Sussex County’s Land Use Reform Group finalized recommendations that will now be sent to Sussex County Council for review. The group was represented by members of conservation groups, engineering companies, construction builders, agricultural organizations, housing advocates, DelDOT and the office of state planning.
The group went through 20 recommendations with each voting on a scale of one to five, with one indicating they strongly oppose and five indicating they strongly support each recommendation. When asked to vote on their support for the full package of recommendations, nine of the ten members voted to strongly support or support them, while one was strongly opposed.
“I agree with this as a whole, but there are things I disagree with on the larger scale as a whole,” Jay Baxter of the Sussex Farm Bureau said. “For instance, once again here we are talking to something that could be of use to the entire count in creating commercial districts, but we’re only putting them in a growth zone. This is why I disagree with having a Growth Zone and a Conservation Zone because, as was mentioned earlier, we are going to be creating a theoretical TDR program and there is no monetary compensation, so here we are picking winners and losers for land.”
Baxter felt that the commercial districts are useful, but did not know what Sussex County Council would deem a growth zone. He stated that he struggled with some of the boundary lines presented, but that he did feel the group had come up with methods to minimize sprawl.
County Administrator Todd Lawson thanked the volunteers who included Jill Hicks, Sussex Preservation Coalition; Mike Riemann, American Council of Engineering Companies; Jon Horner, Home Builders Association of Delaware; Christophe Tolou, Environmental Group; Baxter; Caitlin Del Collo, Affordable Housing Advocate; Matthew Padron, Affordable Housing Developer; Doug Motley, Local Residential Developer; Mark Luszcz, DelDOT; and David Edgell, Office of State Planning Coordination, for their dedication to the process.
“I think it’s only been five months since we got started in earnest. It’s such a quick turnaround and I’ve never seen a working group get the amount of work done in the amount of time we did it. It’s pretty amazing,” Lawson said. “This was a Herculean effort when we started, and I wasn’t sure how fast or how comprehensive we would be to get to this point, but we made it, and it’s all because of your work and willingness to roll up your sleeves and deliver the product.”
Lawson continued, explaining why the working group was formed in the first place.
“We started this process because county council sat down with us the beginning of this year and said, we got some new ideas, and we want to get feedback from stakeholders. And we got some people in mind and that was the formation of the working group, really in its essence,” Lawson said.
The recommendations will be presented at a future County Council meeting. Council will have the final say in the wording of the ordinances or which ones will be put into county code at all. The entire meeting can be watched by visiting here. Documents presented at the meeting as well as the final vote tally can be found by visiting the Sussex County Government webpage and choosing “presentation,” “final recommendations” or “results of final recommendations” under the September 11 meeting.
