“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.”
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
By Karen Hartley-Nagle
Former President of New Castle County Council (2016 to 2024)
Published: October 20, 2026 | A Truthline Investigative Report
“Thom Harvey sent a table: Robin Adair Harvey, lawyer Shawn Tucker, lobbyist Douglas Gramiak, and Artesian Water Company, all on one day. Governor Matt Meyer sent the appointees: Fred Sears II, Kevin P. Kelly, Jonathan Horner, William “Jack” Riddle, and CJ Bell. Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez sent the room. Every one of those people is in the Matt Meyer campaign filings, by that person’s own check, that person’s company, or that person’s household.”
“The State paid Harvey Hanna and Associates $1,000,000 in January 2023 to get a warehouse in Delaware City ready, and never said the company’s name. Harvey Hanna came back in September 2026 for $1,900,000 more, for a site in Middletown that the seller had sold as finished. Everyone at the table who had to say yes is in the Matt Meyer 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 Answer Block
The whole report in one paragraph, every name and figure
On September 28, 2026, the Council on Development Finance in Dover, with nine members present, voted 7 to 1, with 1 reported abstention, to recommend $1,900,000 of State money to Harvey Hanna & Associates for a warehouse site that the site’s 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 Harvey Hanna & Associates from the same Site Readiness 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 Governor Lea Road LLC 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 Harvey Hanna & Associates’ second trip, nine months after Christopher “CJ” Bell, Director of the Delaware Division of Small Business, who signs the checks, presented a rule for returning recipients. Fred Sears II, Chairman of the Council on Development Finance, who ran the vote, has written Matt Meyer a check in every race since 2016 and is Vice Chairman of the Diamond State Port Corporation, whose lobbyist, Douglas Gramiak, is Harvey Hanna & Associates’ lobbyist. Douglas Gramiak works in the same Barnes & Thornburg LLP suite as Harvey Hanna & Associates’ lawyer, Shawn Tucker, and as Wali W. Rushdan II, who co-chaired the transition team of County Executive Marcus Henry, who sponsored the application. On October 29, 2024, Thom Harvey, Thom Harvey’s wife Robin Adair Harvey, Douglas Gramiak, Douglas Gramiak’s wife Stephanie Gramiak, Shawn Tucker, Shawn Tucker’s wife Michele Tucker, and the site’s water company, Artesian Water Company, all wrote Governor Matt Meyer checks on one day. Two homebuilders on the Council on Development Finance, Kevin P. Kelly and Jonathan Horner, saw Kevin P. Kelly’s and Jonathan Horner’s companies pay Change Can’t Wait PAC, Governor Matt Meyer’s political action committee, nineteen and thirty-nine days before the vote, and the laws and orders Governor Matt Meyer signed in 2026 gave the homebuilding industry by-right density, no hearings, waived road fees, and $388,780,000 in financing. William “Jack” Riddle, the member of the Council on Development Finance who priced the grant, has a wife who gave; Christopher “CJ” Bell, Director of the Delaware Division of Small Business, who signs the grant, gave before Christopher “CJ” Bell was hired. Jonathan Horner is President of the Home Builders Association of Delaware and co-chairs the residential committee of Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware, and both the Home Builders Association of Delaware and Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware, those two associations’ political committees and those two associations’ boards are in the Matt Meyer campaign filings. The Barnes & Thornburg LLP suite Harvey Hanna & Associates’ lawyers work from came out of the old law firm of Alan Levin, Governor Matt Meyer’s fundraiser; that old law firm’s remaining Wilmington partner, Geoffrey A. Sawyer III, is Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s outside counsel on unclaimed property and gave $11,700, and Geoffrey A. Sawyer III’s sister, Carrie Sawyer Casey, runs County Executive Marcus Henry’s old county department, the New Castle County Department of Community Services, and gave too. Over all of it sits Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez, County Executive Matt Meyer’s county Land Use chief when the warehouse plan was recorded. Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s Delaware Department of State pays the grant, registered the applicant, SRJC, LLC, hosted the hearing, charters Community Bank Delaware, William “Jack” Riddle’s bank, sets Artesian Water Company’s rates, licenses the restaurants of Alan Levin, Governor Matt Meyer’s fundraiser, and is suing Jonathan Horner. Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez chairs the Diamond State Port Corporation, of which Fred Sears II is Vice Chairman, sits on the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council, which Alan Levin chairs, and Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s household gave sixteen times. Change Can’t Wait PAC, the account that elected Governor Matt Meyer, 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 Governor Matt Meyer endorsed against two senators of Governor Matt Meyer’s own party, three weeks before Senator Ray Seigfried, 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
Twenty-three findings from the State’s and county’s own documents
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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 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 Governor Matt Meyer in every race Governor Matt Meyer has run. Fred Sears II of Wilmington, Chairman of the Council on Development Finance, retired President of Commerce Bank, Delaware and of the Delaware Community Foundation, the City of Wilmington’s Finance Director in the years the city owned the Port of Wilmington, and Finance Chair of Congresswoman Lisa Blunt Rochester’s campaigns since 2016, wrote Matt Meyer ten checks, $3,350, between November 3, 2016, and May 18, 2025. Fred Sears II is Vice Chairman of the Diamond State Port Corporation. The Chairman of the Diamond State Port Corporation is Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez. The Diamond State Port Corporation’s registered lobbyist, Douglas Gramiak, is the registered lobbyist for Harvey, Hanna & Associates, the applicant.
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The applicant’s lobbyist, Shawn Tucker, Harvey Hanna & Associates’ lawyer, Douglas Gramiak, the Diamond State Port Corporation’s lobbyist, and the County Executive’s transition team 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 on Development Finance, wrote Shawn Tucker’s 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 Alan Levin left State service; the partner who stayed behind, Geoffrey A. Sawyer III, leads Faegre Drinker’s representation of Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’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, E. Thomas Harvey III’s 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 Harvey Hanna & Associates’ 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 2, 2026, four days after the Scott Run vote, with comments due October 16, and never announced it under Harvey Hanna & Associates’ name. The $1,900,000 for Scott Run is the firm’s second award from the Site Readiness Fund, nine months after CJ Bell presented the Returning Awardees Procedure.
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The firm said so itself. An economic impact study Harvey Hanna & Associates commissioned from Econsult Solutions of Philadelphia, dated July 12, 2024, states that “the State of Delaware’s Division of Small Business awarded HHA a $1 million Site Readiness Grant in January 2023” for 750 Governor Lea Road, “providing funding for activities necessary to prepare for the project, including design, engineering, and site work.” The study described a 305,000-square-foot speculative warehouse with “more than 180” permanent jobs. The building in the firm’s September 2026 State filing is 353,500 square feet. The jobs figure did not move.
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The Secretary of State has already approved State money to the applicant. Under Title 29, Section 8422 of the Delaware Code, a Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund grant is recommended by the Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund Council but approved by the Secretary of Transportation and Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez. On May 20, 2026, four months before the Scott Run hearing, that Fund’s council recommended $1,430,000 to Harvey Hanna & Associates’ Route 40 LLC, listed on the public agenda only as “School Bell Crossing.” The Fund Council’s November 18, 2025, minutes list Jordan Seemans of Harvey Hanna & Associates as a guest; Representative William Bush and Senator Jack Walsh sit on that council.
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The applicant helps pay for the body that receives its applications. The Delaware Prosperity Partnership, the private nonprofit that took over the recruiting half of the Delaware Economic Development Office Alan Levin ran, lists Harvey Hanna & Associates as an investor of $10,000 to $24,999 in its 2024 to 2026 campaign, beside Artesian Resources and Delmarva Power at $25,000 to $49,999, WSFS and Chesapeake Utilities at $50,000 and up, and D2 Organization, Keith Delaney’s company, Barnes & Thornburg, EDiS, M. Davis & Sons, Becker Morgan and DiSabatino Construction. Its board, co-chaired by Governor Matt Meyer and WSFS Chairman Rodger Levenson, includes Emilie Ninan of Barnes & Thornburg, Brian DiSabatino of EDiS, Ed Capodanno, the retired President of Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware, Shane Breakie of Chesapeake Utilities, Terry Murphy of Bayhealth, Robert Wittig of DSM Commercial, Representative William Bush and Senator Jack Walsh.
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The Secretary of State whose department pays the grant came from Matt Meyer’s county government and gave with Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s 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. Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s 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, under Commissioner Lisa Collison, Governor Matt Meyer’s nominee of January 23, 2026, 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. Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez chairs the Diamond State Port Corporation and sits on the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council, which Alan Levin chairs. Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez, Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s husband, and the Patibanda-Sanchez household gave the Matt Meyer committees $5,566.64 in sixteen contributions, $1,000 of it to Change Can’t Wait PAC. On February 9, 2026, Secretary of State 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 on Development Finance, 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. Kevin P. Kelly gave Change Can’t Wait PAC $5,000 on December 1, 2025. Leon N. Weiner & Associates, Inc. gave Change Can’t Wait PAC $5,000 on September 9, 2026, nineteen days before Kevin P. Kelly voted on SRJC, LLC. Kevin P. Kelly was in the room on January 22, 2024, when the Council on Development Finance set the dollar tiers. Eight checks since 2016: $14,200. Part One listed Kevin P. Kelly 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 of 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 Jonathan Horner’s employer pay $35,000 between Jonathan Horner’s seating and Jonathan Horner’s vote. On April 28, 2025, four months before Governor Matt Meyer seated Jonathan Horner, 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 Jonathan Horner cancelled Selbyville homebuyer Mohammed Sedghi’s contract after Mohammed Sedghi invoked Mohammed Sedghi’s fair housing rights and that Jonathan Horner told Mohammed Sedghi, “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 Matt Meyer campaign 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 those thirty-six checks, $15,400, came from the Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware political action committee and from the companies and people on the Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware 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, William “Jack” Riddle’s 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 CJ Bell on January 9, 2025. CJ Bell succeeded Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez as Matt Meyer’s county Economic Development Director on July 1, 2023; Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez 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 Delaware Health Care Facilities Association 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 Site Readiness 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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On September 28, 2026, the day of the Scott Run hearing, Governor Matt Meyer nominated twenty-five census tracts for the next round of federal Opportunity Zones after a process run by Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s Division of Small Business. Thirteen are in New Castle County, chosen with the county’s Department of Land Use. Census Tract 101.04, which holds Drawbridge Claymont LLC’s 6300 Philadelphia Pike, and Census Tract 19.02, which holds the Port of Wilmington, are on the list. Census Tract 164.04, Governor Lea Road, is not, and neither is Scott Run.
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Jeff Buhrman, fifteen years at Bloomberg, L.P., was County Executive Marcus Henry’s first Director of Economic Development, named January 17, 2025, ten weeks after Michael R. Bloomberg’s $250,000 to Change Can’t Wait PAC. The county announced Jeff Buhrman’s successor, Emma Odren of the New Castle County Chamber of Commerce and the Delaware Prosperity Partnership, on September 9, 2026, without naming Jeff Buhrman; Emma Odren’s first day was September 28, the day of the hearing. Jeff Buhrman now runs South Pond Advisors LLC of Wilmington, formed June 3, 2026, ninety-eight days before the county announced Jeff Buhrman’s successor, which tells developers: “We wrote the rules. Led overhauls of redevelopment code … We know where the flexibility is,” and sells help stacking the Site Readiness Fund, the Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund, brownfield money and Opportunity Zones.
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New Castle County rewrote its brownfield rules three weeks before Harvey Hanna’s Delaware City plan surfaced. Substitute No. 1 to Ordinance 26-084, drafted after the Department of Land Use solicited “developers, attorneys, and engineers,” passed County Council 11 to 0 on September 22, 2026, and was signed by County Executive Marcus Henry on October 8 as “Supporting Redevelopment.” Under Substitute No. 1 to Ordinance 26-084, an industrial park on a certified brownfield such as 750 Governor Lea Road is a minor plan approved by the General Manager of Land Use with no Council vote, no public hearing and no impact fee. Jeff Buhrman, the county’s Director of Economic Development until this fall, describes that rewrite on South Pond Advisors LLC’s website in the first person: “We wrote the rules … We know where the flexibility is.”
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On October 9, 2026, eleven days after the Scott Run vote, Governor Matt Meyer accepted three rooftop solar projects into the JobsFirst Permitting Accelerator on warehouses at 400 Ships Landing Way, 1001 Lambson Lane and 10 Dock View Drive in New Castle, each owned by a limited liability company at 405 East Marsh Lane, Newport, Harvey Hanna & Associates’ address, and the Governor’s press release quotes Thomas Harvey, Managing Director of Harvey Hanna & Associates, thanking Governor Matt Meyer for “creating the JobsFirst initiative.”
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The three people County Executive Marcus Henry chose to run County Executive Marcus Henry’s transition team are in the Matt Meyer campaign 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.
“Part One counted the developer’s checks. This one counts the Chairman’s, Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s, the banker’s wife’s, the Director’s, the lobbyist’s, the lawyer’s, the water company’s, the transition team chairs’ and the County Attorney’s. That is not a developer who gave to a Governor. That is the whole building.”
Questions Residents Are Asking
Twenty-four questions, answered with the record
What is Part Two of They Took Your Hearing about?
Part Two follows the $1,900,000 Site Readiness Fund grant the Council on Development Finance recommended to Harvey Hanna & Associates on September 28, 2026, back through the people who voted, signed, lobbied, and sponsored it, and shows from the Delaware campaign finance filings that every one of them had already paid Governor Matt Meyer. It also reports that the State had paid Harvey Hanna & Associates before: $1,000,000 from the same fund in January 2023 under the name Governor Lea Road LLC, and $1,430,000 recommended on May 20, 2026 by the Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund Council under the name School Bell Crossing.
Has Harvey Hanna & Associates taken Delaware Site Readiness Fund money before?
Yes. On December 12, 2022, the Council on Development Finance recommended $1,000,000 to Governor Lea Road LLC for 18.5 acres at 750 Governor Lea Road in Delaware City. Governor Lea Road LLC’s Coastal Zone Act application, certified March 30, 2026, and September 2, 2026, is signed by E. Thomas Harvey IV and gives Harvey Hanna & Associates’ address, 405 East Marsh Lane, Newport. Harvey Hanna & Associates’ own Econsult Solutions study of July 12, 2024, states that the Division of Small Business awarded the firm a $1 million Site Readiness Grant in January 2023.
How much public money has followed Harvey Hanna & Associates parcels since 2020?
$8,830,000 in four trips to Dover: $4,500,000 to Amazon on Harvey Hanna & Associates’ Boxwood Road ground in February 2020; $1,000,000 to Governor Lea Road LLC in December 2022; $1,430,000 recommended to Route 40 LLC, listed on the agenda as School Bell Crossing, on May 20, 2026; and $1,900,000 to SRJC, LLC for Scott Run on September 28, 2026.
Who is Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez and why does she matter to this grant?
Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez has been Delaware Secretary of State since January 28, 2025, appointed by Governor Matt Meyer. She was Matt Meyer’s New Castle County Economic Development Director from 2021 and General Manager of Land Use from July 1, 2023, the department that recorded the Scott Run warehouse plan on August 3, 2023. Her Department of State holds the Division of Small Business that pays the grant and the Division of Corporations that registered SRJC, LLC; under Title 29, Section 8422, she approves every Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund grant; and she chairs the Diamond State Port Corporation. Her household gave the Matt Meyer committees $5,566.64 in sixteen contributions.
Did Fred Sears II, Chairman of the Council on Development Finance, give money to Matt Meyer?
Yes. Fred Sears II wrote Matt Meyer ten checks totaling $3,350 between November 3, 2016, and May 18, 2025, in every race Matt Meyer has run and once after there was no race. He is Vice Chairman of the Diamond State Port Corporation, whose registered lobbyist, Douglas Gramiak, is also Harvey Hanna & Associates’ registered lobbyist.
What is Barnes & Thornburg LLP’s role?
One office at 222 Delaware Avenue, Suite 1200, Wilmington, holds Harvey Hanna & Associates’ land use lawyer Shawn Tucker, its registered lobbyist Douglas Gramiak, who also lobbies for the Diamond State Port Corporation, and Wali W. Rushdan II, who co-chaired County Executive Marcus Henry’s transition team. On October 29, 2024, Shawn Tucker, Michele Tucker, Douglas Gramiak, and Stephanie Gramiak wrote Meyer for Delaware checks on the same day as Thom Harvey and Robin Adair Harvey.
What is Change Can’t Wait PAC and how much does it hold?
Change Can’t Wait PAC, account 02005278, is the political action committee Alan Levin organized that elected Governor Matt Meyer. Delaware sets no contribution limit on it. On October 4, 2026, it held $393,428.95 with no Governor’s race until 2028, raised from nursing homes, hospitals, builders, a sportsbook, a prediction market, and a nuclear operator with business before the State. Its only 2026 political spending was $50,000 to Progressive Democrats for Delaware on August 25, 2026, eight days after Governor Matt Meyer endorsed challengers against Senator Ray Seigfried and Senator Dan Cruce.
What did New Castle County change with Ordinance 26-084?
Substitute No. 1 to Ordinance 26-084, adopted 11 to 0 on September 22, 2026, and signed by County Executive Marcus Henry on October 8, 2026, moved the county’s redevelopment rules into a new Article 9 of the Unified Development Code. Under it, an industrial park on a certified brownfield such as Harvey Hanna & Associates’ 750 Governor Lea Road is a minor plan approved by the General Manager of Land Use with no County Council vote, no public hearing, and no impact fee.
Where can residents see the campaign finance filings?
Every report is on the Delaware Campaign Finance Reporting System at cfrs.elections.delaware.gov, searchable by committee name or account number: Meyer for New Castle County 01003643, Meyer for Delaware 01005311, Change Can’t Wait PAC 02005278. Appendix A of the report lists every check by person with committee, date, and address as filed, and the Evidence File lists every source with a live link.
What is new in Part Two that was not in Part One?
