Land use reporter Olivia Marble joins the “Beyond the Headlines” podcast to discuss three current development proposals across Sussex County – Belle Mead, Atlantic Fields and Cool Spring Crossing – which, taken together, give a fascinating snapshot into how elected officials, advocates, and everyday residents are wrestling with questions about where and how to build in Delaware’s fastest growing region.
Olivia discusses her “reading of the tea leaves” to try to discern how Sussex County Council members will vote, the conflict between desires for both denser developments and preservation corridors, and traffic – always traffic. Plus, the irony of residents in new housing developments advocating against new housing developments.
The podcast is hosted by Director of Community Engagement David Stradley.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Your first appearance on the podcast back in July was about the Delaware City data center project. My final question to you was, “But what are you going to be looking at in Southern Delaware?” Do you remember how you answered?
I bet it was about housing and other types of commercial developments.
And here we are on the podcast to talk about housing and other kinds of commercial developments.
We’re going to be talking about three different developments, two of which involve housing, that are in different stages of the approval or rezoning processes. All of them intersect with themes that the Sussex County Land Use Reform Working Group has been exploring.
I’d love to start by giving listeners a quick capsule description of each of these developments. So in 30 seconds or less: Belle Mead.
Belle Mead is a development that has both commercial retail stores and also apartments and other types of multifamily homes – which is just types of housing that’s not a single family home, but it’s not an apartment. Duplexes, triplexes, all of that counts as multi-family homes.
And this is on Route 24, Where is Route 24?
Route 24 is just off of Route 1. It’s like five miles west of the beaches. It’s a pretty major east-west corridor. It’s four lanes right off of Route 1, but then it does go into two lanes at right around where Belle Mead is.
All right, so that is Belle Mead. What about Atlantic Fields?
Atlantic Fields is a pretty massive retail development. It would be about half the size of Christiana Mall in terms of just the retail area that it would cover.
It has three big name stores – Costco, Target and Whole Foods – that would be the anchor stores if this were approved. And then a bunch of other big name stores like Decathlon and Hobby Lobby.
And Atlantic Fields is directly across the street from Belle Mead.
It’s diagonal. And both of these, by the way, just to orient people, are near Love Creek Elementary School and Beacon Middle School.
And then last but not least, Cool Spring Crossing.
There’s actually two plans for Cool Spring Crossing. The one that developer Carl M.Freeman Companies actually wants to build, ideally, would essentially be a new town. It would cover about the same area as the town of Bethany Beach and it would have 1900 homes, which would make it have a population of about 5,000 people. And it would be built over the course of 20 years. It would be a long time until it’d be full size
It would have a YMCA, a grocery store, a hotel, an assisted living facility, an educational facility for college students and also adult learners. It’s basically a new town.
And then option two is:
Option two is just 1200 single family homes and a clubhouse. And that’s it.
We’ll get into a little later about why there’s two options there.
When you attended the Sussex County Council meeting about Belle Mead back in September, you said you had never seen so organized an opposition. Can you talk a little bit more about your impressions of this Route 24 Alliance?
The Route 24 Alliance is a residents’ group that’s mainly people who live along the Route 24 Corridor who are primarily concerned with the traffic along the corridor and general quality of life issues. But really it’s the traffic. It’s the congestion on the roads. And like I said, they’re very well organized.
They actually recently incorporated. They’ve had growing influence just in terms of the amount of people that are coming out to these county council hearings and opposing projects that are along Route 24. They have come out against the first two of the proposals that we’re talking about, because like you said, they’re right across from each other, diagonal to each other, on Route 24.
And what this group argues is we just have too much traffic on Route 24 right now. We can’t rezone the areas to approve even more projects.
The opinions of the Route 24 Alliance are running right into one of the recommendations of the Sussex County Land Use Reform Working Group, which is this body that was tasked with giving recommendations to Sussex County Council about how to think about development in the area.
And one of their top recommendations is for denser, more affordable developments. So how are you seeing the council members wrestle with that conflict between this Route 24 Alliance being in their face, being very organized, and this recommendation of more dense developments.
To be honest, I haven’t really seen them truly reconcile with it yet because they haven’t yet voted on any of the three plans that we’re going to talk about today. I have seen them make some comments and they seem pretty split. It seems to be a really tough decision in front of them on what to do, especially when it comes to Belle Mead because it does seem to follow, to tick all the boxes of the Land Use Reform Working Group’s recommendations.
It’s in an area that is slated for development, by both the county and also the state. It has affordable housing. It is mixed use, which the Land Use Reform Working Group says basically could help with the traffic issue if more people are able to walk or bike to what they need for their daily life rather than always getting in their car and driving.
