Beyond the Headlines podcast: Residents’ efforts to ‘Make Georgetown Great Again’

Rural communities reporter Maggie Reynolds returns to the “Beyond the Headlines” podcast to discuss a controversy that has broken out in recent weeks in Georgetown where a citizens’ group is making their disapproval of the town’s homeless population and the town government’s handling of the issue quite vocal.

Maggie gives insight into the origins of the Make Georgetown Great Again movement, highlights other quieter voices offering perspectives on homelessness, and reflects on how the dynamics of smaller town life are playing out in this debate. Plus, Maggie shares how reporters think about where they sit in town council meetings.

The podcast is hosted by Director of Community Engagement David Stradley.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

When you were first on the podcast back at the end of August, you were talking about efforts in Kent County to build facilities for those experiencing homelessness and drug addiction.

As we were talking then, you mentioned that reporting on homelessness in Kent County had sparked your interest in seeing how the challenge was being addressed in Sussex County. And here we are now. So what was your reporting journey to focusing on public sentiment in Georgetown around homelessness?

I guess it was a little bit roundabout. Like you said, I was doing some reporting on the resources in Kent County. And then I ended up doing a couple of stories about the mayor’s task force to address homelessness in Wilmington. And I learned about the Pallet Village proposal in Christina Park there.

So then I started diving into the Pallet Village model in Georgetown a little bit more since Sussex County is more my area. As I was learning about the Pallet Village in Georgetown and about this Little Living project that’s being discussed in Kent and Sussex counties, this Facebook group pushing back against homeless resources in Georgetown really blew up.

It was kind of hard not to pay attention to it. So that’s how I started looking at the debate in Georgetown. 

Let’s talk a little bit more about this group. The leading force in both your recent articles about Georgetown is this community group called Make Georgetown Great Again.

Can you just tell us a little bit about the group, its founders and how it came to be? 

A couple named Tyler Scott and Amber Kairos founded the group. I think they’ve had some kind of dissatisfaction bubbling up under the surface with the resources in Georgetown for a while.

They have this recording of a conversation between Tyler Scott and Mayor Bill West about his handling of homelessness from a couple of years ago that they actually didn’t publish anywhere until this fall. They published that video to kind of get people paying attention to Mayor West.

And then from there they launched the Facebook group called Make Georgetown Great Again to gather people to talk about the homelessness problem in Georgetown. And the group really just gained a lot of traction from there. It’s a small town, so I think word spreads quickly of people from Georgetown and even surrounding areas talking about the homelessness situation in Georgetown.

The two facilities this Make Georgetown Great Again group doesn’t seem to like are the Pallet Village that you talked about, and then The Shepherd’s Office. What is it about these facilities that the group doesn’t like?

The Pallet Village is a transitional housing place. It’s these cabins that people can get to stay in for whatever period of time it takes for them to find a permanent place to live. And they also get some other resources while they’re there, including recovery services, physical health, mental health, etc.

With that one, I think people have a lot of skepticism about their results, such as if people are actually moving into housing efficiently or if they end up moving back into homelessness. 

Also they don’t have requirements for sobriety. You can’t use substances on the grounds, but you could when you’re outside. And so I think people feel like that’s not punitive enough or extreme enough to get people the help they need.

The Shepherd’s Office is a day center. They provide meals and other resources, such as clothing. And then they do church services. 

People seem to be very mad about the trash that is produced from the meals. I guess people that collect the meals will leave their containers around town and not pick them up, or that people will leave the clothes around or aren’t using the clothes as adequately as they could be.

The sense is that they’re providing handouts for people instead of really forcing people to make a change in their lives.

Attentive listeners may say, “Hey, Make Georgetown Great Again. That sounds like a familiar slogan that I’m aware of.” 

The founders of Make Georgetown Great Again say they don’t intend to be aligned with President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement and that they’re welcome to all political viewpoints. What’s your assessment of that intention? 

I think that the founders admit that when they chose the name Make Georgetown Great Again they wanted it to be reminiscent of Make America Great Again – and maybe they themselves do associate with that movement.

I definitely think that from some of the rhetoric of people that are members of the group at town council meetings, the way they talk about homeless people does sound like some of the rhetoric of the MAGA movement.