Everything. Part One had the parcel, the Site Readiness Fund, the tiers, the nine members of the Council on Development Finance, the Harvey and Hanna families’ $13,200, Schell Brothers’ first $25,000, Alan Levin’s $29,100, and Senate Substitute 2 to Senate Bill 23 and House Substitute 1 to House Bill 450. 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 ten checks of Fred Sears II, Chairman of the Council on Development Finance, Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s Delaware Department of State and household, the Barnes & Thornburg LLP suite, the October 29, 2024, checks, the nineteen-day and thirty-nine-day checks, the wife of William “Jack” Riddle, the three checks of Christopher “CJ” Bell, Director of the Delaware Division of Small Business, the Returning Awardees Procedure, the $393,428.95 Change Can’t Wait PAC account, who paid into Change Can’t Wait PAC and why, the $50,000 into the primaries, County Executive Marcus Henry’s transition team chairs, and the officials who carried out the pattern.
Who is Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez, and why does Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez matter here?
Delaware’s Secretary of State since January 28, 2025, appointed by Governor Matt Meyer. Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez was County Executive Matt Meyer’s New Castle County Economic Development Director from 2021 and County Executive Matt Meyer’s General Manager of Land Use from July 1, 2023, the New Castle County Department of Land Use that recorded the Scott Run warehouse plan thirty-three days later. Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s Delaware Department of State holds the Delaware Division of Small Business, which pays the grant; the Division of Corporations, which registered SRJC, LLC; the Public Archives, which hosted the hearing; State Bank Commissioner Lisa Collison, Governor Matt Meyer’s nominee of January 23, 2026, who charters William “Jack” Riddle’s bank, Community Bank Delaware; 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, which registers every lobbyist in Delaware, Douglas Gramiak, Shawn Tucker, James Smith Jr. and Jordan Seemans included, and enforces the State Code of Conduct; and the Division of Human and Civil Rights, whose Delaware Human and Civil Rights Commission is suing Jonathan Horner. Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez chairs the Diamond State Port Corporation, of which Fred Sears II is Vice Chairman, and sits on the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council, which Alan Levin chairs. Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s household gave the Matt Meyer committees $5,566.64 in sixteen contributions.
What is Barnes & Thornburg LLP’s role?
One Wilmington office, 222 Delaware Avenue, Suite 1200, holds Harvey Hanna & Associates’ lawyer, Shawn Tucker; Harvey Hanna & Associates’ and the Diamond State Port Corporation’s lobbyist, Douglas Gramiak; and Wali W. Rushdan II, who co-chaired the transition team of County Executive Marcus Henry, who sponsored the application. Barnes & Thornburg LLP gave $3,600, Shawn Tucker and Shawn Tucker’s wife Michele Tucker $8,680, Douglas Gramiak and Douglas Gramiak’s wife Stephanie Gramiak $1,200, the Rushdans $3,600.
Did Fred Sears II, Chairman of the Council on Development Finance, give money to Governor Matt Meyer?
Yes. Fred Sears II, Chairman of the Council on Development Finance, 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 members of the Council on Development Finance, or those members’ companies and households, gave, and when?
Fred Sears II, Chairman of the Council on Development Finance, personally, ten checks. Kevin P. Kelly personally, $8,000, and Kevin P. Kelly’s 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 Jonathan Horner’s 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. Christopher “CJ” Bell, Director of the Delaware Division of Small Business, who signs, gave $500 before Christopher “CJ” Bell was appointed.
Is it allowed for a member of the Council on Development Finance to vote on a grant weeks after that member’s company gave to Change Can’t Wait PAC?
Nothing in Title 29, Section 8707A of the Delaware Code or in the Council on Development Finance’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 Delaware Department of State, bars a State officer from acting on a matter in which that State officer or a close relative has a financial interest, and the Council on Development Finance’s own minutes show members recusing on other grounds: Fred Sears II on CRISP Partners on March 28, 2022, William “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; the State 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 Delaware Human and Civil Rights Commission, inside Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s Delaware Department of State, on behalf of a Selbyville homebuyer, Mohammed Sedghi, who alleges Jonathan Horner cancelled Mohammed Sedghi’s contract after Mohammed Sedghi invoked Mohammed Sedghi’s fair housing rights and told Mohammed Sedghi, “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 Jonathan Horner on the Council on Development Finance 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 the political committees, officers, and board companies of both the Home Builders Association of Delaware and Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware are in the Matt Meyer campaign filings; Section IV and Table 2A set those checks 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 the providers’ costs, set each year by the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council that Alan Levin chairs. The Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council set 2026 at 4.9 percent in December 2025; the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory 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, 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 Delaware Health Care Facilities Association, the nursing home association, gave $50,000 on May 11; the full Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council, Alan Levin chairing the meeting as Chairman, accepted 5.0 percent on May 18. Cheryl Heiks, Executive Director of the Delaware Health Care Facilities Association, the nursing home association, was reappointed by Governor Matt Meyer to the board that approves new nursing home beds. The Delaware Health Care Facilities Association’s 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 Change Can’t Wait PAC made in 2026, and it came on August 25, eight days after Governor Matt Meyer endorsed Shay Frisby against Senator Ray Seigfried of Claymont and Adriana Bohm against Senator Dan Cruce of Wilmington, two Democrats who had crossed Governor Matt Meyer 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. Change Can’t Wait PAC 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 Change Can’t Wait PAC and no rule that Change Can’t Wait PAC spend down. Change Can’t Wait PAC can give to any candidate in any race, including a primary against a sitting senator. Change Can’t Wait PAC raised $461,100 after Alan Levin became Chairman of the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council, and Alan Levin has not written Change Can’t Wait PAC a check since June 10, 2024.
Has Harvey Hanna & Associates taken Site Readiness Fund 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 Governor Lea Road LLC’s 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 2, 2026, four days after the Scott Run vote, corrected the notice on October 6, and set comments to close 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 Harvey Hanna & Associates’ second trip to the Site Readiness Fund.
What did New Castle County just sign?
Substitute No. 1 to Ordinance 26-084, adopted September 22, 2026, 11 to 0, and ceremonially signed by County Executive Marcus Henry on October 8. Substitute No. 1 to Ordinance 26-084 moves New Castle County’s redevelopment rules into a new Article 9 of the Unified Development Code. Under Substitute No. 1 to Ordinance 26-084, a certified brownfield may be developed under the redevelopment standards regardless of what is demolished; an industrial park on a certified brownfield is a minor plan approved by the General Manager of the New Castle County Department of Land Use rather than New Castle County Council; the office restriction in the Industrial district does not apply, and the site pays no impact fees on the floor area already on the site’s books. The brownfield at 750 Governor Lea Road, the Harvey Hanna & Associates warehouse the Site Readiness Fund paid $1,000,000 to design, is the kind of site Substitute No. 1 to Ordinance 26-084 was written for. The New Castle County Department of Land Use’s report says the ordinance was drafted after soliciting “the development community (developers, attorneys, and engineers).”
How far back does this go?
To 2009. Alan Levin ran the Delaware Economic Development Office and chaired the Diamond State Port Corporation from 2009 to 2015, announced Amazon’s Middletown warehouse in 2012, wrote Matt Meyer’s first county campaign a check in April 2016, chaired County Executive Matt Meyer’s airport task force in 2019, organized Change Can’t Wait PAC, the committee that elected Matt Meyer Governor, in June 2021, a year before Matt Meyer announced, and took the gavel of the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council, the council that certifies the State’s revenue, on March 17, 2025. The Delaware Economic Development Office Alan Levin ran was split in 2017 into a private partnership, the Delaware Prosperity Partnership, that the applicants fund, and a Delaware Division of Small Business whose Director, Christopher “CJ” Bell, and Secretary, Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez, both gave; County Executive Marcus Henry, who sponsors the grants, is Governor Matt Meyer’s former deputy; the people around every decision in this report wrote Governor Matt Meyer checks. Section XI lays the sequence out by date and names the public records that extend the sequence: the deeds, the formation records of the applicant companies, the correspondence, and the Opportunity Zone map, which the State itself filled in on September 28, 2026.
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?
The decision of Christopher “CJ” Bell, Director of the Delaware Division of Small Business, 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 Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s office, in writing, whether Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez has recused Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez 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 of the Council on Development Finance; 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
The one-day notice, the warehouse nobody was told about, and where the money goes
On October 2, 2026, four days after the State voted $1,900,000 of your money to Harvey Hanna & Associates for Harvey Hanna & Associates’ Scott Run warehouse site in Middletown, a notice appeared on a State website, under a company name no resident would recognize, for a second Harvey Hanna & Associates warehouse in Delaware City, that nobody had been told about.
Comments closed October 16. No hearing was offered. The application behind the notice was signed by Thom Harvey’s son, E. Thomas Harvey IV. And the State had already paid for that Delaware City warehouse too: $1,000,000 from the same Site Readiness Fund in January 2023, under a company name, Governor Lea Road LLC; the minutes never connected to Harvey Hanna & Associates. Harvey Hanna & Associates’ own consultant put the grant in writing in July 2024. Four months before Scott Run, a third State fund, the Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund, recommended Harvey Hanna & Associates $1,430,000 more, under a name the agenda gave as School Bell Crossing, an award that needed Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s signature. Four trips to Dover in six years, $8,830,000, and the public heard about one of the four, after the vote.
This report is about how that is done. This report follows the money through the Delaware Prosperity Partnership, a private office in Wilmington that Harvey Hanna & Associates helps pay for and Governor Matt Meyer chairs. This report follows the money into the Delaware Department of State, run by Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez, who recorded the Scott Run plan at New Castle County and whose family wrote Governor Matt Meyer sixteen checks, and across a Council on Development Finance whose Chairman, Fred Sears II, two homebuilders, Kevin P. Kelly and Jonathan Horner, banker, William “Jack” Riddle, and signing Director, Christopher “CJ” Bell of the Delaware Division of Small Business, had each been paid or had paid before each of those people sat down.
This report follows the money into New Castle County, where County Executive Marcus Henry’s transition team was chaired by Wali W. Rushdan II, the Barnes & Thornburg LLP partner of Harvey Hanna & Associates’ lawyer Shawn Tucker, and by Pamela J. Scott, a Saul Ewing LLP attorney who chairs the Board of the New Castle County Chamber of Commerce; where Jeff Buhrman, County Executive Marcus Henry’s Director of Economic Development, formed a company, South Pond Advisors LLC, to sell developers “the flexibility” Jeff Buhrman says Jeff Buhrman wrote while Jeff Buhrman still held the job; where Jeff Buhrman’s replacement from that same New Castle County Chamber of Commerce, Emma Odren, started work the morning of the vote; and where New Castle County Council rewrote New Castle County’s brownfield rules three weeks before Harvey Hanna & Associates’ Delaware City plan arrives. And this report follows the money into Change Can’t Wait PAC, a political account with no race to run that now holds $393,428.95 from the hospitals, nursing homes, builders, and gaming companies with business before the State.
Every name is in full, every time, with the title, the board, and the check, because the people doing this are counting on you not knowing who those people are. I sat across from most of those people for eight years. The filings are the part I could not see from the New Castle County Council President’s chair.
“Public money has followed Harvey Hanna & Associates parcels to Dover four
times since 2020, $8,830,000 recommended or paid, three of those trips under
company names no resident would recognize, and the people who ran the vote,
signed the grant, sponsored the application, and run the department that pays
are all in the Matt Meyer campaign filings.”
Everyone in the Room Paid the Man Who Put Them There
Part 2 of They Took Your Hearing, Your County’s Say, and $1,900,000 of Your Money:
The warehouse nobody was told about, the Barnes & Thornburg suite, Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s department, Chairman Fred Sears II’s checks, the builders’ laws, Alan Levin’s account with no race to run, and the senators who paid for asking.
Explainer for "They Took Your Hearing..." Reports 1 & 2 covered in a 7-minute video.
See below.
Part Two. The People Who Paid for the Room
Shawn Tucker’s Barnes & Thornburg LLP Suite, Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s Delaware Department of State, the Council on Development Finance’s Checks, and Change Can’t Wait PAC, the Account With No Race to Run
I. The Table Came With Him
The Delaware City warehouse, the first million, the third fund, and the seven checks of October 29, 2024
Part One told you what happened in the Delaware Room on September 28, 2026: the Council on Development Finance, nine members present, voted 7 to 1, with 1 reported abstention, Senator Nicole Poore the one no, to recommend $1,900,000 of State money to a company called SRJC, LLC for a warehouse site at Jamison Corner Road in Middletown, with no public hearing. This report begins with what Part One could not know, because it surfaced only after Part One was published. The company behind SRJC, LLC, Harvey Hanna & Associates of Newport, has a second warehouse under way that nobody in Delaware was told about, and the State had already paid for that second warehouse.
The warehouse you never heard of
On October 2, 2026, four days after the Scott Run vote, the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control posted a notice on the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control’s website, Notice CCE20260360. A company named Governor Lea Road, LLC was asking for a Coastal Zone Act ruling on “a 353,500 square foot warehouse building with vehicle loading docks at 750 Governor Lea Road” in Delaware City. The Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control corrected the square footage on October 6 and set the close of comment at the end of October 16. Fourteen days, by email or by mail, no hearing, no press release, and no mention anywhere of Harvey Hanna & Associates.
I opened the application behind the notice. Governor Lea Road LLC’s address was 405 East Marsh Lane, Suite 1, Newport. That is the front door of Harvey Hanna & Associates. The contact was E. Thomas Harvey IV, at a harveyhanna.com email address. The signature line, certified on March 30, 2026, and again on September 2, 2026, read “E. Thomas Harvey, IV, Authorized Member.” E. Thomas Harvey IV is one of the three sons that E. Thomas “Thom” Harvey III, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Harvey Hanna & Associates, named Managing Directors of Harvey Hanna & Associates on July 24, 2026.
So Harvey Hanna & Associates has a second warehouse coming, on 18.5 acres of the old Ion Power laboratory, a certified brownfield wedged between the Metachem Superfund site to the north and the Delaware City Refinery to the south. The Delaware City warehouse will be built on speculation, the application says, with no tenant signed. $36,600,000 in construction. “More than 180” permanent jobs. The Delaware Department of Transportation had already reviewed the Delaware City warehouse’s traffic study on January 29, 2025, and noted that the traffic signal the site needs at River Road and Hamburg Road is being installed by Stoltz Real Estate Partners, the developer that holds the largest Site Readiness Fund grant in the Site Readiness Fund’s history, $2,400,000 for Blue Diamond Park. None of this had been in the news. No one in Delaware City had been asked.
“A public notice under a name nobody would recognize, E. Thomas Harvey IV’s signature on it, a million dollars the State never announced under Harvey Hanna
& Associates’ name, and four trips to Dover in six years.”
The first million, found in the minutes
The name Governor Lea Road LLC sent me back through the minutes of the Council on Development Finance, the nine-member State board that recommends these grants. On December 12, 2022, the Council on Development Finance had voted 6 to 0 to recommend $1,000,000 from the Site Readiness Fund to “Governor Lea Road LLC” for 18.5 acres on Governor Lea Road. The State does not publish who owns a limited liability company, so the minutes alone could never tell a resident that the money went to Harvey Hanna & Associates. The Coastal Zone Act application, signed by Thom Harvey’s son, E. Thomas Harvey IV from Harvey Hanna & Associates’ own address, does.
Then I found the document that says it in Harvey Hanna & Associates’ own voice. On July 12, 2024, a Philadelphia consulting firm, Econsult Solutions, Inc., delivered a study to Harvey Hanna & Associates titled The Economic and Fiscal Impacts of the Redevelopment of 750 Governor Lea Road, commissioned, in Econsult Solutions, Inc.’s words, “to enhance the public discussion about the proposal.” Page 7: “In recognition of the project bringing this site back into productive use and creating opportunities for new business and jobs, the State of Delaware’s Division of Small Business awarded HHA a $1 million Site Readiness Grant in January 2023. This award is providing funding for activities necessary to prepare for the project, including design, engineering, and site work.”
Read what that means. Harvey Hanna & Associates was paid $1,000,000 by the Site Readiness Fund in January 2023. Fifteen months later, Harvey Hanna & Associates commissioned a study that said so. Twenty months after that, on September 28, 2026, Harvey Hanna & Associates stood before the same Site Readiness Fund, through a different shell, SRJC, LLC, and asked for $1,900,000 more. The Delaware City warehouse the State paid to design in 2023 is still a vacant brownfield. Harvey Hanna & Associates’ own study called the site “underutilized” in July 2024, eighteen months after the State’s money arrived.
The building has also grown while the jobs stood still. The Econsult Solutions, Inc. study described 305,000 square feet. The traffic study the Delaware Department of Transportation reviewed in January 2025 said 330,000. The Coastal Zone Act application Thom Harvey’s son, E. Thomas Harvey IV certified in September 2026 says 353,500, sixteen percent larger than the building the State was told about when the State paid, at the same $36,600,000 and the same 180 jobs.
The third fund, and Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s signature
That was not the only State money. On May 20, 2026, in the Farmington-Felton Room of the Delaware Department of Transportation’s building at 800 Bay Road in Dover, the Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund Council took up an application the public agenda called only “School Bell Crossing (Bear, DE).” The name Harvey Hanna & Associates appears nowhere on that agenda. The name Route 40 LLC appears nowhere on that agenda either. Inside the room, the applicant was Route 40 LLC, a Harvey Hanna & Associates company, asking for road money for two warehouses, 119,031 square feet on 10.54 acres at 531 Vandyke Road in Bear, the parcel at the corner of Pulaski Highway and Vandyke Road that the news report of June 10 called 600 Pulaski Highway, with ground to be broken in 2027. That is the third name in this report under which Harvey Hanna & Associates has gone to Dover for public money: Governor Lea Road LLC in 2022, School Bell Crossing in May 2026, SRJC, LLC in September 2026. A resident reading the State’s calendar would not have recognized a single one of those three names as Harvey Hanna & Associates.
