With Dover’s mayoral municipal election less than a week away, candidates faced off in their first and only debate on Wednesday night, with concerns about the city’s languishing development and housing shortage were front-and-center.
Dover’s municipal elections are nonpartisan, and there is no clearly defined ideological distinction between incumbent mayor Robin Christiansen and challenger Diana Welch, an air force veteran and downtown property owner.
Christiansen’s long tenure as mayor – he has held the office since 2014 – is a core tension in the race.
Welch accuses Christiansen of becoming disengaged from efforts to correct the city’s course, pointing to the city’s difficulties retaining college graduates – in part because of a housing shortage – and long-stagnant downtown as evidence that the city has fallen decades behind its peers.
"Downtown Dover looks exactly like it did 20 years ago, and we cannot sustain that," Welch said.
Christiansen positions himself as the city's elder statesman, touting his well-established connections to key local partners like the Kent Economic Partnership and his role in drawing some new employers, including a corrugated cardboard manufacturer, to the city during his tenure.
The candidates' visions for the city largely overlap — both envision the city making use of an air cargo terminal it has owned since 1999 to attract aviation jobs, for instance — and both were vocal in their support of the half-billion dollar Capital City 2030 plan to redevelop Dover's struggling downtown core, including the addition of 1,000 new residential units and both pedestrian and bicycle improvements. The plan was prepared for the Downtown Dover Partnership by the Philadelphia-based Mosaic Development Partners and presented to city council in March.
Christiansen did, however, note his concern that the plan could result in the displacement of the low-income residents of the west side of Dover's downtown, while Welch worried that without her leadership, the plan — which came with a more than $200,000 price tag — will be left to collect dust alongside previous proposals to breathe life into the city.
Welch offered a more full-throated endorsement of plans to add denser housing stock to downtown Dover, naming the creation of walkable "livability islands" around the city as one of her highest priorities. She noted that creating those self-sufficient neighborhoods would require significant changes to Dover's zoning map and loosening of the city's building height restrictions.
"We need to build up," she said. "A three-story apartment building – that’s not enough return on investment and it doesn’t provide enough housing. We need a ten-story apartment building.”
She conceded, however, that smaller multifamily buildings would be more appropriate in the downtown core, while taller buildings could be appropriate additions to neighborhoods like the Village at Blue Hen.
Christiansen contends that the city needs greater cooperation from private partners to draw new multifamily housing to downtown Dover. "This isn't only the city's responsibility," he said. "The success of these apartment buildings we want to build depends on external investors." Those investors, he added, have been hard to find.
Welch blames that shortage of willing investors on inefficiencies in the city's permitting system. "We need to roll out the red carpet [for developers]," she said.
Both candidates were particularly concerned with the impacts of the city's housing shortage — average rents for a one-bedroom apartment have risen to more than $1,200 — on local college graduates. "We don't have enough places for them to go while they're in school or after they graduate, so we're losing them entirely," said Christiansen.
The focus on downtown revitalization also raised questions about the city's role in filling long-vacant storefronts on Loockerman Street, which the candidates blamed partially on business owners' and customers' concerns about public safety and partially on negligent property owners.
“We cannot force someone to do something with the property other than to maintain it to the standards they have," he said. "I don’t agree with that – I think we need a bigger hammer, but we don’t have a bigger hammer at this point in time.”
The city currently entrusts responsibility for drawing tenants to downtown storefronts to the Downtown Dover Partnership — an arrangement both Christiansen and Welch says has not been as successful as they would hope; the vacancy rate for downtown store fronts hovers around fifty percent.
Exactly how the city will fundraise for broader redevelopment plans went largely unaddressed during the debate, though both candidates noted their interest in making use of temporary increment financing districts — a tool for capturing property tax revenue from a designated area of a city to finance development bonds that Dover's city council recently voted to add to the city's options for development financing.
Asked how to mitigate public safety concerns, Welch suggested that while the Dover Police Department may need several more officers, the city could benefit from the addition of so-called "force multipliers" like surveillance cameras and license plate readers. "[Cameras] don't get tired, they don't care if it's raining, they don't get distracted," she said. Welch also noted that she is married to a retired Dover police officer.
In contrast, Christiansen argued that the city's public safety budget would be more effective if used to field patrol officers on foot in neighborhoods across the city. "You can have as many cameras as you want," he said, "but if you don't have people to watch those cameras, you're going to be reactive instead of proactive."
The candidates also split on the question of professionalizing Dover's volunteer fire department. "A lot of firemen are aging, and they're struggling to find new recruits," Welch said. "I don't want to wait until it's a crisis. I want to assess whether the number of people we have will carry us to 2040. We need to start building that department now, or else we'll be ten years behind when it matters."
Christiansen, a longtime volunteer with the fire department, argued that the city should trust the department's leaders to raise the alarm if they believe the fire service is in imminent risk of a staffing crisis. "They won't wait until the last minute," he said.
Four Dover City Council seats are also on the ballot this month, though only two seats are contested. The city will hold its election on Tuesday, April 18th, with polls opening at 7:00 AM and closing at 8:00 PM.
