Commercial use or republication requires written permission.
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Attribution:
Content and analysis © 2025 The Truthline Network, a division of Nexus Innovation Group LLC.
All content authored by Karen Hartley-Nagle, Founder & Publisher, The Truthline Network; Editor-in-Chief, Host & Executive Producer, The Truthline (Radio & Live); Former President, New Castle County Council (2016–2024); Founder & CEO, Nexus Innovation Group, LLC.
Excerpts, data, or quotations may be reproduced for noncommercial use with attribution to The Truthline Network and a direct link to the original report. Commercial use or republication requires written permission.
Read full documents: The Evidence File → Sources above
“Transparency isn’t charity. It’s the rent you pay for power”
Read The New Castle County Tax Reckoning Series:
PART I | PART II | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5
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Report 1 | Report 2 | Report 3 | Report 4 | Coming Soon: Report 5 & Report 6
THE TRUTHLINE NETWORK
“Truth doesn't whisper. It breaks through.”
In 2001, James P. Hoffa, General President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and son of Jimmy Hoffa, reached down into Local 326 in Delaware and admonished one business agent for misrepresentation and misuse of union money. That business agent was George Smiley. The International's Executive Committee found him guilty of misrepresentation on appeal. Smiley paid the money back and lost his union post.
Michael J. Ciabattoni, a former president of Local 326, said it on the record to The News Journal in 2004: "If you want to say we had a vendetta because he was a crook, he's correct. I don't like thieves."
The Teamsters told the newspaper George Smiley was unworthy of their endorsement. Their own local endorsed his opponent. New Castle County elected George Smiley anyway.
Today Councilman George Smiley co-chairs the Finance Committee of New Castle County Council, the committee that watches the county's money.
Twenty-two years after James P. Hoffa admonished him, the United States Tax Court described how developer Nicholas Ferrara Jr. brought a rezoning to Councilman George Smiley in 2006, and how by March 2007 Councilman Smiley was in favor. Six years later, 58 acres beside the New Castle County Airport, appraised at $6,900,000 as industrial land, sold for $11,100,000, rezoned as commercial. $4,200,000 of that went to the developer's partnership for the political work.
Before he was a councilman, George Smiley was a business agent at that union hall. When members called on a Friday looking for him, staff were told to say he was out on union business. He was on his boat. The boat was named Union Business.
The rezoning that followed carries three signatures, and two of the people who signed it now run the State of Delaware.
The Tax Court was deciding a tax bill. Nobody put Councilman George Smiley's conduct before it. That question has never been asked by anyone with the power to answer it.
And there's the MORE we haven't named.
“The headlines wrote themselves.”