The guest list in the minutes reads: Jordan Seemans, Harvey Hanna and Associates. Thomas Harvey, Harvey Hanna and Associates. Steve Wooden, Harvey Hanna and Associates. Jim Smith, Barnes and Thornburg. Shawn Tucker, Barnes and Thornburg. Thom Harvey came to Dover in person, with Thom Harvey’s in-house lobbyist Jordan Seemans. Shawn Tucker and Jim Smith of the Barnes & Thornburg LLP suite at 222 Delaware Avenue were in the same room; the same agenda carried Two Farms Inc., the Royal Farms company, for which Shawn Tucker has been the registered lobbyist since March 7, 2023. The financial review of Route 40 LLC was presented by Kristina Robinson of the Delaware Division of Small Business, the same division inside Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s Delaware Department of State that would take up Harvey Hanna & Associates’ $1,900,000 in September, and the State’s own slide for the item carries the line “CONFIDENTIALITY OF FINANCIALS WAS REQUESTED.”
The public endorser was Senator Marie Pinkney. Forty-nine jobs were promised for year three. Jordan Seemans told the council that “there is nothing currently on the site.” Thom Harvey told the council that the hardest part of finding a tenant had been “the certainty of these improvements and the timing of them,” and that “a well-known nonprofit organization is also looking at this space.” The one member of the public who spoke was Dr. Keenan D. Dorsey, founder and owner of Innovative Kids Early Learning Academy at 614 Pulaski Highway, who told the council that Harvey Hanna & Associates “has been a great neighbor” and asked the council to support the project. New Castle County’s ownership records list the owner of 614 Pulaski Highway as 614P LLC, 405 East Marsh Lane, Suite 1, Newport, the address of Harvey Hanna & Associates; Thom Harvey had told the council minutes earlier that “they successfully leased the previously vacant daycare space.” The daycare owner who spoke for the landlord’s road money is the landlord’s tenant.
The convenience store pad Thom Harvey said had been sold is 600 Pulaski Highway, 2.03 acres in the School Bell Crossing Shopping Center subdivision, and the county’s records now list its owner as Bear 40 Developers LLC of 1195 Route 70, Lakewood, New Jersey, the address of Paramount Realty Services. No executive session was needed. No one spoke against. No one voted no. The council recommended $1,430,000. Three weeks later, on June 10, 2026, Delaware Business Times reported that the Bear warehouses had been approved for $1,140,000. The council’s own minutes say $1,430,000, and this report uses the minutes.
Fifteen days after that vote, on June 4, 2026, Shawn Tucker and Jim Smith of Barnes & Thornburg LLP were back in the same building for the next client, Two Farms Inc., the Royal Farms company, asking the same council for $231,432.61 for a store at 613 Pulaski Highway, across the road. The public endorser of the Royal Farms application was County Executive Marcus Henry, the same County Executive who sponsored Harvey Hanna & Associates’ $1,900,000 application to the State. When Senator Jack Walsh said the Royal Farms project was “a stretch” and that twenty-four jobs did not seem enough, the minutes record Shawn Tucker’s answer: Shawn Tucker “mentioned the School Bell project across the street” as proof the corridor was redeveloping. The Harvey Hanna & Associates grant of May became Shawn Tucker’s argument for the Royal Farms grant of June. The council declined Royal Farms, 7 to 0. The council had not declined Harvey Hanna & Associates.
I read the statute that governs the Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund, Title 29, Section 8422 of the Delaware Code. The Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund’s council only recommends. The money may be spent only when two people approve it: the Secretary of Transportation and the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State is Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez. Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez was County Executive Matt Meyer’s General Manager of Land Use at New Castle County when the Scott Run warehouse plan was recorded on August 3, 2023. The $1,430,000 the council recommended to Harvey Hanna & Associates on May 20, 2026, could not be paid without Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s approval. Four months later, Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s own Delaware Division of Small Business took up Harvey Hanna & Associates’ $1,900,000. Section II is about Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez.
The minutes of the Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund’s council for November 18, 2025, list the members present: Chair Joe Westcott; Representative William Bush, who this year wrote House Substitute 1 to House Bill 450, the new State road fee; Senator Jack Walsh, who wrote the law that created the Site Readiness Fund; Martin Nunlee; and Bill Strickland. Under guests: “Jordan Seemans, Harvey Hanna and Associates.” Jordan Seemans had been Deputy State Treasurer under State Treasurer Colleen Davis until Harvey Hanna & Associates hired Jordan Seemans on March 11, 2025, nine weeks after Governor Matt Meyer took office, as Harvey Hanna & Associates’ Government Affairs and Community Relations Manager.
Jordan Seemans had written Matt Meyer $250 on October 29, 2024, the same Tuesday that Thom Harvey, Thom Harvey’s wife Robin Adair Harvey, Thom Harvey’s lawyer Shawn Tucker of Barnes & Thornburg LLP, Thom Harvey’s lobbyist Douglas Gramiak of Barnes & Thornburg LLP, Shawn Tucker’s wife Michele Tucker, Douglas Gramiak’s wife Stephanie Gramiak, and Artesian Water Company all wrote Governor Matt Meyer checks. Harvey Hanna & Associates’ in-house lobbyist, Jordan Seemans, was in the room at the second State fund, the Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund, in November, six weeks before Harvey Hanna & Associates’ Delaware City warehouse plan was revised and ten months before Harvey Hanna & Associates’ Middletown request came up at the first State fund, the Site Readiness Fund.
How long Harvey Hanna & Associates and Alan Levin have been doing this
Harvey Hanna & Associates knew the way to Dover long before Jamison Corner. Ryan Kennedy of Harvey Hanna & Associates once credited, by name, “Alan Levin and Bernice Whaley at the Delaware Economic Development Office” for the deal that kept a tenant at Harvey Hanna & Associates’ Twin Lakes property. That is Alan Levin, as Governor Jack Markell’s Director of the Delaware Economic Development Office, doing Harvey Hanna & Associates a favor more than a decade ago, in Harvey Hanna & Associates’ own words. Alan Levin is today the Chairman of the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council, by Governor Matt Meyer’s appointment of March 17, 2025, and the man who organized Change Can’t Wait PAC, Governor Matt Meyer’s political action committee.
In October 2017, Harvey Hanna & Associates bought the closed General Motors plant on Boxwood Road in Newport, 142 acres, for about $10,400,000, on a deed that recorded ten dollars. Harvey Hanna & Associates cleared the ground and sold 88 acres to Dermody Properties of Reno, Nevada, in two closings, November 2019 and February 2020, for more than $31,000,000. On February 24, 2020, the same month as the second closing, the Council on Development Finance recommended $4,500,000 of Delaware Strategic Fund money to Amazon for the 3,800,000-square-foot warehouse Dermody Properties built on that ground.
Kurt Foreman, then President and Chief Executive Officer of the Delaware Prosperity Partnership, made the pitch. When the Amazon building sold again, Macquarie Asset Management of Sydney, Australia, paid about $392,000,000 for it, $818 a square foot. Whitney Sweeney, formerly of Macquarie Asset Management, now sits on the Delaware Prosperity Partnership’s board of directors, beside Governor Matt Meyer, the Delaware Prosperity Partnership’s co-chair. Section VI explains what the Delaware Prosperity Partnership’s board does.
And the road the Scott Run trucks will use was drawn eleven years ago. The Delmarva Freight Plan of May 2015, prepared for the Delaware Department of Transportation by Whitman, Requardt & Associates with the Wilmington Area Planning Council, named the US 301 corridor the peninsula’s “Bay” Freight Corridor, listed the new four-lane US 301 expressway from the Maryland line to Delaware Route 1 as its project candidate BY 41, and listed “freight management upgrades” on Delaware Route 896 from US 301 to Route 1 as BY 44, the roads Scott Run’s 233 truck doors open onto. Harvey Hanna & Associates lists the Wilmington Area Planning Council, the Delmarva Freight Plan’s co-author, among Harvey Hanna & Associates’ own affiliations on Harvey Hanna & Associates’ website. The road was planned; Harvey Hanna & Associates sat with the planners, and the ground came later.
Count the trips. Twin Lakes, under Governor Jack Markell, a favor from Alan Levin’s Delaware Economic Development Office. Boxwood Road, February 2020, $4,500,000 to Amazon on Harvey Hanna & Associates’ ground. Governor Lea Road, January 2023, $1,000,000 to Harvey Hanna & Associates, never announced under Harvey Hanna & Associates’ name. Pulaski Highway, May 2026, $1,430,000 to Harvey Hanna & Associates under the name School Bell Crossing, an award that needed Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s approval. Scott Run, September 2026, $1,900,000 to Harvey Hanna & Associates, the fourth time in six years that public money has followed a Harvey Hanna & Associates parcel and the second time from the same Site Readiness Fund. $8,830,000 of public money since 2020. The public heard about one of the four after the vote.
Thom Harvey started out driving a trash truck. Thom Harvey now owns four million square feet of warehouse in Delaware. Thom Harvey has never had to ask twice, and after June 27, 2025, Thom Harvey did not have to ask twice even at the Site Readiness Fund that had already paid Thom Harvey. That is the rule Section VI is about.
The seven checks and the Barnes & Thornburg LLP suite at 222 Delaware Avenue the checks came from
Here is how the table was set. On Tuesday, October 29, 2024, one week before Delaware elected a Governor, seven checks arrived at Meyer for Delaware from one side of one deal. Thom Harvey, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Harvey Hanna & Associates, and Thom Harvey’s wife Robin Adair Harvey, $1,200 each, from 22 Center Meeting Road, Wilmington. Douglas Gramiak, Harvey Hanna & Associates’ registered lobbyist, and Douglas Gramiak’s wife, Stephanie Gramiak, $600 each, from 5 Harrington Court. Shawn Tucker, Harvey Hanna & Associates’ land use lawyer, and Shawn Tucker’s wife, Michele Tucker, $1,000 each, Shawn Tucker’s from the Barnes & Thornburg LLP office, Michele Tucker’s from 414 Derby Way. And Artesian Water Company, Inc., the utility that had certified on August 2, 2022, that the Scott Run site had the water it needed, $1,200. Seven checks, one day, $6,800. Thom Harvey did not send Thom Harvey’s money alone. Thom Harvey sent everyone who would later carry Harvey Hanna & Associates’ application.
Start on the twelfth floor of 222 Delaware Avenue in Wilmington, because the whole story can be seen from that one suite. The twelfth floor of 222 Delaware Avenue 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 at Barnes & Thornburg LLP.
Shawn Tucker is a partner at Barnes & Thornburg LLP. Shawn Tucker is the land use lawyer who handled Harvey Hanna & Associates’ Middletown purchases and who stands up for Stoltz Real Estate Partners when Stoltz Real Estate Partners comes before the Council on Development Finance, as Stoltz Real Estate Partners did on September 23, 2024, for the $2,400,000 Blue Diamond Park award that is still the largest in the Site Readiness Fund’s history. Between September 28, 2016, and October 29, 2024, Shawn Tucker wrote the three Matt Meyer committees eleven checks, $6,480, $2,200 of it to Change Can’t Wait PAC, where there is no limit. Michele Tucker, Shawn Tucker’s wife, wrote five more. Shawn Tucker’s last check, the $1,000 on October 29, 2024, was filed from the Barnes & Thornburg LLP suite at 222 Delaware Avenue.
Douglas Gramiak is Barnes & Thornburg LLP’s Director of State Government Affairs, in the same Barnes & Thornburg LLP suite. Douglas Gramiak was Governor John Carney’s chief of staff, and before that the political editor of The News Journal. Douglas Gramiak 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 Matt Meyer had announced for anything, Douglas Gramiak registered as the lobbyist for Harvey, Hanna & Associates. On October 29, 2024, Douglas Gramiak and Douglas Gramiak’s wife, Stephanie Gramiak, wrote the Gramiaks’ $600 checks on the same day the Harveys wrote the Harveys’ checks.
Wali W. Rushdan II is a real estate partner in the same Barnes & Thornburg LLP office at 222 Delaware Avenue, Suite 1200, Wilmington. On November 20, 2024, fifteen days after the election, County Executive-elect Marcus Henry named Wali W. Rushdan II one of three co-chairs of County Executive-elect Marcus Henry’s transition team, the transition team whose Land Use and Economic Development committees produced County Executive Order 2026-06, the expedited land use track County Executive Marcus Henry signed on April 28, 2026, and County Executive Marcus Henry’s 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 Barnes & Thornburg LLP 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 Barnes & Thornburg LLP had given to, Matt Meyer, was Governor Matt Meyer.
So: Shawn Tucker, Harvey Hanna & Associates’ lawyer, Douglas Gramiak, Harvey Hanna & Associates’ lobbyist and the Diamond State Port Corporation’s lobbyist, and Wali W. Rushdan II, County Executive Marcus Henry’s transition team co-chair, are one firm, Barnes & Thornburg LLP, at one address, 222 Delaware Avenue, Suite 1200, Wilmington, and Barnes & Thornburg LLP and its people put $13,680 into the three Matt Meyer committees. Hold that address: 222 Delaware Avenue, Suite 1200. Every other road in this report runs back through 222 Delaware Avenue, Suite 1200.
The suite at 222 Delaware Avenue, Suite 1200, has a history, and the history is the same people. Barnes & Thornburg LLP 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 Barnes & Thornburg LLP Wilmington office; Shawn Tucker, who by Barnes & Thornburg LLP’s own release had been New Castle County’s First Assistant County Attorney and had managed the New Castle County Department of Land Use before private practice; Douglas Gramiak, who had gone from Governor John Carney’s office to Drinker Biddle & Reath in October 2019 and registered as the Diamond State Port Corporation’s lobbyist from Drinker Biddle & Reath on January 20, 2020; Mary Kate McLaughlin; and Michael DeNote.
Drinker Biddle & Reath is the firm Alan Levin, Chairman of the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council, joined as Of Counsel when Alan Levin left the Delaware Economic Development Office in June 2015, and Drinker Biddle & Reath gave Matt Meyer $600 on September 26, 2016, from 222 Delaware Avenue, Suite 1410, two floors from the Barnes & Thornburg LLP suite at 222 Delaware Avenue, Suite 1200, that Drinker Biddle & Reath’s 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 Faegre Drinker’s representation of the State of Delaware’s Voluntary Disclosure Agreement program for unclaimed property, the program Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez has run since 2012, through which more than 1,200 companies settle what those companies owe the State without audit. Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez is Geoffrey A. Sawyer III’s client.
Geoffrey A. Sawyer III, partner at Faegre Drinker, 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, Inc. 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 Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council that certifies it is chaired by Geoffrey A. Sawyer III’s former colleague, Alan Levin, Chairman of the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council.
The day after Governor Matt Meyer signed Senate Substitute 2 to Senate Bill 23 and House Substitute 1 to House Bill 450, on July 14, 2026, Governor Matt Meyer signed Executive Order 25, barring from the State’s Unclaimed Property Task Force anyone paid in the preceding five years for unclaimed property consulting; Executive Order 25 does not reach Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s own contractor, Geoffrey A. Sawyer III of Faegre Drinker. The five-year bar does reach Michael Houghton, a retired attorney with decades in the unclaimed property industry, the man Governor Matt Meyer removed from the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council in March 2026. And the $110,000,000 the State added to the port in House Bill 500 is paid from the same unclaimed property revenue the Task Force exists to examine.
And Geoffrey A. Sawyer III 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 Carrie Sawyer Casey 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; Carrie Sawyer Casey worked under Marcus Henry, for Matt Meyer, for the eight years I sat across from both Marcus Henry and Matt Meyer, was nominated by County Executive Matt Meyer to succeed Marcus Henry as General Manager when Marcus Henry 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, Carrie Sawyer Casey 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, Geoffrey A. Sawyer III, is Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s outside counsel. The sister, Carrie Sawyer Casey, runs County Executive Marcus Henry’s old department, the New Castle County Department of Community Services. Both Geoffrey A. Sawyer III and Carrie Sawyer Casey wrote Governor Matt Meyer checks.
“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.”
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 Artesian Water Company, Inc.’s August 2, 2022, capacity certification is one of the approvals the seller printed under “SHOVEL-READY AND FULLY APPROVED.” Artesian Water Company, Inc. had given Matt Meyer $250 in 2016 and $600 in 2019. Artesian Water Company, Inc.’s rates are set by the Delaware Public Service Commission, which sits inside the Delaware Department of State. The $1,200 on October 29, 2024, is the only time a Delaware water utility appears in the filings beside Harvey Hanna & Associates, the developer Artesian Water Company, Inc. serves, on Harvey Hanna & Associates’ day.
There was an eighth check that Tuesday, and the eighth check explains how Harvey Hanna & Associates learns the way to Dover. Jordan Seemans of 1508 North Franklin Street, Wilmington, gave Meyer for Delaware $250 on October 29, 2024. Jordan Seemans was then Deputy State Treasurer under State Treasurer Colleen Davis, promoted to that post on March 10, 2023, after three years as State Treasurer Colleen Davis’s Director of Policy and Communications, and before that Governor John Carney’s Director of Legislative Affairs and County Executive Matt Meyer’s liaison to Delaware’s fifty-seven municipalities.
On March 11, 2025, nine weeks after Governor Matt Meyer took the oath, Harvey Hanna & Associates announced Jordan Seemans 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 of Harvey Hanna & Associates, said Jordan Seemans’ experience would “advance the company’s economic development efforts in Delaware.” Sixteen months later, Harvey Hanna & Associates’ economic development effort in Delaware was a $1,900,000 request to the Council on Development Finance.
Harvey Hanna & Associates’ in-house lobbyist, Jordan Seemans, and Harvey Hanna & Associates’ outside lobbyist, Douglas Gramiak, both wrote Governor Matt Meyer 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 Misty Seemans is not counted with Jordan Seemans. Ryan Kennedy of Harvey Hanna & Associates, who once credited Alan Levin by name for the deal that kept a tenant at Harvey Hanna & Associates’ Twin Lakes property, gave $1,658.32 in four checks from 2020 to 2024.
