The race for Sussex County’s House District 41 pits a first-time candidate and business owner, Democrat Ryan Stuckey, against a former legislator, John Atkins, with experience in the State House as a member of both parties. First elected in 2002 as a Republican, he switched parties in 2008 and served as a Democrat until losing his seat in 2014.
Atkins did not respond to multiple requests for interviews from Delaware Public Media. He has also declined interview requests from other news organizations and invitations to speak at some public forums. We’ve attempted to represent his positions on the issues based on his Facebook posts — Atkins also does not have a campaign website — and limited media appearances.
Stuckey, the Democratic nominee, owns a coffee shop in Dagsboro. He says as a lifelong resident of the area, he was moved to run by seeing the erosion of the places he grew up in.
“There's this old expression, you can never go home again. For me and my friends, we joke, we call ourselves the last generation of locals. Like, that's literally true - a lot of the places we grew up or the places we remembered when we were kids, they're gone now. They’re parking lots, they’re townhomes, starting in the low 400s, you know, places that normal people like me could never afford to rent, let alone own. It's just, yeah, the area is becoming unrecognizable,” he said.
Atkins, for his part, stresses his experience as a legislator and small business owner and bills himself on his Facebook page as a “politically incorrect conservative.”
A member of Dagsboro’s Planning and Zoning Commission, Stuckey has a lot to say about growth and its impacts on the area. He says he reads widely about planning and land use, and wants to advocate for what he calls a “concurrency law.”
He said, “A concurrency law would look at that overall impact and essentially say, if the roads are full and the schools are packed, the bulldozers do not move, period.”
Atkins has also expressed concern about the area’s infrastructure, suggesting on Facebook that too much of the county’s realty transfer tax is going into state coffers and that more of that revenue should go into repairing and upgrading roads and other infrastructure.
Stuckey also supports conservation subdivision design, putting new houses into more dense clusters while preserving forest and agricultural land.
“You require that before anything else, the developer look at that space, circle agricultural fields, deep growth forests, things of that nature - those are preserved, you don't touch them. So you can still build the same number of houses. The developer saves money because they're not having to pave as much, they're not having to lay as much pipe or anything like that, the people who ultimately live there are happier, and this is borne out in survey after survey and financial data nationwide. When you give a person the opportunity to live somewhere where they know the fields and the forest will be protected permanently, those essentially become their backyard. They will pay a premium for that,” he said.
One major growth-related issue in Sussex County is the effect of Senate Bill 23, a new state law which seeks to streamline the process of new home construction. Critics in local governments say the bill removes the ability of local governments to impose conditions on new subdivisions and does away with public hearings on new construction. Stuckey says that, while eliminating red tape is a good thing, he has concerns about SB23.
“If you're going to make it easier for developers to stand up housing, that needs to be paired with requirements, in my opinion. I feel like in some aspects what we did with this was just throw the keys to the teenager and say, ‘don't wreck it, son.’ I feel like we're being handed a false choice. They're acting like our only two options are either a complete building moratorium or just paving over our agricultural heritage. It's just not true,” Stuckey said.
He suggests there are better ways to get to the same ends, ”Instead of stripping local control, I think we need to empower towns to enforce density neutral design, let developers build their allotted units. And something else I would like to see also would be inclusionary zoning where you peg a certain percentage of the homes or townhomes to like the local cost of living.”
Atkins takes a less moderated approach to SB 23, characterizing it on the Dan Gaffney show on Delaware 105.9 earlier this month as another power grab by state lawmakers.
“They want to tell the town of Frankford that they can't do this, they want to tell the town of Millsboro or Fenwick Island about their windmills. They want to tell the town of Selbyville that they can't do this. They want to tell the county council what to do. We saw it on the marijuana issues, we saw it on the windmills and most recently the bypass of all county and local zoning laws with Senate Bill 23,” Atkins said.
Health care is another pressing issue in the 41st District. Stuckey says he has had his own struggles finding affordable health care, “I'm in a position right now where I've had to cancel multiple procedures this year because I can't afford them. I'm probably going to open a new one of those 12 month 0% interest credit cards so I can try to get them. That's ridiculous.”
He points to a shortage of doctors in Sussex County.
“Something I'm told is that they don't want to raise a family here. They want to move somewhere where their kids will be able to go to a better school.I've heard that a couple of times, so one of the things I'm thinking about to try to incentivize doctors to want to come to Delaware and stay here would be improving our education system,” Stuckey said.
Talking about public education, Stuckey admits that he’s not an expert on the subject, but says he’s talking to people who are, and listening to their input. However, he is optimistic about the state’s new hybrid formula for funding public education.
Stuckey said, “This is one of those cases where I defer to subject matter experts and people I talk to. It seems universally positive. From what I would consider to be vastly different camps of education, almost everybody seems to support hybrid funding, and I tend to be data-driven, so that would be my direction as well.”
Atkins was first elected to the House in 2002 as a Republican, but resigned his seat in 2007 following a drunk driving arrest and a domestic violence arrest, both within a span of a few hours. The next year, Atkins was back on the ballot, this time as a Democrat, serving until a loss in the 2014 general election. His legal troubles continued however, with several more arrests for domestic violence, culminating in a 22 day prison sentence and a year of probation for misdemeanor assault.
Speaking to 105.9’s Dan Gaffney earlier this month, Atkins says those problems are in his past and not on voters’ minds, “We won the primary, and they - I mean, they trashed us during the primary. My past is my past. We've talked about that a thousand times. I think the people in the 41st district want to talk about traffic. They want to talk about dredging. They want to talk about farm issues. They want to talk about saving our farms.”
That’s something Stuckey says he isn’t campaigning on, although he has encouraged people on social media to “Google John Atkins Delaware.”
Stuckey said “I just try to focus on, here's my positive vision for the future.Here's the results I've already delivered for my community, and I want to scale these up and take them to the next level.”
The 41st District is overwhelmingly Republican, with outgoing GOP State Representative Rich Collins getting anywhere from 59% to 86% of the vote in the past five general elections. Stuckey seems to be undaunted by those numbers. He wants to talk about his roots in the area and notes that his affiliation to the Democratic Party is a relatively recent one.
“I was born and raised here. I've owned a business on Main Street in my town for years. I'm well known in the competition shooting community. I was an independent for 23 years. I made the decision to file to run as a Democrat for pragmatic purposes. I think we need a Sussex County voice inside the caucus just so we can get more resources for our towns, our communities, our schools, and our roads,” Stuckey said.
Atkins, on the other hand, leans into his conservative credentials, betting on the district’s usual heavy Republican turnout to carry him to victory and talking about gun ownership, transgender athletes, and other hot button issues in his media appearances, while characterizing himself as running against a Democratic supermajority in Dover as much as against Stuckey.
