Council considers Community Development

By Sam Harvey
Staff Reporter

The $1.9 million in federal funding is to be split up between Kent (except for the City of Dover) and Sussex counties. It’s used by low- to moderate-income homeowners — for housing rehabilitation and assistance with utility hookups, primarily.

However, Lecates has more than $2.7 million in Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program funding requests on his list. And his counterpart in Kent County, Albert Biddle (Planning Services), said he didn’t have his numbers finalized yet, but expected he’d be requesting nearly $2 million.]

In other words, Lecates and Biddle have identified more than twice as many people in need as there are available CDBG funds.

Every year, Lecates refers to the Sussex residents sitting on the backlog. Whichever projects the DSHA approves, he asked council for a roughly $346,000 county match on Jan. 3.

That money would cover the lion’s share of Community Development and Housing’s nearly $400,000 in administrative costs. As Lecates pointed out, the department was running on a 15-percent administrative overhead (the maximum allowed).

He said the department had garnered $15 million in CDBG funding since 1996. Lecates suggested the department’s efforts had a positive influence, not only in preserving low- to moderate-income housing stock, but on the local economy in a more general sense.

Council Member George Cole asked if Community Development was targeting any specific areas this year, as the department has done in the past.

He mentioned the Strong Communities Initiative, which targeted some of Sussex’s struggling neighborhoods in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The initiative especially addressed communities with high rates of violence, drug trafficking, teen pregnancy and substandard housing. The program started with a list of eight deteriorated Sussex communities, but identified another 30 or so in similar straits.

Cole suggested targeted spending could invigorate a community, whereas it was harder for people to see Community Development’s scattershot improvements.

Lecates noted one Strong Community on his budget — he’d slated Coverdale Crossroads, west of Georgetown, for 10 rehabilitation projects. However, he said it was difficult to target communities in the way Cole had suggested, because many residents were renters, not homeowners (and therefore ineligible).

“We’re not really targeting communities so much as picking them up as scatter sites,” Cole later noted.

Lecates is requesting $280,000 for 16 rehab projects in Selbyville and $443,000 for 25 rehab projects at scattered sites around Frankford and Dagsboro.

He’s requesting $280,000 for 16 rehab projects in rural Millsboro-Dagsboro, and $80,000 for assistance with 69 utility hookups at scattered sites between Dagsboro and Ocean View.

In other business, council formally reorganized and reappointed legal staff to start the New Year. Council Member Dale Dukes nominated Council Member Lynn Rogers to serve as president, and that motion passed unanimously.

Council Member Vance Phillips nominated Cole for vice-president, but that motion died for lack of a second. Council Member Finley Jones nominated Dukes instead, and that motion passed unanimously.

Council reappointed County Attorney James Griffin (Griffin & Hackett), Assistant County Attorney and attorney for the Planning and Zoning (P&Z) Commission Vince Robertson (Griffin & Hackett), Assistant County Attorney and attorney for the Board of Adjustment Richard Berl (Smith, O’Donnell, Feinberg & Berl) and Assistant County Attorneys Rebecca Trifillis and David Hackett (Griffin & Hackett).

Rogers reviewed rules of procedure. Phillips suggested the occasional “free-flow exchanges” between council members were sometimes entertaining, but frequently counterproductive as well.

He suggested council either discard the rules of procedure governing council members while someone has the chair’s recognition, and the floor, or enforce them.

Rogers promised he’d wield the gavel when necessary. Griffin agreed with Phillips that perfect adherence to formal procedures was something to strive for, but suggested council members were already following those procedures more often than they were deviating from them.

Dukes brought up a side issue: council members’ ability to discuss an issue at the introduction stage, rather than waiting until the public hearing date to start debating specific points.

Cole raised the matter last month, when Phillips introduced his version of a Cluster Development Ordinance amendment. Cole had previously introduced an amendment that would confine clustered subdivision to the development districts.

Dukes added an amendment to the amendment, which kept clustering as an option in the low-density districts but levied a 25-percent reduction to the gross area of the parcel before the developers could calculate the permitted number of lots.

Phillips’ amendment instead encouraged developers to build in development districts by offering a density bonus, up to four units per acre, at a cost.

Around town centers, developers could opt to pay $15,000 for each bonus residence (or $20,000, for bonus densities in the Environmentally Sensitive Developing District). The money would go toward land conservation efforts.

Cole expressed a desire to further discuss Phillips’ amendment at that time (at introduction), but Jones forged ahead over his objection.

Griffin said there were no laws forbidding discussion at that point, but the idea behind waiting until public hearing was to give citizens a chance to respond to those discussions and offer input of their own.

Phillips said it typically came down to a matter of deference to the chair (this year, Rogers). If the chair decided to simply introduce the ordinance or resolution and move on, that typically ended the discussion for that particular meeting, he said.

At any rate, Duke’s amendment will be up for public hearing at the Jan. 12 P&Z meeting. Phillips’ amendment appears on the Jan. 26 P&Z agenda.