“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.”
RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
II. The Department That Pays, and the Woman Who Runs It
Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez: what the Department of State holds and who paid
Section I ended with a signature. Under Title 29, Section 8422, the $1,430,000 that the Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund Council recommended to Harvey Hanna & Associates’ Route 40 LLC on May 20, 2026, could not be spent until Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez approved it, and Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez is the same official whose Delaware Division of Small Business took up Harvey Hanna & Associates’ $1,900,000 four months later. To understand how one person can hold both of those pens, you have to know where Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez came from, and Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez came from the same county building I did.
“Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez, from County Executive Matt Meyer’s New Castle County Department of Land Use chief to the Delaware Department of State that registered SRJC, LLC, hosted the hearing, charters Community Bank Delaware, William “Jack” Riddle’s bank, and cuts the check.”
Part One said CJ Bell, Director of the Delaware Division of Small Business, signs the grant. Part One did not say whose department the Delaware Division of Small Business is in, the Delaware Department of State, or who Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez is, or where Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez came from. Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez 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 Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez 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, Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez gave Meyer for New Castle County $400.
In 2021, New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer made Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez New Castle County’s Economic Development Director, the job Marcus Henry had held. On June 13, 2023, County Executive 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, County Executive Matt Meyer’s Manager of Special Projects, to take Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s old job as Economic Development Director. Both moves took effect July 1, 2023.
“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.”
Thirty-three days later, on August 3, 2023, the New Castle County Department of Land Use under Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez 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 New Castle County Council; the New Castle County Department of Land Use under Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez carried Ordinance 23-104 through the Planning Board hearing of November 7, 2023, and New Castle County Council’s vote of January 9, 2024, to the signature that made Ordinance 23-104 law on January 25, 2024, five months and twenty-two days after the New Castle County Department of Land Use under Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez had recorded the plan the cap could no longer reach. Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez ran the New Castle County Department of Land Use for the whole of that sequence. I know Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s 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 New Castle County Council President.
On December 11, 2024, Governor-elect Matt Meyer named Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez Secretary of State. The Delaware Senate confirmed Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez, and Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez was sworn in on January 28, 2025. The Delaware Department of State that Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez now runs is not a filing office. The Delaware Department of State is the department that, in the Delaware Department of State’s own words, has “responsibilities in virtually every aspect of Delaware state government,” and in this story the Delaware Department of State has a hand on nearly every piece.
The Delaware Department of State holds the Delaware Division of Small Business, whose Director, CJ Bell, Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s successor at the county, signs Site Readiness Fund grants, and whose budget line, 20-10-01, is where the General Assembly has put $10,000,000 a year for the Site Readiness Fund since 2021. The Delaware Department of State 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.
The Delaware Department of State 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. The Delaware Department of State holds the Office of the State Bank Commissioner, under State Bank Commissioner Lisa Collison, Governor Matt Meyer’s nominee of January 23, 2026, which charters and examines Delaware’s state banks, Community Bank Delaware of Lewes, one of those banks, whose President and Chief Lending Officer is Council on Development Finance member William “Jack” Riddle.
The Delaware Department of State holds the Delaware 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. The Delaware Department of State holds the Alcoholic Beverage Control Commissioner, who licenses every restaurant in SoDel Concepts, the Sussex County group Alan Levin, Chairman of the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council, part-owns.
The Delaware Department of State holds the Public Integrity Commission, the State’s ethics body. The Delaware Department of State 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 three Matt Meyer committees $11,700. And under Title 29, Section 8422, Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez is one of the two officers who approve every Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund grant, including the $1,430,000 to Harvey Hanna & Associates’ Route 40 LLC in May 2026. And the Delaware Department of State holds the Division of Human and Civil Rights, whose Delaware Human and Civil Rights 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 on Development Finance. Section IV has that fair housing case.
Outside the Delaware Department of State, Secretary of State 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, chairing the meeting as Chairman of the Council on Development Finance, ran the September 28 vote, and whose lobbyist is Douglas Gramiak of Barnes & Thornburg LLP, the man who wrote Douglas Gramiak’s check to Meyer for Delaware on the Harveys’ day.
“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.”
House Bill 500, the Fiscal Year 2027 Bond Bill, gave the Diamond State Port Corporation $110,000,000; on April 20, 2026, Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez told the Diamond State Port Corporation’s 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 Enstructure, the port 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.” By June 10, 2026, the $669,000,000 first phase carried a $110,000,000 State share whose source Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez declined to name at the time; the source, disclosed in late June 2026, was unclaimed property revenue, the money Geoffrey A. Sawyer III’s program collects and the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council that Alan Levin chairs certifies.
Michael Houghton, who had sat on the Port Expansion Task Force, resigned from the Port Expansion Task Force in May 2026, days after questioning the Diamond State Port Corporation’s interim director about the funding; Michael Houghton does not sit on the Diamond State Port Corporation board today, and the Diamond State Port Corporation’s current roster lists Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez as Chair and Fred Sears II as Vice Chair. And Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez sits on the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council, at the table Alan Levin has chaired as Chairman since March 17, 2025.
The filings put Secretary of State 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 Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s aggregate to exactly $1,050; with the 2019 check from Los Angeles, $1,708.32 in seven contributions, none filed under Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s 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, Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s husband, gave $658.32 in three checks from Washington, D.C. Household, $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 that House Substitute 1 to House Bill 450, the law of July 13, 2026, created.
Section V explains why a man on the Council on Development Finance cared about that transportation impact fee waiver.
“She recorded the warehouse plan at the county. She chairs the port whose lobbyist works for the developer. She sits on the council Governor Matt Meyer’s fundraiser chairs. Her department registered the applicant, hosted the hearing, licenses Community Bank Delaware, William “Jack” Riddle’s bank, and will cut the check. And Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s family wrote sixteen of the checks. There is no part of this that does not pass through Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s desk.”
III. The Chairman Who Never Missed a Race
Fred Sears II: ten checks, every race, and the port corporation
When the Scott Run request reached the Council on Development Finance on September 28, 2026, carried in by Bryan Mack of the Delaware Prosperity Partnership, the man chairing the meeting as Chairman was Fred Sears II. Governor Matt Meyer appointed Fred Sears II Chairman of the Council on Development Finance, and Fred Sears II serves at Governor Matt Meyer’s pleasure. Here is what Fred Sears II had already done for Matt Meyer, and what else Fred Sears II chairs, before Fred Sears II called the vote.
Fred Sears II lives on Derbyshire Way in Wilmington, in the 19807 zip code where most of the money in this report lives. Fred Sears II spent thirty-eight years in banking and ended that career as President of Commerce Bank, Delaware. Before that, on leave from the bank, Fred Sears II was the City of Wilmington’s Finance Director and Director of Commerce, the office that oversaw the Port of Wilmington when the city still owned the port, and Fred Sears II sat on Wilmington City Council from 1976 to 1984, chairing the Finance Committee and the Port Committee. Fred Sears II has been Finance Chair of Congresswoman Lisa Blunt Rochester’s campaigns since 2016, was Finance Chair of Mayor James Sills’ transition, co-chaired Governor Ruth Ann Minner’s transition team in 2000 and County Executive Chris Coons’ transition team in 2004, is a director of Applied Bank, and received the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce’s Josiah Marvel Cup in 2022.
“Fred Sears II, ten checks in nine years, and the lobbyist, Douglas Gramiak, that Fred Sears II’s Diamond State Port Corporation shares with Harvey Hanna & Associates.”
The man who ran the Scott Run vote has been at the finance table of Delaware Democrats for fifty years, and the port whose lobbyist is Harvey Hanna & Associates’ lobbyist was Fred Sears II’s portfolio when the City of Wilmington owned it. Fred Sears II ran the Delaware Community Foundation, the State’s largest charitable endowment, and retired as the Delaware Community Foundation’s President. Fred Sears II is Vice Chairman of the Diamond State Port Corporation under Chairman Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez. And Fred Sears II is Chairman of the Council on Development Finance, named by Governor Matt Meyer, serving, in the words of Title 29, Section 8707A of the Delaware Code, “at the pleasure of Governor Matt Meyer,” which means Governor Matt Meyer can replace Fred Sears II any afternoon Governor Matt Meyer likes.
Part One gave Fred Sears II’s titles. The filings give Fred Sears II’s checks, and Fred Sears II’s checks 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.
“Fred Sears II, ten checks in nine years, and the lobbyist his port
shares with the applicant.”
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 Governor Matt Meyer who held Fred Sears II’s chair, two months after Governor Matt Meyer had handed Alan Levin the gavel of the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council.
Ten checks, $3,350, small by the standards of Meyer for Delaware. But read what the ten checks are. Fred Sears II, Chairman of the Council on Development Finance, the board that votes the State’s site money, has written Governor Matt Meyer, the man who appoints Fred Sears II, a check in every campaign Matt Meyer has ever run, and the last one after there was no campaign left to give to. And the Diamond State Port Corporation, which Fred Sears II vice-chairs, the one Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez chairs, pays Douglas Gramiak of Barnes & Thornburg LLP to lobby for the Diamond State Port Corporation, the same Douglas Gramiak who lobbies for Harvey Hanna & Associates, the developer whose request Fred Sears II, chairing the meeting as Chairman, carried through on September 28. Fred Sears II and Harvey Hanna & Associates share a lobbyist, Douglas Gramiak. Douglas Gramiak shares a suite with Shawn Tucker, Harvey Hanna & Associates’ lawyer. Shawn Tucker’s partner Wali W. Rushdan II co-chaired County Executive Marcus Henry’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.”
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IV. The Two Homebuilders at the Table, and What the Laws Built for Them
Kevin P. Kelly, Jonathan Horner, and the 2026 laws and orders written for homebuilders
Two of the nine seats at the Council on Development Finance table belong to homebuilders, both placed there by Governor Matt Meyer: Kevin P. Kelly, Chairman and Managing Principal of Leon N. Weiner & Associates, Inc., and Jonathan Horner, General Counsel of Schell Brothers, President of the Home Builders Association of Delaware and Residential Committee Co-chair of Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware. Kevin P. Kelly and Jonathan Horner each voted on Harvey Hanna & Associates’ $1,900,000 within weeks of Kevin P. Kelly’s company or Jonathan Horner’s company or association paying Change Can’t Wait PAC, Governor Matt Meyer’s political action committee, and each builds under laws Governor Matt Meyer signed this July. This section tells both stories.
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. Kevin P. Kelly has held that seat 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 P. Kelly present.
Kevin P. Kelly 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 Leon Weiner’s 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. Leon N. Weiner & Associates, Inc.’s management arm is Arbor Management, LLC. Leon N. Weiner & Associates, Inc.’s Executive Vice President is Sean Kelly.
“Kevin P. Kelly’s tax-credit apartments, Jonathan Horner’s employer, Schell Brothers, and Jonathan Horner’s association, the Home Builders Association of Delaware,
and the laws, orders, and fee waivers signed for both.”
Leon N. Weiner & Associates, Inc.’s Delaware work includes Owens and Queen Manor at 426 South New Street in Dover, 110 apartments, a $29,000,000 renovation financed with those Low-Income Housing 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 P. Kelly in its Housing Hall of Fame in October 2021.
Now look at what Governor Matt Meyer signed in Governor Matt Meyer’s first eighteen months, and ask who it was written for. Both laws reached Governor Matt Meyer’s desk as substitutes for the bills as introduced, rewritten in the spring of 2026 before the two-thirds votes that passed the two bills. 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 county and municipality, 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 House Substitute 1 to House Bill 450’s own synopsis, on Executive Order 18 and the Permitting Accelerator: House Substitute 1 to House Bill 450 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 County and 12 percent of Sussex County, by June 1, 2027.
What by right means on the ground was shown in Kent County seven weeks after the signing. In July 2026, the Kent County Regional Planning Commission denied Harmony Hills 2, a ninety-three-lot subdivision, on public safety grounds, shared entrances and emergency access, while finding that the plan met the county code. On September 1, 2026, Kent County Levy Court reversed that denial on appeal and granted conditional preliminary approval, five commissioners voting yes, Commissioner Allan Angel not voting and one commissioner absent, after Kent County’s counsel told the commissioners that, under previous case law, the commissioners had no choice but to approve a plan that met the code.
That advice came seven weeks after Governor Matt Meyer signed Senate Substitute 2 to Senate Bill 23. Commissioner Allan Angel said: “Of all my almost 22 years as a commissioner, this is the first time my conscience has bothered me on a development.” Commissioner George Sweeney said: “Removing them from by right gives us an opportunity to apply conditions that mitigate impact on our constituents,” and said that removing public hearing requirements takes the public out of the process. In the eight years I presided over New Castle County Council, every rezoning and every plan that came to County Council came with a public hearing, and no lawyer for the county ever told County Council that case law took that hearing away. Senate Substitute 2 to Senate Bill 23 now extends by right, with no hearing, to every apartment and townhouse plan at four units an acre and up across the growth areas of all three counties by June 1, 2027.
New Castle County went the other way on the same day the State took the hearing. On July 14, 2026, the day after Governor Matt Meyer signed the two laws, New Castle County Council passed Ordinance 26-018, prime sponsors Councilman David Tackett, Councilman Brandon Toole and Councilwoman Dee Durham, co-sponsor Councilman Kevin Caneco, 12 to 0 with one member absent, widening the mailed notice of a rezoning hearing from property owners within 300 feet to property owners within 1,000 feet, requiring the notice on the county website and a sign on the property at least fifteen days before the hearing. Councilman Kevin Caneco said: “Getting more people involved in the process is a good thing.” The county widened the circle of neighbors who must be told about a hearing the day after the State removed the hearing for every by-right project.
That ordinance had been written once before, and I wrote it. On December 12, 2023, as President of New Castle County Council, I introduced Ordinance 23-168 with Councilman Brandon Toole, amending the same Section 40.31.340: notice of a rezoning hearing by certified mail to every property owner within 1,000 feet instead of 300, fourteen days before the hearing instead of ten, notice to the surrounding civic associations and the umbrella civic association, and notice on the Department of Land Use’s own social media. The ordinance’s first finding read: “a proposed rezoning of a property is an important legal process that can have weighty ramifications.” Ordinance 23-168 never got a vote. The New Castle County Council Land Use Committee’s minutes of September 17, 2024, record the ordinance tabled, no comments from Council, no comments from the public, no vote taken, and Ordinance 23-168 died with the term that November. On July 14, 2026, the 1,000 feet and the fourteen days passed 12 to 0 under Councilman David Tackett’s name, with Councilman Brandon Toole a prime sponsor a second time, the day after the State took away the hearing the notice is for.
House Substitute 1 to House Bill 450, signed the same day, July 13, 2026, 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 that transportation impact fee 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 the Delaware State Housing 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, Governor Matt Meyer.
And the Home Builders Association of Delaware that stood in the room for Executive Order 18 is the association Jonathan Horner is President of: the Home Builders Association of Delaware’s 2026 board lists Jonathan Horner as President, the National Association of Home Builders’ March 3, 2026, account of the signing names Jonathan Horner in the photograph beside Governor Matt Meyer, Richard Forsten of Saul Ewing LLP, Pamela J. Scott’s firm, is the Home Builders Association of Delaware’s Secretary and Government Relations Co-chair, and Debra Finocchiaro of Leon N. Weiner & Associates, Inc., Kevin P. Kelly’s firm, sits on the Home Builders Association of Delaware’s board.
“Kevin P. Kelly’s tax-credit apartments, Jonathan Horner’s employer and his
association, and the laws, orders, and fee waivers signed for both.”
The two homebuilders on the Council on Development Finance, Kevin P. Kelly and Jonathan Horner, share an association, the Home Builders Association of Delaware, and the Home Builders Association of Delaware’s President, Jonathan Horner, was at Governor Matt Meyer’s elbow when the Housing Fast Lane was signed.
Kevin P. Kelly and Kevin P. Kelly’s company, Leon N. Weiner & Associates, Inc., have written Governor Matt Meyer checks in every race Matt Meyer 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 P. Kelly gave Meyer for New Castle County $600 on August 17, 2020, from 4 Denny Road. Kevin P. Kelly 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 checks that land on this story.
On December 1, 2025, with Matt Meyer in Matt Meyer’s first year as the Governor who seats the Council on Development Finance, Kevin P. Kelly gave Change Can’t Wait PAC $5,000 from 4 Denny Road. On September 9, 2026, nineteen days before the Council on Development Finance took up SRJC, LLC, Leon N. Weiner & Associates, Inc. gave Change Can’t Wait PAC $5,000 more, from the same address, 4 Denny Road. Eight checks, $14,200. Change Can’t Wait PAC filed Leon N. Weiner & Associates, Inc.’s check on October 5, 2026, one week after the hearing, which is why Part One could not see that check.
“$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 Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s Department of State
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 Sussex 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 Development Finance 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 on Development Finance took up SRJC, LLC. The Schell 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. The Schell family and the Schell companies, twenty checks, $88,400, and $600 more to Marcus Henry two days after Marcus Henry was elected County Executive, filed as “Schoell Brothers LLC.”
“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.”
What Part One did not have is the fair housing 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 Mohammed Sedghi would exercise Mohammed Sedghi’s fair housing rights; Jonathan Horner cancelled the contract and, by the complaint, said, “I know your kind of people.” Mohammed Sedghi and Paula Burkhardt-Sedghi 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 Delaware Division of Human and Civil Rights 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 Jonathan Horner proceed. Four months later Governor Matt Meyer put Jonathan Horner on the Council on Development Finance.
The Delaware Division of Human and Civil Rights that brought the fair housing case is a division of the Delaware Department of State. The Secretary of State is Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez. The Governor who seated the defendant, Jonathan Horner, is Governor Matt Meyer, who appointed Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez.