But the Route 24 Alliance argues that the roads just can’t handle the level of traffic that would come from these developments. Even if people could walk to some things for their daily life, they can’t walk for everything. There’s no grocery stores, for example, that are, at least to my knowledge, in the Belle Mead plan. So we need to drive to a grocery store and that would just add to the traffic.
Interestingly enough – again this is just from comments of the County Council – it seems like two of the newest county council members are very pro following the land use reform working group recommendations rather than being anti-development, which is how a lot of people characterized them after they were elected.
I was going back in our reporting and I was realizing they never said that they were anti-development, but I think just the fact that they defeated these incumbents that a lot of people felt like were very pro-development made people think they’re gonna be anti-development.
But these two really haven’t been – and that’s Steve McCarron and Matt Lloyd. Lloyd especially has been very pro-mixed use in his comments.
The third of those newly elected council members is Jane Gruenbaum. How would you characterize how she’s been presenting herself in these meetings?
I’d say that she is following more of what people expected from these three newcomers. She has been very skeptical of these new developments. She’s brought up a lot of concerns about traffic and the environment and whether or not the infrastructure of the roads can handle these new developments.
In all three of these projects, she’s expressed concerns. Again, I haven’t seen her vote on any of them yet, so I can’t quite say for any council member how they’re really feeling. But during meetings. I’m noticing her and John Rieley, who’s one of the longtime members, both of them expressed some deep concerns about how things are going.
Belle Mead is right now a horse farm?
Yes.
So it needs to be rezoned from agricultural-residential to planned commercial. The Planning and Zoning Commission gave it the thumbs up.
Yes.
County Council gave themselves a six week pause, which has come and gone.
I was actually surprised. I thought they were going to vote on the November 4th meeting because, like you said, at the September meeting they gave themselves six weeks to ask agencies questions – to ask DelDOT and DNREC, the environmental agency of the state. And they just said, “the record’s closed,” and that was it. They didn’t vote on it and didn’t say when they were going to make this rezoning decision.
I haven’t asked yet, so maybe they already know when it’s going to be [voted on], but I don’t know.
Much like Belle Mead, Sussex County Council had a chance to vote on rezoning for Atlantic Fields in late October and also delayed that vote for six weeks.
Yes. For at least six weeks. What they say that they want to do is to ask state agencies questions. The council members are legally only allowed to consider what is on the record for this public hearing when they’re making their decisions. So they want all of their questions answered. They want to be able to continue to ask more questions and get more information.
I will say, I think it’s also maybe so that they don’t have to make the final decision in front of the angry crowd. Often at the public hearings, a lot of people come out to speak in support of, but usually against these projects. And to make that decision in front of this crowd, it must be tough for the council members.
One of the other recommendations from the Land Use Reform Working Group is to align the future of the land use map. And I think the need for that is partially illustrated with Atlantic fields.
You write that the Sussex County Comprehensive Plan labels the area that Atlantic Fields is in as an area to target for commercial development. But the actual zoning for that area is agricultural-residential, which raises the question in my mind: why would the county target an area for commercial development that isn’t zoned for that?
I’ll be completely honest, I have not asked Sussex County officials about this question. So I’m just going to purely guess right now.
I think when something is zoned for a certain commercial use then there’s nothing really the county can do if a proposal comes forward that meets the zoning requirements. So if they were to rezone it, they’d be giving up a little bit of control over exactly what that commercial development could look like.
For example, in the comprehensive plan when they said we want this to be commercial, I don’t think they were even imagining a commercial development that would be as big as Atlantic Fields. Now they have a bit more control over that.
So that’s my guess. But also, I do think that the Land Use Reform Working Group’s recommendations to align the future land use map and the comprehensive plan with the rezoning, it makes sense because it gives everyone criteria of what to expect and gives the public more of a say.
Right now, a lot of these decisions are up to the County Council’s discretion.
Let’s leave Lewes and Rehoboth Beach and travel up Route 1, or Route 13, depending on your driving pleasure to get to Milton.
The Cool Spring Crossing debate is particularly fascinating to me because it pits two of these Land Use Reform Working Group recommendations against each other. One is this desire to identify conservation areas, and then two is this desire for greater density.
The area that Cool Spring Crossing is an is an area that’s been designated for preservation. Why is that?
When I said preservation, what I meant is to preserve it as it is now. As in right now, there’s homes there and there’s farmland there. And so what both the state and the county have said in their plans respectively, the state strategies spending plan, and then also the comprehensive plan, is yes we want this to remain a rural agricultural and residential area.
But what the developer, Carl M. Freeman Companies, would argue is that this area has become not so rural. There’s a medical center right next to the property. There’s a water tower, there’s a bike path, there’s many different homes there, and it’s along this major corridor.
