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.

Things are About to get Interesting

The new year is about to kick into very high gear for me, professionally. As we rise from the wreckage of the holiday season, a number of strands are starting to come together in the related areas of GIS and data management, the 2010 census, land-use planning, and state government management over-all. It should be an interesting start to 2010.

The Delaware GIS Conference is now one month away. One my my jobs in Delaware state government is the coordination of the use and sharing of geospatial data and tools. I run an organization called the Delaware Geographic Data Committee (DGDC) and we mount a statewide GIS conference every few years.

This time around, I am the chair of the Conference Planning Subcommittee and so am sweating through the run-up and wondering if enough people will register and attend for me to not be terribly embarrassed. Our conference is not expensive, but finding any money to spend these days is a challenge.

I spend a fair amount of time promoting the event. I have initiated a series of posts on the DGDC News blog based on the abstracts of the 24 presentations that will be offered. Meanwhile, I work with a great group of subcommittee members who have all taken on the different tasks needed to make a conference happen. I have absolute faith in these folks, but need to stay connected and try to understand what they are up to to coordinate the whole thing.

Meanwhile, I'm working with another group on a strategic plan for statewide GIS coordination under a federal grant. We plan to release a draft at the GIS Conference, so there's plenty of review and comment work to be done.

And, while we're in coordination mode, the 2010 US Census is just ahead. The decennial count will be taken on April 1 and promoting and preparing for that is part of my job responsibilities.  I'm working now to organize a statewide "Complete Count Committee" to add some oomph to census preparation.

At the same time, I'm deep into the City of Lewes zoning ordinance as chair of the Lewes Planning Commission. We've spent many months on this update and the process has proven more complex and challenging than I would have thought. But we're rounding the final turn and almost ready to take it public.

That task dovetails with the overall land use planning coordination that is the center of the mission of the Office of State Planning Coordination, where I am housed. It is an ongoing challenge for which I provide technical support -- GIS, demographic data, etc. -- and for which I help track news sites and on-line discussion.

Never a dull moment.

And looming over all of this is the return of the Delaware General Assembly on Tuesday. They face another session of trying to balance the state budget in a time of fiscal crisis. There's a chilling story about this in today's News Journal -- Delaware lawmakers return, once again facing tough choices with budget shortfall. It discusses the likelihood that we'll not get back the 2.5% pay cut we took last year. I can live with that. What's more interesting is the start of discussions about what services, programs, offices, and maybe people will need to be cut.

As I said above: "interesting."

Urban Planning, Parks and Their Impacts on Planned and Un-Planned Pedestrian Peregrination

I try to walk, when I can, for exercise and as a way to get out and photograph things. I live in one of the most beautiful, historic, small towns on the east coast -- Lewes -- and work in one of the more picturesque, historic, state capitols -- Dover. Both are in Delaware, for those of you in other places.

A challenge I have, though, is familiarity. In nearly five years as a photo-hobbyist, I have walked and photographed almost all of Lewes (586 photos, so far) and Dover (737 photos). Those totals, by the way, are only those I deemed worthy of uploading to flickr.

So I am happy to report that a change in Lewes' layout has helped me change the way I look at, and photograph, the town. Lewes has recently completed and opened the Canalfront Park, the redevelopment of a rusty boatyard and adjacent state boat launching ramp into a very nice park.

This has given me new things to photograph. And it has changed the way I walk through town.

It used to be the case that when I walked into town I would walk down Second Street (our main commercial street) from Savannah Road towards the Historic Society Complex to the northwest. And so I came upon, and often photographed, St. Peter's church from its northeast corner, as at left.

Now, however, I find that I walk up to the Canal, first, wind my way through the park, and circle around to walk back up Second Street from Historic Society Complex. So I now approach, and photograph, the church from the northwest, as at right.

Of course, I could have, and probably should have, made the change on my own. But we are creatures of habit. It took a change in urban planning to nudge me just slightly off course.

It has given me a whole new perspective.

Incorrect? Incorrect Like A Fox!