“Jonathan Horner, member of the Council on Development Finance, seated August 26, 2025. $25,000 from Jonathan Horner’s employer, Schell Brothers, on September 10, 2025. $10,000 from Jonathan Horner’s employer, Schell Brothers, on August 20, 2026. The vote on September 28, 2026. And the whole time, the Delaware Human and Civil Rights Commission, the State’s own civil rights commission, was suing Jonathan Horner by name in Superior Court. Governor Matt Meyer read the opinion, or Governor Matt Meyer did not. Either way, Governor Matt Meyer gave Jonathan Horner a vote.”
The two associations he leads, and the day the contractors came
Jonathan Horner, member of the Council on Development Finance, is not only Schell Brothers’ lawyer. For 2026, Jonathan Horner 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 Matt Meyer campaign filings and both associations, the Home Builders Association of Delaware and Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware; the two associations’ officers and the two associations’ political committees are there.
The homebuilders first. The Home Builders Association of Delaware keeps a committee called Hammer & Nails; the Home Builders Association of Delaware’s 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 Home Builders Association of Delaware, whose President, Jonathan Horner, sits on the Council on Development Finance.
“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.”
The Home Builders Association of Delaware’s Past President and Government Affairs Co-chair, Michael Riemann of Becker Morgan Group, gave $1,600 in four checks. The Home Builders Association of Delaware’s Secretary and the other Government Affairs Co-chair is Richard Forsten of Saul Ewing LLP, the partner of Pamela J. Scott, co-chair of County Executive Marcus Henry’s transition team; Saul Ewing LLP’s own September 28, 2016, check was filed from 222 Delaware Avenue, Suite 1200, the Barnes & Thornburg LLP suite at 222 Delaware Avenue that Barnes & Thornburg LLP occupies today. Chesapeake Utilities Corporation, the company of the Home Builders Association of Delaware’s Associate Vice President, Dave Detrick, gave $2,400 in three checks. And Debra Finocchiaro, a director of the Home Builders Association of Delaware, is of Leon N. Weiner & Associates, Inc., the firm of Kevin P. Kelly, member of the Council on Development Finance.
Now the contractors. Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware’s political action committee, filed as the “ABC Merit Shop PAC,” gave the three Matt Meyer committees, Change Can’t Wait PAC, Meyer for Delaware and Meyer for New Castle County, $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, Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware came in a body.
Thirty-six checks reached Meyer for Delaware that day, $24,450, the largest single day in Meyer for Delaware’s first two years, and eighteen of the thirty-six, $15,400, came from Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware’s political action committee and from the companies and people on Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware’s board: Master Interiors, Inc., the company of R. Jeffrey Faull, Chairman of Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware, $1,200; R.C. Fabricators, Inc., the company of Matthew Suppe, a director of Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware, $1,200; GFP Cement Contractors LLC, the company of Dominic J. Papa, a director of Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware, $1,200; Jeffrey DiSabatino, Chair of Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware’s Legislative and Legal Rights Committee, $1,200; Lawrence DiSabatino, $500; Todd Moran of M.Davis & Sons, Inc., First Vice Chair of Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware, $500; Stephen Lex of Pettinaro Construction, Membership Chair of Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware, $500; Assurance Media LLC, the company of Matt Laird, Events Chair of Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware, $1,200; Pace Electric & Generator Services, the company of Corrine Peters, Work Force Excellence Chair of Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware, $1,000; P&C Roofing Inc., the company of Angela P. Mariano, Immediate Past Chairwoman of Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware, $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 Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware’s Treasurer, Mark Lucey, works, wrote $1,200 the same day.”
The families on the Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware board kept paying. The DiSabatinos, who hold Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware’s Secretary’s chair through Kevin DiSabatino and Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware’s Legislative chair through Jeffrey DiSabatino, gave $15,600 in twenty-five checks across the three Matt Meyer committees. Stephen Julian, a director of Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware, is of Eastern States Construction Service, Inc., 702 First State Boulevard, Wilmington, the family firm founded in 1953 and managed by the Julian family’s 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 Julian 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 Change Can’t Wait PAC on April 4, 2024. And on September 15, 2025, five days after Schell Brothers LLC wrote Schell Brothers LLC’s $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, Jonathan Horner, one Council on Development Finance seat, two trade associations. The homebuilders’ political arm, the Home Builders Association of Delaware’s, $3,600. The contractors’ political arm, Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware’s, $10,400. The contractors’ board, Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware, $15,400 in a single December day. Governor Matt Meyer did not just seat a lawyer. Governor Matt Meyer seated the industry.”
V. The Banker Who Priced It, and the Man Who Signs It
William “Jack” Riddle’s motion and CJ Bell’s signature
Two more people at the table touch the money directly. William “Jack” Riddle, President and Chief Lending Officer of Community Bank Delaware in Lewes, is the Council on Development Finance member who priced the Scott Run grant. Christopher “CJ” Bell, Director of the Division of Small Business inside Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s Delaware Department of State, is the man who signs the Scott Run grant, and the man who presented the Returning Awardees Procedure that let Harvey Hanna & Associates come back. Both William “Jack” Riddle and CJ Bell are Governor Matt Meyer’s appointees, and both William “Jack” Riddle and CJ Bell had something in the filings before William “Jack” Riddle and CJ Bell acted.
“William “Jack” Riddle’s motion and William “Jack” Riddle’s wife Susan Riddle’s
three checks; CJ Bell’s three checks and CJ Bell’s signature.”
William “Jack” Riddle of Rehoboth Beach is Governor Matt Meyer’s appointee for the Sussex County seat on the Council on Development Finance. William “Jack” Riddle is President and Chief Lending Officer of Community Bank Delaware, the Lewes bank William “Jack” Riddle 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 Community Bank Delaware, examines Community Bank Delaware and can take Community Bank Delaware’s charter, sits inside the Delaware Department of State, under Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez. Governor Matt Meyer’s appointee William “Jack” Riddle votes on Governor Matt Meyer’s grants, and Governor Matt Meyer’s Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez regulates William “Jack” Riddle’s bank.
William “Jack” Riddle is also the Council on Development Finance member who, on January 22, 2024, made the motion by which the Council on Development Finance adopted the Site Readiness Fund’s dollar tiers, seconded by Richard Rowland, a certified public accountant who has since left the Council on Development Finance, 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 William “Jack” Riddle’s own name. Susan Riddle, William “Jack” Riddle’s 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 William “Jack” Riddle, the man who priced the grant.
“William “Jack” Riddle’s motion and his wife’s three checks; CJ Bell’s three checks
and his signature.”
Christopher “CJ” Bell, Director of the Division of Small Business, is not at the table. CJ Bell 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 CJ Bell’s alone; the nine members of the Council on Development Finance 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 New Castle County Economic Development Director’s job from Charuni Patibanda when Matt Meyer moved Charuni Patibanda to the New Castle County Department of Land Use; Marcus Henry had held the job before Charuni Patibanda. Governor-elect Matt Meyer named CJ Bell Director of the Division of Small Business on January 9, 2025, which put CJ Bell back under Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez, in Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s Delaware Department of State, 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: CJ Bell, the employee, wrote Matt Meyer, the candidate, three checks; Matt Meyer won, and Governor Matt Meyer made CJ Bell the one man in Delaware who signs this money, in a department run by Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez, the woman CJ Bell had replaced at the county.
Table 2. The Council on Development Finance and the Director, with every Matt Meyer check
The Council on Development Finance 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
The Delaware Prosperity Partnership, the Returning Awardees Procedure, and Drawbridge Claymont LLC
Part One drew the circuit once: the Site Readiness 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 Claymont LLC and Drawbridge Claymont LLC’s 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.
The lobbyist registry kept by the Public Integrity Commission inside Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s Delaware Department of State, retrieved August 11, 2026, records that Sean Finnigan of Maven Strategies LLC registered as the Delaware lobbyist for D2 Management LLC, Keith Delaney’s company, on February 28, 2022, twenty-eight days before the Council on Development Finance voted Drawbridge Claymont LLC the $1,000,000. Sean Finnigan had registered for The Buccini/Pollin Group five weeks earlier, on January 21, 2022. What Part One could not see is that the Council on Development Finance wrote itself a rule for the return trip, and that Harvey Hanna & Associates used that rule.
On June 27, 2025, CJ Bell, Director of the Division of Small Business, five months into the job, presented the Returning Awardees Procedure to the Council on Development Finance, the rule under which a developer the Site Readiness 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 Delaware Prosperity Partnership is the private nonprofit that receives every Site Readiness application before the State does.
The Delaware Prosperity Partnership’s board, co-chaired by Governor Matt Meyer and by Rodger Levenson, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of WSFS Bank, voted on August 18, 2025, to expand the Delaware Prosperity Partnership’s board to thirty-five seats, and on August 21, Governor Matt Meyer filled one with Robert Wittig, co-founder of DSM Commercial, whose network Part One traced at $29,400.
“Drawbridge, Stoltz, the Returning Awardees Procedure, and $207,500,000
of farmland sold to Amazon.”
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 Claymont LLC, $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 Change Can’t Wait PAC’s history, ahead of Alan Levin, Chairman of the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council.
Stoltz Real Estate Partners closed the other kind of circuit. PR-Stoltz Venture LLC took $2,400,000 from the Site Readiness Fund on September 23, 2024, the largest award in the Site Readiness Fund’s history, over Senator Nicole Poore’s objection, with Shawn Tucker of Barnes & Thornburg LLP, Harvey Hanna & Associates’ land use lawyer, at the table for it. Jack Stoltz and Susan Stoltz wrote Meyer for Delaware $1,200 each thirty-one days later. Then Stoltz Real Estate Partners sold the next farm.
Stoltz Real Estate Partners’ 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. Stoltz Real Estate Partners’ lawyer at Barley Mill Plaza in 2010 was Pamela J. Scott of Saul Ewing LLP, who would chair County Executive 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 Harvey Hanna & Associates, 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 Site Readiness Fund on December 12, 2022, as a Harvey Hanna & Associates entity signed by E. Thomas Harvey IV, Managing Director of Harvey Hanna & Associates. That makes Harvey Hanna & Associates the third Site Readiness recipient in the Matt Meyer campaign filings, beside Drawbridge Claymont LLC and Stoltz Real Estate Partners, and the second, after Drawbridge Claymont LLC, to come back to the window after CJ Bell, Director of the Division of Small Business, presented the Returning Awardees Procedure on June 27, 2025.
Drawbridge Claymont LLC came back with a $25,000 check. Harvey Hanna & Associates came back with a $1,900,000 request. The Harvey and Hanna families had already written Governor Matt Meyer $13,200; Harvey Hanna & Associates’ lobbyist Douglas Gramiak, Harvey Hanna & Associates’ lawyer Shawn Tucker, Harvey Hanna & Associates’ water company, Artesian, and Harvey Hanna & Associates’ incoming government affairs manager Jordan Seemans had written Governor Matt Meyer $4,650 more on a single Tuesday; and the Harvey family’s first seven checks, the ones written before Matt Meyer had announced for anything, were a year old when Harvey Hanna & Associates took the first Harvey Hanna & Associates grant, for a speculative warehouse on a brownfield between a Superfund site and a refinery.
The private office your money passes through, and who pays for it
On September 28, 2026, the person who stood up in the Delaware Room to ask the State for $1,900,000 on behalf of SRJC, LLC was not E. Thomas “Thom” Harvey III, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Harvey Hanna & Associates. It was not Thom Harvey’s lawyer, Shawn Tucker of Barnes & Thornburg LLP, or Thom Harvey’s lobbyist, Douglas Gramiak of the same firm, Barnes & Thornburg LLP. It was Bryan Mack, Senior Manager for Existing Business Engagement at the Delaware Prosperity Partnership. Most people in Delaware have never heard of Bryan Mack or of the Delaware Prosperity Partnership, and Delaware residents should, because nothing reaches the Council on Development Finance without the Delaware Prosperity Partnership carrying it in.
The Delaware Prosperity Partnership is not part of State government. In 2017, the General Assembly broke up the Delaware Economic Development Office, the State agency Alan Levin had run for Governor Jack Markell from 2009 to 2015, the agency that decided which companies got State money. The legislature split Alan Levin’s old job in two. The recruiting and the pitching went to a new private nonprofit, the Delaware Prosperity Partnership. The check-signing stayed public, in a new Division of Small Business inside the Delaware Department of State. From that day on, no State employee has made the case for a Site Readiness grant. A private company, the Delaware Prosperity Partnership, does. Then a State employee, today Christopher “CJ” Bell, Director of the Division of Small Business, signs.
Who pays Bryan Mack? The companies do, and the Delaware Prosperity Partnership publishes the list on the Delaware Prosperity Partnership’s website, sorted by how much each company pays a year, under the Delaware Prosperity Partnership’s own word for those companies, “investors.” These payments are not campaign contributions; these payments are the dues that keep the Delaware Prosperity Partnership running. Harvey Hanna & Associates, the company asking for the $1,900,000, is on that list at $10,000 to $24,999 a year. Barnes & Thornburg LLP, the firm of Shawn Tucker and Douglas Gramiak, is on the list at $5,000 to $9,999.
Artesian Resources Corporation, the parent of the Artesian Water Company that certified the Scott Run site’s water on August 2, 2022, and wrote Matt Meyer $1,200 on October 29, 2024, the day the Harveys, the Tuckers and the Gramiaks wrote the Harvey, Tucker and Gramiak checks, is on the list at $25,000 to $49,999. CSC, the registered agent whose name is on SRJC, LLC’s own formation papers, is on the list at the same tier.
And D2 Organization, the company of Keith Delaney, whose Drawbridge Claymont LLC took $1,000,000 from the Site Readiness Fund in March 2022 and then wrote Change Can’t Wait PAC, Governor Matt Meyer’s political action committee, $25,000 on May 12, 2026, is on the list at $5,000 to $9,999.
That is the first thing a resident should know about the Delaware Prosperity Partnership. Harvey Hanna & Associates, the company asking for your money, helps pay the salary of Bryan Mack, the man who asks for the money on Harvey Hanna & Associates’ behalf. So do Harvey Hanna & Associates’ lawyers, Harvey Hanna & Associates’ water company, and the agent that filed Harvey Hanna & Associates’ paperwork. The Delaware Prosperity Partnership’s forty founding funders, 2017 to 2020, included the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce, the Committee of 100, Artesian Resources, Delmarva Power, Chesapeake Utilities, Bayhealth, ChristianaCare, CSC and WSFS, the same organizations whose boards Section IX walks through.
The second thing is who runs the Delaware Prosperity Partnership. The Delaware Prosperity Partnership has a board of directors, and Governor Matt Meyer sits at the head of that board. Governor Matt Meyer co-chairs the Delaware Prosperity Partnership with Rodger Levenson, Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer of WSFS Financial Corporation. Rodger Levenson wrote Matt Meyer $2,900. So Governor Matt Meyer, whose Delaware Department of State pays the grant, chairs the private company that pitched it, and Fred Sears II, the man who ran the vote, came out of Governor Matt Meyer’s co-chair Rodger Levenson’s bank.
Look down the rest of the Delaware Prosperity Partnership board, and you find the people who wrote this year’s rules.
Representative William Bush sits on the Delaware Prosperity Partnership board; Representative William Bush sponsored House Substitute 1 to House Bill 450, the State transportation impact fee that takes effect January 1, 2027. Senator Jack Walsh sits on the Delaware Prosperity Partnership board; Senator Jack Walsh wrote the law that created the Site Readiness Fund, and Senator Jack Walsh is an additional sponsor of House Substitute 1 to House Bill 450, the law that took the hearing.
Two of the nine members of the Council on Development Finance who sat for the Scott Run vote are co-sponsors of that same law: Senator Nicole Poore, who cast the one no vote, and Representative Edward Osienski. Both Representative William Bush and Senator Jack Walsh also sit on the Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund Council, which recommended $1,430,000 to Harvey Hanna & Associates’ Route 40 LLC in May 2026 with Jordan Seemans, Government Affairs and Community Relations Manager of Harvey Hanna & Associates, in the audience. The legislators who write the grant programs sit on the private board that decides which companies get pitched for those programs. One director was placed there by Governor Matt Meyer five weeks before the vote: Robert Wittig of DSM Commercial, appointed August 21, 2025.
And one seat shows how far back this reaches. Whitney Sweeney, formerly of Macquarie Asset Management, the Australian fund that paid about $392,000,000 for the Amazon warehouse on the General Motors ground Harvey Hanna & Associates bought on a ten-dollar deed and sold to Dermody Properties, sits on the Delaware Prosperity Partnership’s board. The fund that paid for Harvey Hanna & Associates’ last fortune has a seat at the table that received Harvey Hanna & Associates’ next request.
“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.”
The remaining chairs hold the same faces as every other room in this report. Emilie Ninan, a partner in the Government Services and Finance practice at Barnes & Thornburg LLP, the same Wilmington office as Harvey Hanna & Associates’ lawyer Shawn Tucker, $1,400 to Governor Matt Meyer. Brian DiSabatino, Chief Executive Officer of EDiS Company, whose DiSabatino family wrote $15,600, and who also sits on the Committee of 100’s Economic Development Committee.
Ed Capodanno, retired President of Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware, the association whose residential committee Jonathan Horner co-chairs, and Jonathan Horner sat on the Council on Development Finance that voted, $600. Terry Murphy, Chief Executive Officer of Bayhealth, whose Chief Medical Officer Gary Siegelman voted to raise the State’s hospital spending cap on April 29, 2026, $2,200.
Robert Herrera of The Mill, $3,700; Shane Breakie of Chesapeake Utilities, $1,503.45; John Gavenonis of West Pharmaceutical Services, $2,500; Lisa Schmidt of Richards, Layton & Finger, $1,200; Stephen Montgomery of the Starboard, $2,400; and Theodore Lauzen of Grey Fox Wealth Advisors, the Democratic nominee for State Treasurer on this November’s ballot, $350. Fourteen members of the Delaware Prosperity Partnership board, the board that pitches the money, wrote Matt Meyer campaign checks.
