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Walmart & Delaware
Land Use
Corporate Responsibility
No to DSTP and Three Tiered Diplomas - 4/22/04
Living Wage Legislation for NCC: An Idea Whose Time Has Come
Let's Stop VX From Coming to Delaware 4/5/04
View On the Expansion of NCC Council
Patriot Act
A Breath of Fresh Air for NCC Government 3/4/04
One of the Cannon campaigns major motives is our desire to confront the issue of how NCCo land will be developed for its citizens in the future. This issue involves a number of interrelated factors including environmental, health, transportation, and economic concerns.
2. The Problem
In the last 10 years, NCCo’s population has increased 25%. In spite of this, county government’s efforts to deal with suburban sprawl have been small-scale and ineffective. As more and more housing developments spring up on previous open space, the county’s infrastructure has not kept pace. As a result, unplanned growth has become one of the county’s central problems.
Take gridlock as an example. Once an occasional problem, gridlock is now a daily fact that faces drivers in numerous locations in the county. In desperation and, ultimately, in futility, taxpayer money pays for building more and more expensive roads as we try to keep up with traffic demand, only to find these new or improved roads clogged with traffic a few short years later. As this happens, the average commute time to work increases yearly, thereby shrinking our leisure time and our time with families. Another factor involved in the expansion of commute time is the nature of sprawl itself, which entails the migration of people ever-further away from their workplaces. In the thirty-four years since 1970, the distance between the average person’s home and workplace has increased by 500 percent.
Unplanned growth also causes other problems. As vast tracts of land are paved for road construction and new housing developments without sufficient environmental scrutiny, natural drainage systems are disrupted. This causes a variety of problems including greater susceptibility to drought -- due to the poor refill of aquifers -- and, during heavy rains, increased possibility of flooding since the run-off water from upstream developments can overwhelm older downstream developments, such as happened in Glenville.
Uncontrolled growth also prevents effective planning for waste treatment -- with middle and lower income people usually paying the price. Take the Cherry Island landfill as an example: its odor- and toxicity-related problems affect some of Wilmington’s poorest neighborhoods as well as middle-class suburban populations just north of the city. Meanwhile, developer-controlled government officials continue to allow zoning exceptions that give developers the right to (a) build communities on or near toxic waste sites and/or (b) crowd people into developments near industrial facilities that daily poison residents’ air and water.
As such problems mount, the quality of life in NCCo suffers. Long-term, this could diminish the county’s appeal to potential new residents and new businesses, thereby shrinking the county’s tax base and further eroding the local standard of living.
Already New Castle County is on a downward trend in terms of standard of living. Coupled with the problems previously mentioned -- e.g., population growth, gridlock, susceptibility to drought and flooding, inadequate waste disposal -- are a number of problems (pollution, economic disparities, etc.) that supposedly were to be ‘left behind’ as Wilmington shrank and the suburbs grew. Suburbanization, however, didn’t leave these problems behind but rather recreated them in new environments as the building contractors and industries that drove sprawl brought with them a propensity for developing crowded communities from which the greatest profit could be extracted from each square foot.
Consequently, life in New Castle County -- as in other areas across the nation -- shows that unplanned growth ultimately results not in an elimination of problems traditionally associated with cities, but rather in their relocation into the suburbs. The growth of NCCo’s pollution problems -- e.g., the county ranks among the worst 5% of U.S. counties that emit toxic substances like dioxin, mercury, benzene and arsenic compounds -- is one sign of such relocation. Another is the fact that the county is home to the highest number of Delaware families whose incomes do not allow them to maintain basic economic self-sufficiency. (Such increases in suburban poverty result from a number of economic trends including the growth of low wage service sector jobs, the outsourcing of better-paying industrial jobs from companies like General Motors and DuPont, and welfare cuts.) A close look at the county’s income data also show that racial inequities in income levels remain a serious problem in the suburbs as well as the cities -- e.g., blacks’ per capita income in the county is only 60.8% of whites and they are 2.3 times more likely to live in rented (rather than owned) homes than whites.
As the above facts make clear, the land use issue touches upon a number of intertwined topics, none of which can be ignored. Just as contractor and industry insensitivity to the county’s ecology results in drought and flooding susceptibilities, so one-sided (i.e., pro-corporate) economic planning causes outsourcing, downward wage trends, pollution, etc. When many such factors combine - and are allowed to spiral out of control by a county council that caters to the state’s corporate elite - we are faced with a situation that demands radical reform.
This is our current situation.