Like many other people in attendance at the Lewes Fire Hall the other night for a public meeting on the update of the Sussex County Comprehensive Land Use Plan, I was astounded by a claim made by Rich Collins, the sunnily optimistic conservative spokes-speaker of the pro-development lobby in Sussex County:

Mr. Collins, who also represents the Positive Growth Alliance, said the problem may be that Sussex County isn’t growing quickly enough. He based that on estimates that show the county population is rapidly growing older and the death rate is exceeding the birth rate. (From Sussex’s land future debated, by Michael Short, Sussex Post)

This report, while accurate, doesn't convey the full extent of what Mr. Collins claims. What he said was, "growth may not be our problem, maybe the lack of growth" is the problem.

If you listen to the county's MP3 of that part of the proceedings (About a minute or two in), you find Rich quoting from the latest Delaware Population Consortium population projections series. He points to the projected amount of population growth, which the Consortium reports in 5-year increments, and says, accurately, that the amount of new population added to the county is projected to drop from 17,867 new residents added between 2000 and 2005 to 12,055 new residents added between 2020 and 2025.

Mr. Collins' conclusion? "Now, I don't have my calculator, but thats, what, about a 33 percent decline in growth."

Rich is either very adept at math on the fly, or he did the calculations before-hand and his aw-shucks act is just that.

What those numbers represent is a 32.5 percent difference between the rate of growth over the last half-decade and the projected rate of growth 20 years from now. The difference is largely due to the fact that, as a retirement area, eastern Sussex County will continue to have a declining birth rate and a burgeoning death rate. That's just demographics. What will keep population change on the positive side will be continued strong migration into Sussex County.


In fact, if you look at the whole of the Consortium's projections, you see that Sussex County is expected to grow by almost 73,000 people between now and 2030. That's a 40 percent growth in population and equal to moving all of the current population of Wilmington, plus a few neighborhoods worth of Elsmere, into Sussex.

I hesitated to write about this. I'm employed by the State Planning Office, which is often at odds with Mr. Collins. I would have let it go had it not made it into the news reports. My motivation to address this is mostly because I also serve as the secretary of the Delaware Population Consortium and take some pride in the work that that group does. I feel a responsibility to step in when it looks like the Consortium's projections are being mis-used.

Mr. Collins may simply be mistaken; he may simply not understand the data he is looking at. But I don't think so. I think Rich is trying to muddy the discussion and sow seeds of doubt about the extent of the problem facing Sussex County.

Wow! We're Famous Here in Lil' Ole Lewes

The great city of Lewes, Delaware, is mentioned in a recent edition of the Quad-City Times Newspaper in Milwaukee. Of course, from their perspective, we're just a tiny burg somewhere on the east coast.

The story reports on a recent conference -- Urban Waterfronts 22: Gathering By the Waters -- put on by The Waterfront Center. Officials from Davenport , Iowa, were on hand to try to earn about how to spruce-up their waterfront.

One the case studies presented, apparently, was the story of how Lewes' old Boatyard Property is becoming a canal-front park. The Waterfront Center was, I think, among the consultants on the project. John Mateyko, of Lewes, who worked on this project and continues in a leadership role, appears to have been in Milwaukee for the conference and is quoted in the story. It caught my eye as a member of the Lewes Planning Commission; this story was the first big, controversial issue I faced as a newcomer to the Commission.

Our story, as presented at the conference, is how Lewes' citizenry "managed to outmaneuver a high-powered developer" whose development proposal included "a hotel, parking ramp and commercial space on the town's last remaining large piece of open waterfront." I don't remember a hotel as part of the proposal, I'm thinking it was residential units, but no matter. I also question whether it was the last open waterfront land.

"The developer was a big-league guy in town who knew everyone, and everyone thought his project was politically greased and would go through," Mateyko said. "All that was true, except that it didn't go through."

Hmmm. I don't know whether the project was politically greased or not, but it was appropriately zoned, which meant that our only decision point was whether or not to recommend approval of the site plan to City Council. That approval was supposed to be based on whether or not that site plan met all of the technical requirements in our code.

The Planning Commission voted to recommend denial. Council went along with that recommendation and we were all served with papers in a lawsuit.

That is the point at which the lobbying went into high gear. Eventually, the citizen organization collected sufficient pledges from area residents, and from the state government, to allow the city to buy the property and satisfy the property owner, who dropped the suit.

This has been a positive outcome for the City, but I argue that we cannot get into the habit of buying our way out of situations in which projects can legally proceed, but are politically unpopular. This could get very expensive.