So I think in some ways you could draw a connection between the two.

But I do think they also are making an effort to include people in the group that don’t necessarily affiliate with the MAGA movement. There are definitely people that are members of the group or participate in the Facebook postings or talk at council meetings that aren’t necessarily MAGA people.

So it’s a mix of the two.  

One of the arguments that this group makes is that people come to be homeless in Georgetown – that ostensibly it’s a good place to be homeless. 

This is an argument that tends to get made frequently around homelessness. We hear it up here in Wilmington. “These people aren’t from here, they’re from somewhere else.”

In your reporting, have you found any data that shows that this is actually the case in any kind of major way in Georgetown? That the homeless people who are living in Georgetown are not actually from there?

No, I have not found that. I mean, there isn’t any data collection service that collects all of these things specifically. But, Springboard Delaware, which is the umbrella organization for the Pallet Village, has something called Street Outreach Services. They go out into the community in Georgetown mostly, but also in other parts of Sussex County, and gather information about unhoused people in the area.

From what they’ve found, the vast majority of people are from Georgetown that are homeless in Georgetown. If people are not from Georgetown, it’s somewhere close to it like somewhere else in Sussex County. Some people are from Kent County, and even fewer are from New Castle County.

People like Steve Metraux, a professor who studies homelessness at University of Delaware who I’ve spoken with, say that the homeless population is not very mobile, so they’re not really traveling from one area to another for services.

That Street Outreach Services group has also asked people who aren’t from Georgetown where they’re from. Out of about 230 people they’ve surveyed in Georgetown, 10 are from Maryland. So that’s not really a very big number. And that doesn’t take into account if people came to Delaware from a state like Maryland, had housing here and then became homeless. And so it wouldn’t be that they came to Delaware seeking resources.

There was a couple I talked to at the Pallet Village who are from Pennsylvania. They moved to Delaware, had housing that didn’t work out and then they ended up homeless in Georgetown. So it’s often that sort of case rather than people actually coming to Georgetown [to be homeless].

Another argument that you quote in your reporting is this concept of, “We have too many services for people experiencing homelessness in Georgetown.” And that’s something that’s again drawing people to Georgetown.

From an outside perspective, that can sound like a harsh argument. I’m curious, have there been any voices that you’ve heard, either in public meetings or otherwise, that actually are advocating on the other side of that? Saying that it’s a good thing that we have services that are caring for our neighbors?

Definitely. I think the voices are a little bit quieter than the group of people that are unhappy. But there have been some residents that have spoken at town council meetings supporting the Pallet Village and The Shepherd’s Office.

I don’t think that any of those people would say there’s too many resources. Maybe they would say these resources are doing a good job, but we could always use more. 

I would say the main supporters have been more the elected officials. Mayor Bill West and members of the town council have been defending these resources, and saying that they can keep working to make them more efficient or further reaching, but not that there is a surplus of resources in Georgetown. 

Let’s shift to the other development that you’ve been writing about. Your most recent article about Georgetown details some pretty new pushback to the Little Living affordable housing proposal of tiny cottages.

How did an affordable housing development, which I think everyone recognizes is a major issue in Sussex County, get wrapped up in this public backlash against homelessness? 

It is an interesting connection. I think part of it is bad timing for the Little Living people.

This cottage ordinance has been in the works for a while and Little Living actually put up a couple of model homes in Georgetown earlier this year to show people what they would look like. This has been something that didn’t seem to have a lot of backlash. People supported it for a while.

But as the Make Georgetown Great Again movement has gotten bigger, there isn’t really anything super tangible for them to pressure town council members to vote a certain way on or push for in terms of homelessness. I think they saw this Little Living project and pegged it as that Little Living wants to house homeless people in their cottages.

But that’s not actually the plan that Little Living has. They want the rent to be a higher income bracket than for people that are currently unhoused. But it’s just kind of like misinformation or misunderstanding about the intention.

Also this ordinance right now would apply to Little Living, but in the future other organizations could create cottage housing communities. Springboard Delaware has said that they want to also create a cottage community in Georgetown, and obviously they’re one of the groups that’s really coming under fire for the Pallet Village.

So I think people are hesitant to support Little Living if they know that it could encourage Springboard Delaware to expand in the future as well. 