3. Recommendations
Because New Castle County is in dire need of a governmental overhaul with regard to how it handles land use issues, legislation and other control methods must be developed in order to implement the following goals.
1. Lessen gridlock and cut back on road construction by expanding public transportation to include (a) commuter rail service in NCCo, (b) bus services to a wider array of county localities and (c) train service from Wilmington to Dover, then eventually to Sussex.
2. A new approach must be developed to local government ‘enticements’ for corporate growth. Tax breaks and other giveaways to industry must include binding agreements to protect the environment, workers’ health, and higher paying jobs. Giveaways in which the companies do all the receiving and the people get nothing in return are examples of the public being sold out by the government that’s supposed to protect us.
3. The county must more aggressively preserve open space, create stronger anti-pollution measures, reign in the power of building contractors, and fashion procedures for direct public involvement in decision-making on all significant development issues.
4. Reform-minded county politicians must play a major role in expanding the county’s parkland acreage, prevent the commercialization privatization of public lands, and prohibiting business exploitation in our wildlife areas.
While creating legislation and other methods for implementing the above goals, we must remember that the amount of open land and the amenities of parkland and woodland vary between different parts of the county. In the northwestern area, for instance, much parkland has been preserved and protected from future development, whereas in Brandywine Hundred and the Route 40 corridor area parkland is sparse, although the county is now developing one park near Glasgow. Also, below the canal there is a great deal of open farmland, but ongoing development could rapidly overwhelm thus land, thereby creating another zone of suburban sprawl.
5. Given the need for solutions to ongoing county land use problems, County Council must be unprecedentedly combative in limiting the impact of big money on the county’s developmental decisions. Doing this will require working in close concert with groups like the Delaware Agricultural Land Preservation Foundation, Delaware Open Space Council and the Nature Conservancy to protect farmland and open space.
4. A Few Words about the Unified Development Code (UDC) and County Council
Several years ago the Gordon administration hired Lane Kendig, Inc., an Illinois based company with ties to the University of Delaware, to develop the Unified Development Code (UDC) in order to reduce the level of unplanned development. The code, consisting as it does of all county land use regulations, governs the work of the county’s Department of Land Use and its various commissions and boards -- e.g., the Planning Board, the Board of Adjustment, etc.
Although the code doesn’t contain solutions to development-related issues like road construction proliferation and the lack of an adequate mass transportation system, it does make an effort to curb some sprawl characteristics and to emphasize community. For instance, the code mandates the construction of more village type developments that are near retail facilities and that contain a mixture of housing types -- stand alone homes, townhouses and apartments. The purpose of such an approach is to encourage development projects that create diverse districts inhabited by a variety of economic strata, all of whom have access to nearby shopping and recreational facilities. Given the corruption scandals (i.e., developers bribing county officials) that have plagued County Council over the years, the UDC’s development was a step in the right direction, since it (a) sets clear guidelines for how certain land use decisions must be made and (b) provides the technical expertise needed for smart land development judgments.
Still, we must be clear that the code’s value is only as a first step. Boards like the Planning Board (9 members) and Board of Adjustment (7 members), both of which consist of unelected officials and ‘experts’, and both of which are guided by the UDC’s regulations, are problematic because they’re accountable to no one except to the politicians who appointed them and therefore they’re beyond the reach of public reprimand. None of this means the UDC shouldn’t be enforced - it should be. However, County Council must be free (a) to modify the code as residents’ ideas of how to best achieve healthy land use policies evolve and (b) to override the land use office's decisions if those decisions violate either the code or people’s right to input into development policies.
Regarding the problem of council members being influenced by bribes or other types of contractor influence, this must be handled not by taking power away from elected officials and giving it to unelected boards or commissions, but by constructing methods of citizen oversight that empower the public to reverse council decisions when necessary and to drive corrupt politicians from office. The creation of commissions and boards that are staffed by unelected think-tank types is no substitute for the rule of ‘we the people’. We need less bureaucracy in government and more public control.
One key to gaining a greater level of citizen oversight is the need to wrestle power out of the hands of the Democratic-Republican elite. This elite, although they bicker among themselves in order to create the impression that they are far apart on many issues, are in fact steadfastly united on the most important issue of all: they believe that it is their right, and their right alone, to control all political decision-making. As a result of this arrogance, they believe that the majority of the electorate, who are independent thinkers, must be prevented at all costs from interfering with how the Democratic/Republican coalition controls the political system.
It would be naive of us to expect this coalition, which consists of the very parties that created the county’s land usage and corruption problems, to solve those problems.
For reform to be real, independent-thinking residents must join together to hack a new path through the local political jungle.