One more thing, and it is the thing that let Harvey Hanna & Associates come back. The Site Readiness Fund had already paid Harvey Hanna & Associates $1,000,000 for Governor Lea Road in January 2023. On June 27, 2025, CJ Bell, Director of the Division of Small Business, presented a new rule to the Council on Development Finance, the Returning Awardees Procedure, letting a company that had already been paid apply again, and Linda Parkowski of the Delaware Prosperity Partnership spoke for the rule. Fifteen months later, Harvey Hanna & Associates was back for $1,900,000 under that rule.
Linda Parkowski has since left the Delaware Prosperity Partnership’s staff page. So has Kurt Foreman, the Delaware Prosperity Partnership President who pitched Amazon’s $4,500,000 grant in 2020. Since September 14, 2026, two weeks before the vote, the Delaware Prosperity Partnership’s President and Chief Executive Officer has been Monique Claiborne. The people who wrote the comeback rule are gone. The rule stayed, and Harvey Hanna & Associates’ second application was already in the pipe when Monique Claiborne sat down.
That is how $1,900,000 reached Dover without a hearing. The request was written and pitched by the Delaware Prosperity Partnership, a private company Harvey Hanna & Associates helps pay, chaired by Governor Matt Meyer, whom Harvey Hanna & Associates’ table helped elect, seated with the legislators who wrote the programs, under a comeback rule the pitchmen wrote themselves. By the time the request reached a public room, there was nothing left for the public to say.
“The Site Readiness Fund gave Drawbridge Claymont LLC $1,000,000. Drawbridge Claymont LLC and Drawbridge Claymont LLC’s owner Keith Delaney gave Governor Matt Meyer $87,400. The Site Readiness Fund gave Stoltz Real Estate Partners $2,400,000. Stoltz Real Estate Partners gave Governor Matt Meyer $2,400 and sold the next farm to Amazon for $207,500,000. Then CJ Bell, the Director of the Division of Small Business who signs the checks, presented a rule so the developers the Site Readiness Fund had already paid could come back. The developers the
Site Readiness Fund had already paid came back.”
RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
VII. The Account That Stopped Being a Campaign
Change Can’t Wait PAC: $393,428.95 and who put it there
Every check in this report so far went to one of three accounts, and the one that matters most no longer runs a campaign. Change Can’t Wait PAC, organized by Alan Levin, Chairman of the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council, elected Matt Meyer in 2024. Change Can’t Wait PAC has not stopped collecting. This section is about who fills Change Can’t Wait PAC now, with no race to run, and what Change Can’t Wait PAC’s money was spent on in 2026.
“$36,576 the day after the election; $393,428.95 with no race to run;
every 2025 dollar dated after Alan Levin became Chairman of the
Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council.”
On Wednesday, November 6, 2024, Change Can’t Wait PAC, account 02005278, had done what Change Can’t Wait PAC was built to do. Alan Levin, Chairman of the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council, had organized Change Can’t Wait PAC in June 2021, a year before Matt Meyer announced for Governor, with Maribeth Przywara as treasurer. Change Can’t Wait PAC 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 Change Can’t Wait PAC’s own third-party advertiser in the four weeks before the primary. Change Can’t Wait PAC had spent $1,568,590.17 to make a County Executive a Governor. Change Can’t Wait PAC closed the year with $36,576.80.
A committee like that usually goes quiet. Change Can’t Wait PAC did not. Change Can’t Wait PAC’s 2025 year-end report, filed January 4, 2026, and signed by Thomas Meitzler, treasurer of Change Can’t Wait PAC, 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 Alan Levin’s first meeting of the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council as its Chairman, a council Alan Levin 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 of the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council.
“$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.”
The man Alan Levin replaced, Michael Houghton, had chaired the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council for eight years and had given Matt Meyer $300 in 2019 and $1,200 in September 2024. Governor Matt Meyer would remove Michael Houghton from the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council altogether on March 18, 2026, by email, two days after WHYY News reported Michael Houghton’s question at the March 16, 2026, meeting about two months of missing corporate franchise revenue figures, figures that come from the Division of Corporations inside Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s Delaware Department of State. Senate President Pro Tempore David Sokola would call the removal “undue political interference.” Governor Matt Meyer has said the removal was not connected to the question, and said on Governor Matt Meyer’s radio program that Michael Houghton had been kept on for continuity and that it was time to put someone else in place.
The 2026 reports show the Change Can’t Wait PAC 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 the twenty-five 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 Change Can’t Wait PAC 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 Governor Matt Meyer three years from Governor Matt Meyer’s 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
The April 2026 fundraiser at Dover Motor Speedway and the business each contributor had pending
The money in Change Can’t Wait PAC did not arrive by accident. It arrived from the industries that had business pending before Governor Matt Meyer’s administration in the months those industries wrote the checks: the nursing homes and hospitals whose spending cap the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council, which Alan Levin chairs, sets, the builders whose laws Governor Matt Meyer signed, the gaming companies whose State contract runs through Governor Matt Meyer’s Secretary of Finance, and the developers who had already been to the Site Readiness Fund. This section takes those industries one at a time, with what each industry had before the State on the day each industry paid.
“Nursing homes, hospitals, a nuclear operator, a sportsbook, a prediction market,
and the decision each was waiting on in Dover.”
Nursing homes, hospitals, a nuclear operator, a sportsbook, a prediction market, and the decision each was waiting on in Dover
Look at who paid Change Can’t Wait PAC in 2026, and then look at what each of the 2026 contributors was waiting on in Dover. None of the 2026 contributors is a warehouse developer. All of the 2026 contributors have a decision pending with the government Governor Matt Meyer 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 Change Can’t Wait PAC has received since Michael R. Bloomberg’s $250,000. The Delaware Health Care Facilities Association’s 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.
The Delaware Health Care Facilities Association’s members are paid, for most of the members’ 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 Delaware Health Care Facilities 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, with one member opposed, the ceiling the State sets on how fast health care providers may grow the providers’ costs, up from the 3 percent of 2024.
On April 29, 2026, the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory 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 A. 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 Change Can’t Wait PAC $5,000. On May 11, the Delaware Health Care Facilities Association gave $50,000.
On May 18, 2026, at Buena Vista, Alan Levin, Chairman of the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council, called the full Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council to order, Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez among the thirty-one members present, and the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory 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 Governor Matt Meyer 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 Change Can’t Wait PAC’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. PSE&G Services Corp. 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, an appeal Starwood Digital Ventures lost before the Coastal Zone Industrial Control Board on March 26, 2026, 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 Delaware Department of State decides what Delmarva Power’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. Rush Street Interactive’s 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; House Bill 365 died, and on September 15, 2026, Representative Franklin D. Cooke lost the 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 Change Can’t Wait PAC wrote its $50,000 check into the primaries. By October 12, 2026, New Jersey, Maryland, Nevada, Massachusetts and Missouri had sued Kalshi Inc. or sent Kalshi Inc. cease and desist letters over sports contracts those states call unlicensed gambling. Delaware had not sued.
Delaware Attorney General Kathleen Jennings had signed two multistate briefs against Kalshi Inc.’s sports contracts, one filed March 10, 2026, in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit beside Nevada, and one filed in October 2026 in the Supreme Court of the United States beside New Jersey, after a divided panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, the circuit that includes Delaware, ruled for Kalshi Inc. in April 2026. The State’s lawyer was in court against Kalshi Inc. while Kalshi Inc.’s $10,000 sat in the Governor’s political action committee.
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, Michael Hynansky’s fourth check, $50,000 in all, $100,000 with John Hynansky. Todd Fryatt of Boston, $25,000 on April 16, Todd Fryatt’s 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
”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 team, Jeff Buhrman, Ordinance 26-084, and the State’s executive orders
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 Governor Matt Meyer’s Director of Economic Development and Policy and then Governor Matt Meyer’s General Manager of Community Services across the eight years I sat in the Council on Development Finance President’s chair. County Executive Marcus Henry gave Governor Matt Meyer $600 on December 7, 2017, the same day as Fred Sears II, Alan Levin and Saul Ewing LLP, and $1,200 on September 7, 2022, while on the county payroll. Harvey Hanna & Associates, Inc. gave County Executive Marcus Henry’s committee $600 three weeks before County Executive Marcus Henry was elected; Schell Brothers LLC gave $600 two days after.
On November 20, 2024, County Executive-elect Marcus Henry named three people to run County Executive-elect Marcus Henry’s transition team, whose Land Use and Economic Development committees produced County Executive Order 2026-06, the expedited land use track County Executive Marcus Henry signed on April 28, 2026. All three are in the Governor Matt Meyer campaign filings, and one of the three kept Governor Matt Meyer’s books.
“Marcus Henry’s transition chairs, the Governor’s bookkeeper, the lawyers,
and the officials who carried out the pattern.”
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 Change Can’t Wait PAC’s first report in 2021 through 2023, the years in which Change Can’t Wait PAC raised $273,460 and Alan Levin wrote Alan Levin’s first two $5,000 checks; Maribeth Przywara 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 Change Can’t Wait PAC, the committee that elected Governor Matt Meyer, co-chaired the transition team of County Executive Marcus Henry, the County Executive who would sponsor Harvey Hanna & Associates’ application.
Wali W. Rushdan II is the Barnes & Thornburg LLP real estate partner of Section I, in the same Wilmington suite as Shawn Tucker, Harvey Hanna & Associates’ lawyer, and Douglas Gramiak, Harvey Hanna & Associates’ lobbyist and the Diamond State Port Corporation’s. Wali W. Rushdan II, the man who co-chaired County Executive Marcus Henry’s transition, practices in Barnes & Thornburg LLP, the law firm that represents Harvey Hanna & Associates, the developer County Executive Marcus Henry’s administration sponsored.
The lawyer who sits at every table
The second transition team co-chair is the one to watch, because Pamela J. Scott turns up in every room the rest of this section opens. Pamela J. Scott is a land use partner at Saul Ewing LLP in Wilmington and the wife of Paul G. Clark, the former New Castle County Executive.
In February 2011, the New Castle County Ethics Commission looked at Pamela J. Scott’s practice while Pamela J. Scott’s husband, Paul G. Clark, held the office of New Castle County Executive and wrote 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.” Pamela J. Scott stayed in the practice.
In 2010, Pamela J. Scott was the lawyer for Stoltz Real Estate Partners at Barley Mill Plaza, the fight that defined land use politics in New Castle County for a decade, and Stoltz Real Estate Partners is the developer that today holds the largest Site Readiness Fund grant on the books, $2,400,000 for Blue Diamond Park, and is installing the traffic signal Harvey Hanna & Associates’ Delaware City warehouse needs.
Pamela J. Scott’s firm, Saul Ewing LLP, paid steadily. Saul Ewing LLP wrote 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 County Executive Marcus Henry named Pamela J. Scott to County Executive Marcus Henry’s transition team. Nine checks, $4,800. Pamela J. Scott’s partner Richard Forsten is Secretary and Government Affairs Co-chair of the Home Builders Association of Delaware, the association Jonathan Horner is President of.
Pamela J. Scott’s own Saul Ewing LLP biography fills in what the county’s announcement left out. Before private practice, Pamela J. Scott was policy director of the Delaware Department of Transportation, assistant county attorney for New Castle County, and first assistant city solicitor for Wilmington. Pamela J. Scott represents regulated utilities before the Delaware Public Service Commission, which sits inside Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s Delaware Department of State, and has litigated Delmarva Power rate cases of the kind pending now as Docket 25-1555.
Pamela J. Scott’s practice lists Opportunity Zones and Qualified Opportunity Funds, the tax vehicle behind the second track of Governor Matt Meyer’s Executive Order 18, the track that requires no affordable housing at all; Governor Matt Meyer drew Delaware’s new Opportunity Zone map on September 28, 2026, the day of the Scott Run vote, and Section XI has what is on that map. Pamela J. Scott lists Pamela J. Scott on the Delaware Affordable Housing Production Task Force and as a member of the State Council on Transportation, though the Delaware Department of Transportation’s current roster of the State Council on Transportation does not carry Pamela J. Scott’s name.
Pamela J. Scott is Director Emeritus of the Committee of 100 and sits on the board of the Commercial-Industrial Realty Council, two of the organizations Harvey Hanna & Associates lists among Harvey Hanna & Associates’ own affiliations.
And Pamela J. Scott is Chair of the Board of the New Castle County Chamber of Commerce. Read who sits at Pamela J. Scott’s table there. Jennifer Cohan, President of Associated Builders and Contractors Delaware and the former Secretary of Transportation, whose association Jonathan Horner helps lead. Christine Schiltz of Parkowski, Guerke & Swayze, P.A., the family firm of Linda Parkowski, who argued for the comeback rule at the Delaware Prosperity Partnership, who gave Governor Matt Meyer $1,925; and Alexandra Parkowski beside Christine Schiltz.
Randi Licciardello of the Delaware City Refining Company, the refinery that sits directly south of Harvey Hanna & Associates’ Governor Lea Road parcel. Marcus Beal of Delmarva Power. And Eugene Young Jr. of Enstructure, the company that operates the Port of Wilmington under the concession; Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez chairs, who, as Director of the Delaware State Housing Authority, stood with Sean Kelly at Owens and Queen Manor in 2023.
The New Castle County Chamber of Commerce, whose Chair Pamela J. Scott co-chaired County Executive Marcus Henry’s transition, seats the contractors’ president, Linda Parkowski’s family firm, the refinery next to the brownfield and Enstructure, the port operator, in one room.
The committee that watches land use is run by the water company
The Committee of 100 calls itself the policy voice of New Castle County’s developers and employers, and the Committee of 100’s Economic Development Committee is the body that monitors county and State land use rules on New Castle County’s developers’ and employers’ behalf. By the Committee of 100’s own page, the Economic Development Committee is chaired by Nicholle R. Taylor, President of Artesian Resources, the parent of the water company that certified the Scott Run site in 2022 and wrote Governor Matt Meyer $1,200 on October 29, 2024; Nicholle R. Taylor wrote Meyer for Delaware $1,800 in three checks in 2024.
The Economic Development Committee’s Vice Chair is Gene Delle Donne of Delle Donne & Associates, whose family wrote $6,000. Around Nicholle R. Taylor and Gene Delle Donne sit Pamela J. Scott; Richard Przywara, the third transition team co-chair; Brian, Kevin and Larry DiSabatino of EDiS; Andrew Lubin, who wrote $5,000, $2,000 of it to Change Can’t Wait PAC; Chris Castagno, $4,500 with Chris Castagno’s wife; Wendie Stabler, who wrote Governor Matt Meyer $500 and County Executive Marcus Henry $320; and Jed Hatfield of Colonial Parking. The Committee of 100’s Executive Director, Elizabeth Keller, wrote $250.
The Committee of 100’s Economic Development Committee, the committee that watches the rules for the people who build, is chaired by Artesian Resources, the company that certified the Scott Run site, and staffed by two of County Executive Marcus Henry’s three transition team chairs.
The statewide room
The Delaware State Chamber of Commerce is where the county rooms meet the State. The Delaware State Chamber of Commerce’s published Board of Governors, under Chair John C. Gooden of M. Davis & Sons, the contractor that wrote Change Can’t Wait PAC, Governor Matt Meyer’s political action committee $5,000 five days after Schell Brothers did, seats the principal figures of this report at one table. Alan Levin, listed for SoDel Concepts, the Chairman of the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council and the organizer of Change Can’t Wait PAC, Governor Matt Meyer’s political action committee.
John C. Fannin III, President of Harvey Hanna & Associates until June 30, 2026, named on January 14, 2026, to chair the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce’s new Foundation. Chris Schell of Schell Brothers, Jonathan Horner’s employer, which wrote Change Can’t Wait PAC $35,000 between Jonathan Horner’s seating and Jonathan Horner’s vote. Michael Houghton, listed as retired from Morris, Nichols, Arsht & Tunnell, the man Alan Levin replaced at the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council and who resigned from the port task force in May 2026.
Brian Frazee of the Delaware Healthcare Association, who voted to raise the hospital spending cap; Terry Murphy of Bayhealth; David A. Tam of Beebe Healthcare; Terry Glebocki of Delaware Park Casino; Dennis M. Salter of Edinburgh Capital Management, who wrote $5,000 on September 26, 2026; Mike Tatoian of Dover Motor Speedway, where Change Can’t Wait PAC spent $39,327.40 in April; Mark Stellini; Andy Lubin; Pierre Anderson of Artesian Water; Marcus Beal of Delmarva Power; Steve Baccino of Chesapeake Utilities; William E. Manning and Jim Taylor of Saul Ewing LLP, Pamela J.
Scott’s partners; Brian DiSabatino of EDiS; Rob Rider of O.A. Newton, the Delaware Prosperity Partnership’s treasurer; Robert W. Perkins of Brandywine Public Strategies, Governor John Carney’s former chief of staff; and Rhett Ruggerio, the lobbyist. The Delaware State Chamber of Commerce and the Committee of 100 were both founding funders of the Delaware Prosperity Partnership. The organizations that lobby for the rules, the companies that benefit from the rules, and the private office that carries the companies’ applications fund one another in a circle, and the same twenty people sit in every part of that circle.
The chair that changed hands the morning of the vote
The county side of that circle is the New Castle County Office of Economic Development, the job County Executive Marcus Henry, Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez and Christopher “CJ” Bell each held in turn under County Executive Matt Meyer. The New Castle County Office of Economic Development’s webpage names two partners, the Delaware Prosperity Partnership and the Delaware Division of Small Business, which is the pipeline the Scott Run application traveled. Who held that job while Scott Run moved through the pipeline, and who holds that job now, is a story the county did not tell.
On January 17, 2025, twelve days after taking office, County Executive Marcus Henry named Jeff Buhrman County Executive Marcus Henry’s Director of Economic Development. The county’s announcement said Jeff Buhrman had spent fifteen years at Bloomberg, L.P., “helping small businesses develop and grow,” and gave no title for any of those years. Bloomberg, L.P. is Michael R. Bloomberg’s company, and Michael R. Bloomberg’s $250,000 of September 4, 2024, six days before the primary, is the largest check in Change Can’t Wait PAC’s history.