You have said that part of the reason you came to Spotlight Delaware is because you have an interest in covering smaller, more rural communities that kind of match where you grew up, where you went to school.

If you view this public backlash in Georgetown against these developments through the lens of your interest and experience in small town life, what factors do you see? What resonates to you in this?

I think a lot of this is a bunch of people in Georgetown who have known each other for a long time and have a lot of history.

Some people who have come up to give public comments have said things like, “Billy West, I went to elementary school and middle school with you and now I have this thing to say against you.” There’s a lot of people who have known each other for a long time and a lot of history there.

There’s also some people who are really involved with the Make Georgetown Great Again movement, like this woman Angie Townsend who ran to unseat Bill West for the mayor’s seat in 2024 and lost pretty narrowly. So there’s kind of some tension between them. She’s rallied a bunch of people behind her.

And other people who were on the town council in the past and maybe didn’t end on great terms, or there were some controversies there, are now coming up very angry about things. 

So definitely some of it is people who have been involved in the government in the past and people that are currently, and that they’re having some friction. 

At the same time, the Little Living people aren’t from Georgetown. They’re from Sussex County, but not Georgetown. So people are skeptical of them because they think, “Oh, they’re not living in Georgetown, so they don’t have the best interest of Georgetown in mind.”

So it’s kind of both fearing outsiders and also there’s just a lot of people that know each other well.

Some of this is small town relations. I mean, there’s a councilwoman, Christina Diaz-Malone, who is married to the Springboard Executive Director, Judson Malone. And that has become a flashpoint as well, right? 

Yes, definitely. Christina Diaz-Malone was on the town council when the town voted to approve the Pallet Village project and she did vote in that decision. She’s gotten a lot of pushback for that. 

She said that there was no money from the town involved. It was state funding and federal funding. So it’s not like she’s doing something financially corrupt, and that her husband wasn’t as involved with the project then as he currently is as the executive director. So, it wasn’t as much of a conflict of interest, but that’s definitely been something people have latched onto.

She said that she wouldn’t vote about anything with the project in the future. But yes, that has been another point of contention. 

I was also really struck by the visual that leads your article about the Little Living pushback in the council meeting because I was looking at this picture and I thought, ‘Okay, this must be Georgetown Town Hall.’ But it appears there’s only like three or four rows of seats in town hall for these meetings. Is that accurate? 

Yes. It’s been a very packed house at recent meetings and the council isn’t really used to having so many people turn out for public comment and so many people trying to get in the room. It’s definitely a little tight there. 

I had a funny experience when I was walking in and trying to find a seat. All of the Pallet Village leadership people were there to give a presentation and I accidentally sat down in the middle of all of them. 

I was worried that it then looked like “the reporter” was in cahoots with one of the groups, but it was just a small room and a lot of people were trying to fit in.

We’ll end on this. Our colleague Nick Stonesifer recently reported on the Meyer administration putting in a $1 billion application to the federal Rural Health Transformation Program, part of which would fund Hope Center-style facilities in Kent and Sussex counties. For anyone who doesn’t know, the Hope Center is this comprehensive social services and transitional housing facility in New Castle.

Based on your reporting in and around Georgetown, how do you think people would respond if a Sussex Hope Center got plopped down anywhere nearby? 

It’s kind of hard to say what the buy-in would be from some residents, but State Sen. Brian Pettyjohn and State Rep. Valerie Jones Giltner, who both represent Georgetown, have been getting involved in the conversation.

They’ve both spoken during public comment at the town council meetings recently acknowledging the issues and residents concerns. And they’ve assembled what they’re calling an ad hoc committee of a bunch of state resources to talk about how to better address homelessness in Georgetown. They say that they’re finding there’s a lot of siloing. There’s one group doing mental health support and one group doing recovery services, but there isn’t really a lot of coordination and people aren’t getting a coordinated action plan for them. 

So I think that something like a Sussex Hope Center would fit well with what these state legislators are seeking to bring to their community. I think residents would be open to something like that. I get the sense that they don’t really want something more within Georgetown town limits, so I feel like there would be some pushback to trying to do that. But it could be a solution to people’s concerns.

Thank you for talking us through this civic debate around homelessness in Georgetown. 

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.