Cape Gazette Questions Series: Future Growth in and Around Lewes

The Cape Gazette sent a series of questions to each of the candidates for Lewes City Council for publication in the May 2 edition.

The proposed Highland Heights and Point Farm communities are very controversial among residents. What is your vision for future growth in and around Lewes?

We know we cannot stop growth. People want to be here. We wanted to be here. We have to remember why we found Lewes so attractive and work to guide future development into a similar pattern.

This means supporting a mixture of different residential densities, low-level industry, open space, and local-scale retail and restaurants.

We can allow for growth where it is appropriate. We can use our city codes to minimize environmental, traffic, flooding and other risks.

 We will work with developers to maintain the intimate scale of the City and encourage pedestrian and bicycle connections. This will require regular updates of city codes and a willingness to seek out advice and input where ever we can find it.

Past Accomplishments, Future Plans

Several voters have asked for a short list of the things I accomplished while on the Lewes Planning Commission and some of what I plan to accomplish on City Council.  So I have pulled together a few thoughts:

I have served for 15 years on the Planning Commission, the last five years as Chair.

• I helped write the 2005 Lewes Comprehensive Plan (PDF) and led efforts to review and suggest interim updates of the plan.
• I led the effort to update the Zoning Ordinance and the Subdivision and Land Development Ordinance, based on the 2005 Comprehensive Plan. This included doing the technical digital mapping work to create the current Lewes Zoning map (PDF).
• I led the Planning Commission through reviews of a series of complex and controversial development proposals, achieving concessions from developers and improving the resulting developments.
• I instituted a regular practice of "roundtable reviews" of the recent activities of city committees, to help keep Planning Commission members up to date on issues in the city.

On Lewes City Council I will draw upon my long experience and detailed knowledge of Lewes and state government operations.

• I will ensure that Lewes gets the most value out of our contract-planner and work towards a goal of eventually adding a full-time planner to help city staff and our boards and commissions.
• I will work with the state, county and our neighboring cities to make Cape region cooperation, and planning, a reality.
• I will find opportunities to preserve options in housing and mobility for seniors.

I have the knowledge and experience needed on Lewes City Council at this point in our history.

A Barn in the Spotlight

This old barn, at the intersection of Clay Road and kings Highway, outside of Lewes, Delaware, has been much in focus lately. It is on a tract of land that is proposed to be turned into a regional shopping center.

This proposal is strongly opposed by most people in the Lewes area. It's an unpopular place for a shopping center and, I think, a bad idea from an economics standpoint -- we don't need more shopping and this could threaten existing retail outlets.

As a result of all the concern, I think, I've noticed a strong increase in people stopping along the road to take its picture.

Now, I note, local painter Kim Klabe is talking about making it the subject of one of her canvases:

...just in case the developers win and the barn gets torn down. Saw it from a different angle the other morning and had one of those AAAAAhhhhhh, look at that...moments.

It's a pretty barn. I'd like to see what Kim does with it.

When the development plan for that property first came forward, the developers talked about saving the barn and turning it into a restaurant. I thought that was a good idea. They've since backed away from that idea.

That's a shame.

Sussex County Delaware Land Use Issues Smack-Down! (on public radio)

Friday morning will see a one-hour (I think) forum on Sussex County Land Use issues on the Salisbury, Maryland, public radio station WSDL (90.7 FM). The Public Radio Delmarva news staff plans to discuss the pending proposals for housing and commercial developments at the corner of Gills Neck Road and Kings Highway, just outside of Lewes, with two gents who are "fer it" and two who are "agin it."

This proposal has stirred up local concern like no other has lately. Opponents are organized and angry and have peppered the local paper with letters to the editor on the subject. Two of the leaders of that movement will be on the WSDL panel. Dave Ennis, a former State Representative who has a house just outside of Lewes, and John Mateyko, an architect and Lewes resident with strong (and usually informed) feelings about development issues, will face off against two who support development interests. Those gents will be Dave Kenton, a local real estate broker who has written several recent editorials extolling the benefits to be gained from letting developers work more freely, and Rich Collins, who recently read a book by Alan Greenspan and lately likes to whip that out at public meetings.

Rich Collins is Executive Director of the Positive Growth Alliance, a local pro-growth advocacy group that he has made his full-time job over the years. I've had occasion to doubt Mr. Collins' accuracy before.

This should be interesting.

An Update on the Hocker Manufacturing Story

Greg Wood, former president of Hocker Mfg. Co., stopped by to leave a very informative comment on my post about the closing of the Hocker plant on Kings Highway at my end of Lewes. If you have any interest in that story, or in Lewes' history, it's worth your reading time. Greg fills-in the gaps in the story as I found it and reveals what I think is an even more rich and fascinating part of Lewes history.

Goodbye, Hocker Manufacturing

The small Hocker factory that has sat across Kings Highway from our neighborhood for as long as we've been here (and longer) has closed down. This was one of only a very few industrial uses we had in Lewes; losing it is another loss of the real-ness of this town. We're moving closer and closer to becoming a large-scale retirement village.

According to a 1976 report for the National Park Service's Historic American Engineering Record, Hocker Manufacturing began its life in Philadelphia in the late 1800's when brothers John and George Hocker started a tin-smith business. John, who had pioneered several new manufacturing techniques, moved the business to Lewes in 1899 to take advantage of lower manufacturing and transportation costs. According to the Engineering Record, Hocker was a Sussex native and was married to a Lewes woman, which may have played a role in his move.

The first factory location was out near Pilottown, on Queen Anne Avenue. Around 1903, Hocker Manufacturing became Henlopen Manufacturing and moved to a new factory building in town on Schley Avenue, now (I think) part of the home of the Lewes Board of Public Works. The Hocker family, and their manufacturing business, prospered at Schley Avenue until 1951. They made tin boxes, bottle caps and brush handles.