Jeff Buhrman’s own published professional profile describes the fifteen years differently: Analytics Desk, Core Terminal Sales, Strategic Relationship Manager, and from July 2020, Real-time Technology Specialist, in which, in Jeff Buhrman’s words, “I primarily work with Large Hedge Funds.” While Jeff Buhrman held the county job, the county’s sponsorship of SRJC, LLC’s application, the letter Title 29, Section 8711A(c)(1) requires before the Council on Development Finance may hear a developer, was prepared. The State has not posted the letter.
On June 3, 2026, while Jeff Buhrman was still the county’s Director of Economic Development by every public record, a company called South Pond Advisors LLC was formed with the Delaware Division of Corporations, File Number 10647405, registered agent Northwest Registered Agent Service, Inc., of Dover. South Pond Advisors LLC’s website names South Pond Advisors LLC’s founder: Jeff Buhrman. South Pond Advisors LLC’s business is advising developers.
“I spent a decade and a half at Bloomberg LP in institutional financial technology before moving into public-sector economic development, most recently as Director of Economic Development for New Castle County, Delaware, where I led the county’s redevelopment strategy, incentive programs, and business attraction and retention work. That experience put me in the room where the deals actually get structured.” Jeff Buhrman names the two projects Jeff Buhrman “worked directly on”: “the Claymont Steel site and the Route 9 corridor,” the two New Castle County grounds that became Opportunity Zone nominations on September 28, 2026.
Then the South Pond Advisors LLC site says what South Pond Advisors LLC sells. “We didn’t just work near these decisions. We made them. We wrote the rules. Led overhauls of redevelopment code, adding density bonuses and waiving demolition and transportation-improvement requirements to make underinvested sites pencil out. We know where the flexibility is.” South Pond Advisors LLC’s catalogue of incentives lists the Site Readiness Fund, “$1M to $10M; varies,” which South Pond Advisors LLC says “stacks well with” the Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund and Opportunity Zones; the Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund, of which South Pond Advisors LLC says “South Pond has built these cases from the inside”; the Delaware Strategic Fund, “under the Meyer administration”; brownfield assistance; and Opportunity Zones.
South Pond Advisors LLC offers an “incentive and TIF stacking audit” and promises to know “how applications are scored, how programs can be stacked without disqualifying each other, and which public partners move fast versus which need to be managed carefully.” The South Pond Advisors LLC site is marked “Updated June 2026.” Jeff Buhrman, the county’s Director of Economic Development, formed a company, South Pond Advisors LLC, to sell developers the flexibility Jeff Buhrman says Jeff Buhrman wrote, while Jeff Buhrman still held the county job, ninety-eight days before the county announced Jeff Buhrman’s successor without naming Jeff Buhrman.
That successor is Emma Odren. On September 9, 2026, County Executive Marcus Henry announced Emma Odren as Director of Economic Development, with a first day of September 28, 2026, the morning the Council on Development Finance met in the Delaware Room to vote on Scott Run. Where Emma Odren came from is the point. Since September 2024, Emma Odren had been Director of Economic Development at the New Castle County Chamber of Commerce, whose board Pamela J.
Scott chairs, where Emma Odren founded and ran the New Castle County Economic Partnership, a liaison between the business community and government leaders, and worked with the county on the county’s Small Business Growth Accelerator. Before that, Emma Odren spent three years at the Delaware Prosperity Partnership, the private office that carried the Scott Run application, on economic impact analyses, site selection and workforce assessments.
County Executive Marcus Henry said Emma Odren “understands New Castle County’s business community.” Emma Odren was hired from the New Castle County Chamber of Commerce, which Pamela J. Scott, the Saul Ewing LLP partner, chairs, trained at the Delaware Prosperity Partnership, which Governor Matt Meyer co-chairs, and seated the morning the Delaware Prosperity Partnership’s applicant, SRJC, LLC, asked Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s Delaware Division of Small Business for $1,900,000.
The rule rewritten before the plan arrived
While Jeff Buhrman’s company, South Pond Advisors LLC, was selling “the flexibility,” the county was writing more of the flexibility. Three weeks before the Coastal Zone notice, New Castle County Council rewrote the rule the Harvey Hanna & Associates plan at 750 Governor Lea Road will be judged by. On September 22, 2026, New Castle County Council adopted Substitute No. 1 to Ordinance 26-084, prime sponsor Councilman John Cartier, co-sponsor Councilman David Carter, 11 to 0, with Councilwoman Monique Williams-Johns not voting and Councilwoman Valerie George absent, and on October 8, 2026, County Executive Marcus Henry held a ceremonial signing and put Ordinance 26-084 in County Executive Marcus Henry’s newsletter under the heading “Supporting Redevelopment.” Ordinance 26-084 rewrites nine articles of the Unified Development Code “regarding redevelopment.” Ordinance 26-084 lifts the county’s redevelopment rules out of Article 8, where the redevelopment rules had lived since 2002 as a remedy for nonconforming strip malls, and gives the redevelopment rules an Article of the redevelopment rules’ own, Article 9.
Read Article 9 against the application E. Thomas Harvey IV certified on September 2. Any site certified as a brownfield, Article 9 says, “regardless of any percentage of loss or destroyed replacement market value of any structure, may be developed in accordance with the redevelopment standards.” The creation of “a business park or industrial park regardless of the number of lots or square footage” is a minor redevelopment plan, and a minor redevelopment plan “shall be approved by the General Manager of the Department,” not by New Castle County Council.
In the Industrial district, the office-use restriction “shall not apply” to a brownfield, and in the Heavy Industrial district, where 750 Governor Lea Road sits, the applicant “may utilize the standards for lot size and setbacks from the I district.” Article 14, the impact fee article, now reads: “Redevelopment or Brownfields as per Article 9” are exempt from impact fees, and impact fees “are only required for” gross floor area “that exceeds existing legally established” gross floor area “on the site.” One thing Ordinance 26-084 adds that was not there before: a brownfield applicant “must conduct a community meeting” and file the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control’s certification with the exploratory plan.
The New Castle County Department of Land Use’s own recommendation report, dated August 18, 2026, says where Ordinance 26-084 came from: the New Castle County Department of Land Use, “in coordination with County Council, commenced efforts to solicit input from the development community (developers, attorneys, and engineers) to identify opportunities to increase the viability of the redevelopment provisions.” At the New Castle County Planning Board hearing on August 4, 2026, the speakers in favor were two land use lawyers, John Tracey of Young Conaway Stargatt & Taylor, LLP, and an engineer from Atwell, LLC, Councilman David Carter; and Dale Swain of the Citizens Alliance for Responsible Land Use; no one spoke against Ordinance 26-084, and the New Castle County Planning Board recommended Ordinance 26-084 7 to 0.
The redevelopment program Ordinance 26-084 rebuilds was the one Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez ran as General Manager of the New Castle County Department of Land Use: Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s annual report to New Castle County Council of August 30, 2023, covering 2002 through 2022, counted 90 redevelopment plans recorded in twenty-one years, six of the ninety brownfields, and reported that participation had fallen off and that no redevelopment plan was active when Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez signed the report.
Three years later, the county has a new Article 9, a $1,900,000 request pending at Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s Delaware Division of Small Business, and a certified brownfield at 750 Governor Lea Road whose owner is Harvey Hanna & Associates, the firm whose first grant Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez will be asked to approve again.
Five days after the ceremonial signing, the county had the neighbor on the county’s desk. On October 13, 2026, New Castle County Council took up Resolution 26-191, the plan of 755 Governor Lea Road, seven warehouse buildings across the road from the Harvey Hanna & Associates 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 the county’s Unified Development Code, the county’s 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 the county’s borders.
The New Castle County Council Land Use Committee had reviewed both Resolution 26-191 and Ordinance 26-106 on October 6. Harvey Hanna & Associates’ own 750 Governor Lea Road plan, Application 2023-0190-S, was not on either agenda; the 750 Governor Lea Road plan is still under review at the New Castle County Department of Land Use, where the 750 Governor Lea Road plan will be approved administratively, with no hearing, if the plan qualifies under the law Governor Matt Meyer signed on July 13.
The county was not writing alone. The State had written the State’s own flexibility first, in three executive orders attested by the Office of the Secretary of State, Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez. On January 30, 2026, Governor Matt Meyer signed Executive Order 16, which rescinded Governor John Carney’s Executive Order 42 of July 23, 2020, and rewrote the State Strategies for Policies and Spending, the framework that decides where the State will pay for roads, water, and sewer. Executive Order 16 tells every State agency it may “use discretion to resource individual development or preservation projects at any investment level” when those projects serve State priorities “as specified by the Governor.” Executive Order 16 directs the Office of State Planning Coordination to make a “concierge model” the standard path for priority projects and to “move toward a 45-day end-to-end process completion timeline” for the Preliminary Land Use Service review every large project must pass. Executive Order 16 lets the State Strategies maps, which had moved on a five-year cycle, be redrawn once a year. Four weeks later, on February 26, 2026, Executive Order 18 created the Delaware Permitting Accelerator.
On June 26, 2026, five days before House Bill 500 passed in the last hours of the session, Governor Matt Meyer signed Executive Order 23. Executive Order 23 says that requiring a full executive order for each change to the Permitting Accelerator “creates unnecessary delay and administrative burden without commensurate public benefit,” and authorizes the Office of the Governor to issue new versions of the Permitting Accelerator on the Governor’s written approval alone. Executive Order 23 says the Permitting Accelerator “may not be construed to create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity,” which means no neighbor, no civic association, and no county can go to court over which project was accelerated or why. And Executive Order 23 reaches backward: any project already accepted for accelerated permitting that meets the standard published that day is “deemed eligible for such acceptance or designation as of the date of its original acceptance or designation.” The State has not published which projects had already been accepted by June 26, 2026. The Accelerator’s acceptance log is on the list of what the filings do not contain.
Who is in the lane is no longer a question. On October 9, 2026, eleven days after the Scott Run vote, Governor Matt Meyer announced six new projects accepted into the Delaware Permitting Accelerator, which the Governor’s office now calls the JobsFirst Permitting Accelerator. Three of the six are rooftop solar projects by King Energy on warehouses in New Castle: 400 Ships Landing Way, 1001 Lambson Lane and 10 Dock View Drive. New Castle County’s ownership records list the owner of 400 Ships Landing Way as TSBP 2 LLC, the owner of 1001 Lambson Lane as 1001 Lambson Lane LLC, and the owner of 10 Dock View Drive as DRIP 2 Lot 5 LLC, every one of the three with the same owner address: 405 East Marsh Lane, Newport, the front door of Harvey Hanna & Associates. John Witchel, Chief Executive Officer of King Energy, said in the Governor’s release that the rooftop solar programs are at “four commercial properties, owned by Harvey Hanna and Coastal Trade Supply.”
The Governor’s own press release carries a quotation from “Thomas Harvey, Managing Director, Harvey Hanna & Associates”: “We appreciate Governor Meyer’s leadership in creating the JobsFirst initiative and recognizing that projects that add energy generation and private investment should be able to move through the permitting process efficiently and responsibly.” And: “We are excited for these projects to be included in the JobsFirst initiative, and we are grateful to the Governor for creating a framework that brings state agencies together to help move important energy projects forward.” Eleven days after the State recommended Harvey Hanna & Associates $1,900,000, the Governor’s office published Harvey Hanna & Associates’ thanks for the lane that lets Harvey Hanna & Associates’ buildings skip the line, and the lane is the one Executive Order 23 says no one outside the executive branch can challenge.
So by the time New Castle County Council voted Ordinance 26-084 on September 22, 2026, the State had already given the Governor project-by-project discretion over State infrastructure money, a 45-day State review, a permitting lane the Governor’s office can rewrite by memorandum, and a rule that no one outside the executive branch can enforce. The county then added a track of its own under County Executive Marcus Henry’s Executive Order 2026-06 and an Article 9 that lets the General Manager of the New Castle County Department of Land Use approve a brownfield industrial park without a New Castle County Council vote. A Harvey Hanna & Associates warehouse at 750 Governor Lea Road can now move through State and county with no hearing at either.
Put the dates on one line. September 4, 2024: Michael R. Bloomberg writes Change Can’t Wait PAC $250,000, the largest check in Change Can’t Wait PAC’s history, six days before Governor Matt Meyer’s primary. November 5, 2024: Matt Meyer is elected Governor and Marcus Henry is elected County Executive. January 17, 2025: County Executive Marcus Henry names Jeff Buhrman, fifteen years at Bloomberg, L.P., County Executive Marcus Henry’s Director of Economic Development, the office that sponsors Site Readiness Fund applications and sits in the pipeline to the Delaware Prosperity Partnership. January 30, 2026: Governor Matt Meyer signs Executive Order 16, project-by-project discretion “as specified by the Governor,” a concierge path and a 45-day State review. February 26, 2026: Executive Order 18 creates the Permitting Accelerator. May 20, 2026: the Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund Council recommends $1,430,000 to Harvey Hanna & Associates’ Route 40 LLC under the name School Bell Crossing, with Thom Harvey, Jordan Seemans, Shawn Tucker and Jim Smith in the room. June 26, 2026: Executive Order 23 lets the Governor’s office rewrite the Permitting Accelerator by memorandum and backdate every acceptance already made.
2025 into 2026: the New Castle County Department of Land Use convenes a working group of “developers, attorneys, and engineers” to rewrite the county’s redevelopment code, and Jeff Buhrman will later describe that work in the first person: “Led overhauls of redevelopment code, adding density bonuses and waiving demolition and transportation-improvement requirements to make underinvested sites pencil out.” June 3, 2026: South Pond Advisors LLC is formed, with Jeff Buhrman as founder, to sell developers “the flexibility” and the stacking of the Site Readiness Fund, the Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund, brownfield money and Opportunity Zones, while Jeff Buhrman still holds the county job.
August 4, 2026: The New Castle County Planning Board hears Ordinance 26-084; two land use lawyers, an engineer, and a councilman speak for Ordinance 26-084; no one against. September 9, 2026: The county announces Emma Odren as Jeff Buhrman’s replacement, without Jeff Buhrman’s name. September 22, 2026: New Castle County Council passes Substitute No. 1 to Ordinance 26-084, 11 to 0, as a redevelopment bill. September 28, 2026: Emma Odren’s first day; the Council on Development Finance votes Harvey Hanna & Associates $1,900,000; Governor Matt Meyer nominates the Opportunity Zone tracts the county chose.
October 2, 2026: Four days after the Scott Run vote, a notice under the name Governor Lea Road, LLC reveals Harvey Hanna & Associates’ certified brownfield at 750 Governor Lea Road. October 8, 2026: County Executive Marcus Henry signs Ordinance 26-084 at a ceremony and calls Ordinance 26-084 “Supporting Redevelopment,” an ordinance which the new Ordinance 26-084 lets the General Manager of the New Castle County Department of Land Use approve as an industrial park with no New Castle County Council vote, no hearing, and no impact fee. New Castle County Council passed a bill titled redevelopment. What New Castle County Council passed was the rule for the warehouse nobody had been told about.
Around the three transition team co-chairs, Pamela J. Scott, Wali W. Rushdan II, and Richard Przywara, stand the firms that build and get the building 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 Change Can’t Wait PAC 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 into the primaries against two senators who asked about health care costs
One body in this report said no. In August 2026, two Democratic State senators who had questioned Governor Matt Meyer’s administration, Senator Ray Seigfried and Senator Dan Cruce, found Governor Matt Meyer campaigning against Senator Ray Seigfried and Senator Dan Cruce in Senator Ray Seigfried’s and Senator Dan Cruce’s own primaries, and Change Can’t Wait PAC put $50,000 into the field eight days later. This section is about what happens in Delaware to the people who ask.
“$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 no to Governor Matt Meyer. The 8-day primary report, filed September 8, 2026, puts a dollar figure and a date on the price of no.
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 Sarah McBride 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 Governor-elect Matt Meyer the Delaware Code did not allow it.
Senator Ray Seigfried and Senator Dan Cruce both spent the 2025 session, the first session for each, on health care costs. Senator Ray Seigfried co-sponsored Senate Bill 1, which would hold hospitals to 250 percent of Medicare pricing unless the hospitals 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 Governor Matt Meyer’s own Director of the Office of Management and Budget, saying the report lacked initiative.
Senator Dan Cruce sponsored Senate Bill 228, which let New Castle County correct the outlier commercial assessments from the reassessment conducted while Governor Matt Meyer was New Castle County Executive; Governor Matt Meyer let Senate Bill 228 become law without Governor Matt Meyer’s 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.” The same slate endorsed Democratic candidates for the State House and one New Castle County Council seat, and Governor Matt Meyer’s office framed the slate around education policy. Senator Dan Cruce and Senator Ray Seigfried had each won a 2025 special election, Senator Dan Cruce for the seat Sarah McBride left for Congress and Senator Ray Seigfried for the seat Lieutenant Governor Kyle Evans Gay left, after Governor-elect Matt Meyer’s push to replace the party nominations with special primaries failed.
Senator Ray Seigfried said Governor Matt Meyer’s office had never contacted Senator Ray Seigfried and that the reason was “pure and simple retaliation” for Senator Ray Seigfried’s work on health care, the senator’s criticism of the administration’s handling of prescription drug prices, and the senator’s criticism of a State Employee Benefits Committee report on lowering drug prices that Senator Ray Seigfried said did not move the discussion forward: “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 the party’s way; Governor Matt Meyer’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Nick Merlino, answered by wishing the retiring Senate President Pro Tempore David Sokola well.
Representative Debra Heffernan had said in July, of Governor Matt Meyer’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 line-item veto itself was retaliation for the General Assembly’s override of Governor Matt Meyer’s veto of a cannabis zoning bill.