So what they say is that was kind of a mistake, really, that they shouldn’t have labeled that for preservation or they shouldn’t have tried to discourage development of that area. They say it’s a good area for development, but then the question is where do you draw the line?
You do have to draw the line somewhere, which areas you want to encourage development and which areas you want to discourage development. Some of the opponents to this project say if we ignore the county and state plans for what they want to see developed and what they don’t in this case, what if other developers down the line say, “Well, you ignored it in this case. Why can’t you ignore it in my case?”
This place where Cool Spring Crossing is being proposed is right now is zoned agriculture-residential. So something’s gonna get built there, no matter what. It can either be this 1200 single family home subdivision, which is what can be built on that by right, or this mixed-use, town-style development, including workforce and affordable housing.
In your preview article, you note that some preservationists actually prefer the subdivision. Everyone seems to be in favor denser development, so why would the preservationists say, no, actually build sprawl?
One of the big uniting ideas from a lot of different groups, from preservationists to affordable housing advocates to developers to some people who want to deal with the traffic issue is that they want mixed-use, denser developments. The idea is that if it’s smaller houses, then people can afford them more, and that if you make the developments smaller and all in the same area, then you can preserve the rest of the land as it is.
But in this case, what it comes down to is just the traffic numbers. For the initial plan for the town-style development, the traffic estimates put it at 33,000 cars on the road, new trips per day.
The developer would argue that it would actually be less than that, and that that estimate is not taking into account the amount of people who would be walking to meet their basic needs rather than driving. But that’s what the number says.
For the 1200 single family home development, the number is 12,600 vehicle trips per day. That’s about a third of what it would be. And they just say, Route 9 can’t handle all of those cars on the road. It’s a two-lane road. It’s going to be expanded to four lanes on part of it, but not all of it, at least not in the foreseeable future. And they just say, it’s just too much.
You sat in this seven and half hour Sussex County Council meeting yesterday, as we are recording this. And did anything happen?
No vote was cast in this. Sussex County Council followed the pattern of delaying the vote for at least six weeks. Which again, I think makes sense. They can only consider things that are on the record. They want to have all the information available.
The County Council members, some of them made some comments that might indicate how they are voting. It was Steve McCarron and Matt Lloyd, more Matt Lloyd than Steve McCarron, who seemed to be making comments that were more pro-this development. They were not going as far as to endorse it. But one of the things Matt Lloyd said is, if we deny this plan, we’re denying affordable housing. And that’s something that is desperately needed in this county.
Now the people who don’t like this plan would argue that the amount of lower paying jobs that this project would bring might add to the affordable housing crisis. It’s an ongoing debate.
Both preservationists and just Sussex Countians who are bothered by growth in traffic pinned a lot of hopes on these three new council members who were elected last year who were seen as smart growth or anti-development candidates. We were just talking in the editorial meeting about it would be nice to do a year out retrospective on how that new block is functioning so far.
If you look at all three of these current cases that we’ve talked about, what themes can you pull so far from seeing these new council members struggle with these rezoning votes in comparison to the hopes of all these community members that council would slow down development?
I feel like maybe what this is showing is that things are a lot more complicated than they might seem on the campaign trail. Every politician comes across that.
Interestingly enough, last night Steve McCarron admitted that he had on the campaign trail signed a petition against Cool Spring Crossing being built. And then last night he never said anything that was very pro-Cool Spring Crossing, but he did say, and I’m paraphrasing here, “It seems hypocritical to me people from new developments are protesting new developments.”
To me, that seemed to lean a little bit more pro-Cool Spring Crossing.
Steve McCarron and Matt Lloyd seemed to have softened on their initial positions. I said this before, on the campaign trail they never really were anti-development really. They talked about smart growth a lot, but they never said that they wanted to stop growth.
But, for example, Matt Lloyd at the beginning of the year was calling for a moratorium. And now he seems to be definitely more on the side of let’s build, but let’s build denser, mixed-use developments so that people can walk more to meet their daily needs rather than driving.
Jane Gruenbaum to me has seemed pretty steadfast in her beliefs. She came from the Sussex Preservation Coalition and she again has seemed very skeptical about all these developments.
But, I think the actual issues facing the council, they’re more complicated than probably any of them could have captured on the campaign trail. And I think that’s just the nature of politics, honestly.
As far as community response, we haven’t had any votes yet, so we’ll wait to see how these three votes happen and then see how the community responds.
I’m trying to read the tea leaves and see what the votes will be, but the comments are just comments.
The votes are what matters, and those haven’t come yet. So I don’t think I’m going to write that overview article until I see some votes.
Thank you for letting us into the ever developing saga of development in Sussex County.
Thank you for having me.