A New Castle County mass rezoning ordinance will go to a vote next month, but the county Planning Board recommends a substitute.
Some residents oppose the ordinance, which would rezone 87 parcels across the county all at once, including the group RADAR – Residents Against Delaware Arbitrary Rezoning – saying it does not follow the county’s rezoning process and each parcel should be proposed separately to allow for public comment.
RADAR organizer Dale Swain says around 70 of them showed up to a county Planning Board meeting on December 12, where the board voted to recommend a substitute removing 16 parcels of concern, which RADAR doesn’t support either.
“It was just wrong to do it this way," Swain says. "The county has had 18 months from July of 2022 when they first passed the revised comprehensive plan. They could have done all of these rezonings as individual rezonings with no problem.”
RADAR has collected over 1500 signatures on a petition to pull the ordinance entirely and has over 650 followers on its Facebook page. Nearly 300 residents came to a meeting at Port Penn Fire Hall last month to drum up support for the group.
County Executive Matt Meyer says in the two-year plan amendment process they talked with over 2,000 residents – barely a drop in the bucket of the county’s total population, but Meyer says it’s hard to reach every single resident.
“There has been public input and we’ve heard the public input. And we’ve advocated for certain parcels that did not reflect implementing the spirit and the letter of the comprehensive plan, we advocate that county council take those parcels out.”
Meyer adds the comprehensive plan amendment process included nearly 50 public meetings, review of 115 written public comments, 909 responses to surveys, and direct interaction with more than 2,000 residents via in-person and virtual meetings. The Department of Land Use calls this "the most inclusive and comprehensive public process ever undertaken by New Castle County."
But Council President Karen Hartley-Nagle says she doesn’t think the Land Use Department is doing enough to notify and inform residents.
"Land Use knows how to get information out, they're really good when they want you to know something," she says. "So I'm not quite believing that they didn't do this on purpose to make it just as confusing and difficult for people as possible."
Hartley-Nagle adds there are too many residents claiming they did not receive notice about rezonings, and says the department also failed to post signage with notice of a public hearing on properties that are proposed to be rezoned.
As a result, Hartley-Nagle recently introduced legislation strengthening notice requirements, including tripling the radius requirement to notify residents living near a parcel with a public hearing for a rezoning, from 300 feet to 1,000 feet.
As for the mass rezoning ordinance at hand, Hartley-Nagle says the county now has a legal issue on its hands. If they don’t rezone the properties to match the comprehensive plan within the 18 months since it was approved, they could risk violatingstate code.
“We expect that we will be sued and we will probably lose based on what we are doing right now," Hartley-Nagle says. "And so I want to make sure that I am listing, if I go not voting, all the reasons why I’m not voting, because if it is challenged in the courts, I want them to understand the reasons why, and what could have been done better and that there was a better way.”
The Land Use Department uses this argument as a reason in support of the mass rezoning. The county sent out a letter on November 30 to residents who wrote emails or sent letters to the Land Use Department, claiming there had been "a considerable amount of misinformation circulated regarding Ordinance 23-083."
The letter explains that mass rezonings have been done before — between 1998 and 2015, New Castle County Council passed 29 corrective ordinances that have resulted in the rezoning of as many as 4,788 parcels under one ordinance.
In December of 1997, Ordinance 97-172 was adopted with the support of then-County Executive Tom Gordon and rezoned over 100,000 parcels under the umbrella of a single ordinance.
Meyer says that despite speculation, the mass rezoning has nothing to do with any warehouse projects or “destroying communities.”
“This is a big county,” he says. “There are a lot of urban spaces, there are a lot of suburban spaces, and there are a lot of rural spaces. And I think a lot of what you hear, and what I hear, around the Appoquinimink area, south of the C&D Canal, is that they don’t want their kids judged by the standards of Wilmington or Newark or Claymont, which is very fair.”
Hartley-Nagle says the county could ask for an extension and suggests amending the comprehensive plan before attempting any more rezoning.
County Council is expected to vote on the ordinance or its substitute next month.