On Tuesday, August 25, 2026, eight days after the endorsements, Change Can’t Wait PAC, 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. The $50,000 was Change Can’t Wait PAC’s only political expenditure of the year, and the $50,000 was two and a half times what Change Can’t Wait PAC 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 Change Can’t Wait PAC, the standing account, is for. Change Can’t Wait PAC does not need a Governor’s race. Change Can’t Wait PAC needs a senator who asks about hospital prices, and Change Can’t Wait PAC 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.”
“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 machine on a single page: who gives, who is appointed, who carries, who signs, who rewrites
If you read only one section after the first, read this one. This section puts the whole machine on a single page: who gives, who is appointed, who carries the application, who signs, who rewrites the rules, and what each of those people had in hand before the public heard a word.
“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 Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council’s spending benchmark, hospitals before the same Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council Health Care Spending Benchmark 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. Change Can’t Wait PAC is chaired, in effect, by Alan Levin, who organized Change Can’t Wait PAC, who sits at the head of the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council, the council that certifies every dollar the Bond Bill can spend, and who no longer has to write a check in Alan Levin’s own name.
Appointments go out from one office, Governor Matt Meyer’s, to the same people and those people’s lawyers. Fred Sears II, who has paid in every race, chairs the Council on Development Finance that recommends the grant. Kevin P. Kelly and Jonathan Horner, whose companies paid nineteen and thirty-nine days before the vote, sit on the Council on Development Finance; William “Jack” Riddle, whose wife paid, priced the grant. Christopher “CJ” Bell, who paid before Christopher “CJ” Bell was hired, signs the grant.
Robert Wittig, whose firm’s network paid $29,400, sits on the Delaware Prosperity Partnership board that receives the Site Readiness Fund application before the State does, beside Kurt Foreman, who presents the application, and Linda Parkowski, whose household paid.
And Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez, who recorded the warehouse plan at the county, whose household paid sixteen times, runs the Delaware Department of State, the department that pays the grant, registered the applicant, SRJC, LLC, hosted the hearing, licenses Community Bank Delaware, William “Jack” Riddle’s bank, sets the water company’s rates, licenses SoDel Concepts, the restaurants of Alan Levin, the fundraiser, and is suing one of the Council on Development Finance members; Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez chairs the Diamond State Port Corporation, whose lobbyist, Douglas Gramiak, works for Harvey Hanna & Associates and whose Vice Chairman, Fred Sears II, chaired the Council on Development Finance vote as Chairman; and Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez sits on the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council, the council Alan Levin, 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 Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez 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 Delaware State Housing Authority finances, which is Kevin P. Kelly’s business. Executive Order 18 gives the homebuilders a 120-day lane. The Returning Awardees Procedure lets Drawbridge Claymont LLC come back, and Drawbridge Claymont LLC did, with $25,000.
New Castle County builds its own lane by order, on the recommendation of County Executive Marcus Henry’s transition team, run by Governor Matt Meyer’s bookkeeper’s household, Harvey Hanna & Associates’ law firm, Barnes & Thornburg LLP, and the Stoltz lawyer, Pamela J. Scott, and then New Castle County sponsors Harvey Hanna & Associates.
And the lawyers stand at every window. Barnes & Thornburg LLP, 222 Delaware Avenue, Suite 1200: Shawn Tucker for Harvey Hanna & Associates and for Stoltz; Douglas Gramiak for Harvey Hanna & Associates and for the Diamond State Port Corporation; Wali W. Rushdan II for County Executive Marcus Henry. Saul Ewing LLP: Pamela J. Scott for Stoltz in 2010 and for County Executive Marcus Henry in 2024. Faegre Drinker, the old firm of the Barnes & Thornburg LLP suite at 222 Delaware Avenue: Alan Levin, Of Counsel, and Geoffrey A. Sawyer III for Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’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 Delaware Senate, was shown the price.
The sequence is long, and every date in it is public. Alan Levin ran the Delaware Economic Development Office from 2009 to 2015 and chaired the Diamond State Port Corporation for the same six years; Alan Levin announced Amazon’s Middletown warehouse in 2012; Alan Levin gave Matt Meyer’s first county campaign $500 on April 18, 2016, before the primary; Alan Levin chaired County Executive Matt Meyer’s airport task force in 2019; Alan Levin organized Change Can’t Wait PAC in June 2021, a year before Matt Meyer announced for Governor; Alan Levin and Thom Harvey and Robin Adair Harvey wrote the first checks of the three on the same Saturday in December 2021; Alan Levin advised Matt Meyer’s 2024 campaign; Governor Matt Meyer, whom Alan Levin elected, gave Alan Levin the gavel of the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council, the council that certifies the State’s revenue, on March 17, 2025, and removed Michael Houghton, the man who held the chairmanship before Alan Levin, a year later for asking a question.
The Delaware Economic Development Office Alan Levin ran was split in 2017 into the private Delaware Prosperity Partnership whose investors are the applicants and the Delaware Division of Small Business whose Director, CJ Bell, gave Governor Matt Meyer three checks and reports to Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez, who gave sixteen. The Council on Development Finance that prices the grants has Fred Sears II, Vice Chairman of Alan Levin’s old Diamond State Port Corporation, in the chair as Chairman. County Executive Marcus Henry, who sponsors the grants, is Governor Matt Meyer’s former deputy, succeeded in that job by Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez and then by CJ Bell, the Director of the Delaware Division of Small Business, who signs the grants.
Alan Levin sits today on the Board of Governors of the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce beside John C. Fannin III of Harvey Hanna & Associates, Chris Schell, Michael Houghton, Brian Frazee of the Delaware Healthcare Association, the hospital association, Dennis Salter, and Mike Tatoian of Dover Motor Speedway, where Change Can’t Wait PAC, the committee Alan Levin organized, held its 2026 fundraiser. Three more public records complete the sequence. First, the dates on which the firms in this report bought the land the State later paid to prepare, from the Recorder of Deeds, set against the dates on which the rules that made the land worth more were decided and the dates on which those decisions were published: the January 22, 2024, tiers the State has never published; the June 27, 2025, Returning Awardees Procedure; Executive Order 17 and Executive Order 18 of February 2026; Senate Substitute 2 to Senate Bill 23 and House Substitute 1 to House Bill 450 of July 13, 2026.
Stoltz Real Estate Partners bought Stoltz Real Estate Partners’ 170 Middletown acres in March 2023 for $6,500,000, a year after Stoltz Real Estate Partners’ first two Site Readiness Fund awards, and sold 247 acres to Amazon for $207,500,000. Harvey Hanna & Associates bought Scott Run in July 2026, after the tiers that made 102 acres worth exactly $1,900,000 existed and before anyone outside the room had been told what the tiers were.
Second, the formation dates of the limited liability companies that applied, from the Division of Corporations: when SRJC, LLC and Governor Lea Road LLC were formed, and by whom, relative to the awards. Third, the correspondence: every communication between the Delaware Prosperity Partnership, the Delaware Division of Small Business, Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s office and the applicants about Scott Run and Governor Lea Road, which the Freedom of Information Act reaches, and which would show who knew the tiers, who proposed the returning-awardee rule, and when. Fourth, the Opportunity Zone map, which the record now answers.
The Governor Lea Road parcels lie in Census Tract 164.04 of New Castle County. Census Tract 164.04 was not among the twenty-five federal Opportunity Zone tracts Delaware designated in 2018, which the State said then would include “properties along the Route 9 Corridor in New Castle” and “aging industrial sites along the Delaware River in northern New Castle County,” and Census Tract 164.04 is not among the twenty-five tracts Governor Matt Meyer nominated for the next round. Governor Matt Meyer’s second list has its own date.
The federal law of July 4, 2025, made the Opportunity Zone program permanent and gave each governor until September 30, 2026, to nominate twenty-five tracts from the Treasury’s eligible list. The Delaware Division of Small Business, Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s Division, ran Delaware’s process: the Delaware Division of Small Business opened nominations on March 4, 2026, closed nominations on May 15 with 237 nominations for 61 eligible tracts, and on September 28, 2026, the day the Council on Development Finance met in the Delaware Room, Governor Matt Meyer announced the twenty-five tracts, thirteen of the tracts in New Castle County, to take effect January 1, 2027, if the Treasury certifies the tracts.
The Qualified Opportunity Fund track of Executive Order 18, the track with no affordable housing requirement, now runs through the thirteen New Castle County tracts Governor Matt Meyer chose, and the private offices that advise Opportunity Zone investors, Pamela J. Scott’s office one of those offices, have a new map to work from. Four of the thirteen New Castle County tracts are already in this report, and two of the four hold the land of the people at the table.
The thirteen New Castle County tracts Governor Matt Meyer nominated are Census Tracts 6.01, 16, 19.02, 21, 27, 29, 30.02, 101.04, 107.04, 145.01, 145.02, 155.02 and 158.02. Eight of the thirteen, Census Tracts 6.01, 19.02, 21, 29, 30.02, 101.04, 155.02 and 158.02, were already Opportunity Zones under the 2018 designation, by the Delaware State Housing Authority’s own 2025 exhibit; Governor Matt Meyer nominated those eight for a second ten-year window. Five are new: Census Tracts 16, 27, 107.04, 145.01 and 145.02.
Census Tract 155.02 is the Delaware River Industrial Park in New Castle, and the Delaware River Industrial Park is Harvey Hanna & Associates. New Castle County’s ownership records list seven parcels in that tract, 58.36 acres, under the owner address 405 East Marsh Lane, Newport: 1 Dock View Drive and the Harbor View Drive bed parcel, owned by Delaware River Industrial Park LLC; 6 Dock View Drive and 1 Harbor View Drive, owned by DRIP 2 LLC; 10 Dock View Drive, owned by DRIP 2 Lot 5 LLC; 1001 Lambson Lane, owned by 1001 Lambson Lane LLC; and 618 Lambson Lane, owned by 618 Lambson Lane LLC. Census Tract 155.02 has been an Opportunity Zone since 2018.
On September 28, 2026, the day of the Scott Run vote, Governor Matt Meyer nominated Census Tract 155.02 for another ten years, and on October 9, 2026, Governor Matt Meyer accepted rooftop solar projects at 1001 Lambson Lane and 10 Dock View Drive, two parcels inside that tract, into the JobsFirst Permitting Accelerator. One company, one tract, a tax shelter renewed and a permitting lane opened, twelve days apart.
Census Tract 107.04, one of the five new tracts, holds 4 Denny Road in Wilmington, the headquarters of Leon N. Weiner & Associates, Inc., the company Kevin P. Kelly chairs, and Kevin P. Kelly sits on the Council on Development Finance that voted Harvey Hanna & Associates $1,900,000 on the day the tract was nominated. The county’s ownership records carry the same owner address, 4 Denny Road, on Main Towers Preservation Associates LLC’s 330 East Main Street in Newark, inside new Census Tract 145.01, and on Compton Towne Preservation Associates LLC’s 288 Compton Court and New Compton Park Associates LLC’s 610 North Walnut Street in Wilmington, inside Census Tract 29, which was an Opportunity Zone in 2018 and is nominated again.
The apartment company whose Chairman votes on the State’s site grants, and whose financing the Delaware State Housing Authority allocates, has its front door and three of its apartment properties inside tracts New Castle County nominated, Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s Delaware Division of Small Business processed, and Governor Matt Meyer chose.
The other nine Harvey Hanna & Associates holdings in this report are outside the thirteen: 750 and 720 Governor Lea Road in Census Tract 164.04; Scott Run at 840 Jamison Corner Road in Census Tract 166.11; 531 Vandyke Road, 540 Pulaski Highway and 614 Pulaski Highway in Census Tract 163.06; and the Twin Spans Business Park parcels on Ships Landing Way and Anchor Mill Road in Census Tract 161.
Census Tract 101.04 in Claymont holds 6300 Philadelphia Pike, the 58 acres of old General Chemical ground that Drawbridge Claymont LLC owns and the Site Readiness Fund paid $1,000,000 to clear on March 28, 2022, the parcel from which Keith Delaney wrote one of Keith Delaney’s checks; Town Square Delaware reported on October 13, 2026, that the Claymont nomination covers the Philadelphia Pike commercial corridor, the former Tri-State Mall property and the ground around the Claymont Regional Transportation Center.
Census Tract 19.02 holds 1 Hausel Road, the Port of Wilmington, the port of the Diamond State Port Corporation, which Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez chairs, Douglas Gramiak lobbies and Enstructure operates, and Enstructure’s Eugene Young sits on the New Castle County Chamber of Commerce board under Pamela J. Scott, Chair of the Board of the New Castle County Chamber of Commerce. Both Census Tract 101.04 and Census Tract 19.02 were among the current Opportunity Zones by the Delaware State Housing Authority’s 2025 exhibit, designated under Governor John Carney in 2018, and Governor Matt Meyer nominated both tracts again for a fresh ten-year window beginning January 1, 2027. An Opportunity Zone pays no one directly; an Opportunity Zone lets investors who put capital gains into a fund inside the tract defer the tax and, after ten years, take the gain on the new building tax-free, and the names of those investors appear in no public record.
Keith Delaney’s Claymont parcel has sat inside an Opportunity Zone since 2018, which means the tax break was already available to the Claymont parcel’s investors when the Site Readiness Fund paid $1,000,000 to clear the ground in March 2022 and when Drawbridge Claymont LLC and Keith Delaney wrote Governor Matt Meyer $87,400. Jeff Buhrman’s South Pond Advisors LLC website says how the pieces fit: the Site Readiness Fund “stacks well with” the Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund and Opportunity Zones. Public money prepares the site, the Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund pays for the access, and the Opportunity Zone makes the private gain tax-free. New Castle County chose the tracts.
David Culver, who succeeded Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez as General Manager of the New Castle County Department of Land Use, told Town Square Delaware that “Land Use is excited that several of our nominations were accepted,” and County Executive Marcus Henry said, “This is what government working together looks like,” and tied the tracts to New Castle County’s Streamlined Planning and Unified Review program, the expedited review County Executive Marcus Henry’s Executive Order 2026-06 created on April 28, 2026.
So Drawbridge Claymont LLC, the Site Readiness Fund’s first Claymont grantee, which has given Governor Matt Meyer $87,400, sits inside a tract New Castle County nominated, Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s Delaware Division of Small Business processed, and Governor Matt Meyer chose, and the tax benefit will be available to Drawbridge Claymont LLC’s investors from January 1, 2027.
Table 6. The web: who is tied to whom, and how
XII. The Calendar
Every date in the record, 2016 to October 2026
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 the State has not published
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.
The Delaware Permitting Accelerator acceptance log as of June 26, 2026, the day Executive Order 23 deemed every prior acceptance valid, has not been published, so the record does not show which projects were already inside the lane when the rule was rewritten. The inventory and efficacy assessment of every State investment and incentive that Executive Order 16 ordered the Office of State Planning Coordination to compile has not been published. The approval memoranda of the Secretary of Transportation and Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez for the Route 40 LLC award have not been published, and the difference between the $1,430,000 the Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund Council recommended on May 20, 2026, and the $1,140,000 Delaware Business Times reported on June 10, 2026, is not explained anywhere in the public record.
No check from Kurt Foreman or Regina Mitchell appears. No check from Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez appears under Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s hyphenated name; the seven checks in Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s name are filed as Charuni Patibanda or Charuni P. Patibanda. The filings do not say what, if anything, Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez knew of the SRJC, LLC application before September 28, 2026, or whether Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez has recused Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez 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 Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez’s department, the Delaware Department of State.
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 three 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 Leon N. Weiner & Associates, Inc.
RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
Author’s Disclosure
Eight years as New Castle County Council President, where firsthand knowledge is used
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 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.
Every figure in this report comes from a document the State of Delaware or New Castle County published: the itemized receipt schedules of ninety-six campaign finance filings for five committees on the Delaware Campaign Finance Reporting System; the agendas, minutes and presentations of the Council on Development Finance and the Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund Council; the Coastal Zone Act application file for 750 Governor Lea Road; Executive Orders 16, 17, 18, 23 and 25 as posted by the Office of the Governor; Substitute No. 1 to Ordinance 26-084 and the Department of Land Use recommendation report of August 18, 2026; the Division of Corporations entity record for South Pond Advisors LLC; the Public Integrity Commission’s lobbyist registration file; and the Superior Court docket in Civil Action S23C-04-004. The Evidence File lists each one with a live link. Appendix A lists every contribution by date, committee, amount, and address as filed. Karen Hartley-Nagle was President of New Castle County Council from November 2016 to November 2024 and read every document cited.
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
203 contributions, by date, committee, amount, and address as filed
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
Three checks, $1,200
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.
RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
A-6. Barnes & Thornburg LLP, Shawn Tucker and Michele Tucker
Shawn Tucker $6,480; Michele Tucker $2,200 in the attached filings ($3,900 in five checks in the State’s online Campaign Finance Reporting System, searched September 28, 2026); household $8,680 ($10,380 by the online database); Barnes & Thornburg LLP $3,600; combined $12,280 ($13,980 by the online database).
A-8. Alan Levin, Ellen Levin, Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP, David Tam
Alan Levin $29,100; Ellen Levin $4,000; household $33,100; Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP $1,200; David Tam $750.
A-9. Drawbridge Claymont LLC, Keith Delaney, Alissa Delaney, Jack Stoltz, Susan Stoltz
Drawbridge Claymont LLC: $55,000; Keith Delaney: $31,200; Alissa Delaney: $1,200; combined: $87,400. Stoltz household: $2,400.
A-10. Linda Parkowski, Mike Parkowski, Parkowski, Guerke & Swayze
Linda Parkowski: $700; household: $1,900; law firm: $1,800.
The Evidence File: Receipts, Sources, and Primary Documents
Every record cited, with a link
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.
115 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
115sources, 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
S-115. Delaware Office of Management and Budget, Office of State Planning Coordination. (n.d.). Preliminary Land Use Service [PLUS].
https://stateplanning.delaware.gov/plus/index.shtml
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
The citation
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
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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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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.”