Founder John Hocker died in the mid-1940s and his son, John Jr., in the late 1940s. When Mrs. Hocker died, Henlopen Manufacturing passed out of the family and the factory was closed.

In 1953, John Hocker's son Harold, who had left the business a decade earlier to raise poultry, re-established a brush business in a small building behind his home on Front Street, across the street from where the Canalfront Park is now being built.

At the time of the Engineering Record report, Hocker's was still a very small, very specialized business in a tiny building on Front Street. At some point between that report, in 1976, and the mid-1980s when I moved to Lewes, Hocker's moved to Kings Highway, at one of the entrances to the City. The business grew a little, but remained very much a niche company.

In a standard Google search, I have not been able to find an account of that move. In the 20 years that I have lived here, Hocker's has simply always been there.

In early 2007, Hocker's was sold to National Novelty Brush Company, of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It was, according to a story in the Intelligencer Journal, at the suggestion of Hocker's management.

"We were friendly competitors for the last 30 years," [Novelty Brush president Richard] Seavy said, "until we got a call (from Hocker) wanting to know if we were interested in purchasing it."

The housing downturn, apparently, has depressed the market for one of the main products of the Hocker's plant, the metal cap with attached brush that is used to apply solvents and cements to PVC pipe. I can see one in the hands of This Old House plumber Richard Trethewey as he runs pipe for some re-built bathroom somewhere. As a result, there's not enough business for two brush-factories and the Lewes site will close.

I'll miss it.

Well Said, Sir

There was a workshop yesterday focused on the effects of growth and land-use change in Sussex County. It was put on by a new group at the University of Delaware and brings together two of my several professional interests, land-use planning and geospatial data tools. It might have been interesting to attend, but it was scheduled against the quarterly meeting of the Delaware Geographic Data Committee, the statewide gesospatial data users' group that I run.

Molly Murray was there, though, and wrote about it for the News Journal. In her story, UD work targets Sussex growth, she quotes the guest speaker Thomas Hylton, of the nonprofit Save Our Towns Inc., on the value of dense development with dedicated open space over the sort of sprawl patters that we often see.

"Sprawl is incredibly expensive to build and maintain," he said. And as people move outside of already developed areas, "they don't live in the countryside. They live in their cars."

I suppose that description somewhat fits me, and the way we live here in eastern Sussex County, as we discussed here, and over at Delaware Liberal, last week.

I comfort myself with the knowledge that, living inside the town limits of Lewes, I can (and do) walk to the public library and to downtown Lewes.

Still, though, it makes you think.

The Final Crop?

We live in eastern Sussex County, Delaware, an area that has grown at what sometimes seems an alarming pace in the 21 years we've been here. Sussex has traditionally been a rural county, with an economy dominated by agriculture. Eastern Sussex, where our town of Lewes is located, is a retirement and resort area, featuring beaches, ocean and bays. We still have farmland, but it is devolving into developments around us.

That's why I'm fascinated by an art project in Arizona, near Phoenix. Matthew Moore is an artist who is watching his family farm fall to encroaching development. His response has been a series of art projects using the remaining fields as his canvas.

Rotations: Moore Estates is an exact replica of the first planned community being built on my family's land. The homes have been planted in sorghum and the roads in a black-bearded wheat. The project is a third scale of the actual development, which can be seen to the east of the project.

Mr. Moore has also carved a new-home floor-plan into a 20-acre field of barley.

I've always enjoyed corn mazes, but this is something bigger.

(With thanks to WFMU's Beware of the Blog)

If Ya Can't Beat 'Em?

Delaware's public discourse is increasingly moving into the world of blogs.

Kent County realtor Phil McGinnis has started a blog called Kent Delaware Land Use Issues. He's used his first post to posit some arguments against the subdivision moratorium enacted last week by the Kent County Levy Court.

I imagine that he noticed the effectiveness of blogs in the recent election, which brought new Levy Court Commissioners into office with a mandate to do something about the pace of growth in the county.

I Find This Very Sad

A lawyer from Maryland has written a column for today's News Journal criticizing Delaware's efforts to preserve open space and encourage "New Urban" and village-style development.

In his column (If you want green space, buy your own), Thomas Beach argues against state efforts to purchase the development rights of farmlands by saying that the price is not high enough and "because the farmer uses up the money and then is stuck with a farm."

While I'm sure this may sometimes be the case, I think this oversimplifies things. The prices are negotiated and based on fair market appraisals. And the goal of the state's Farmland Preservation Program is to maintain the agricultural sector of the economy as much, if not more than, to maintain open space.

Mr. Beach also scoffs at the idea of village-style development, saying that people prefer to live on large lots in large houses.

It seems the only people who choose to live in cities are a few yuppies and the elderly who may need public transportation and easy access to services.

This statement seems absurd, if not insulting and condescending.

But here is the part that stood out for me:

Except for my time in the Army, I haven't done any serious walking since I turned 16 and got my driver's license. I have never ridden a bus or subway and don't ever plan to.

I find that simply sad.

Phone Call for Mr. Leghorn! Foghorn Leghorn, Call For You!

The universe will provide all the laughs we need if we are but open to it.

There's an article posted this afternoon on the News Journal web site about a dispute over a proposal for a cell tower disguised as a tree in Western Sussex County.

There are opponents. There are supporters. Chief among the supporters is Byard Layton, on whose chicken farm the tower would be placed.

According to Mr. Layton, the area needs more cell coverage: “If you go in the chicken house, you don’t get any reception.”