Why Should Delaware Care?
Debate over an anti-panhandling ordinance has overtaken Dover City Council meetings over the past three months. Despite being scheduled to vote on the ordinance this week, the council opted to delay the final vote longer, continuing the uncertainty over the fate of a contentious proposal.
The Dover City Council opted, once again, to delay a final vote on its controversial anti-panhandling ordinance, instead voting to send the proposal back to committee for further review.
At the Wednesday night city council meeting, which at times broke down into squabbles and battles to get a word in between different officials, the body also voted to invite Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings to come speak to them about the ordinance and any existing state laws that might serve a similar purpose.
The decision to ask Jennings for a meeting came after some constituents and council members called earlier this week for further discussion with the Department of Justice (DOJ) – which Jennings oversees – before taking a final vote on the ordinance.
The ordinance, officially referred to as a “Traffic, Vehicles and Pedestrian Safety” measure, would prohibit pedestrians from stopping and standing on street medians. Since being introduced by Councilman David Anderson in late October, the ordinance has faced threats of legal challenge by the ACLU of Delaware and outcry from community activists.
Council members who were opposed to taking a final vote on the ordinance on Wednesday night also took issue with the fact that Anderson introduced additional amendments to his proposal – without giving his colleagues warning of the changes, or voluntarily sending the amended ordinance back to committee for review.
Anderson’s proposed amendments included tweaks to the ordinance’s language and the addition of a severability clause, so that if one part of the ordinance was being litigated the other parts would still be in effect.
Anderson’s amendments also directed the Dover City Manager to coordinate with nonprofit organizations in helping individuals find “safe zones” to stand and ask for money, which he said was not necessary, but had been viewed “favorably” in other jurisdictions that faced legal challenges to similar regulations.
While the amendments Anderson introduced were projected on a screen at the meeting, the most recent version of the ordinance on the city website does not include his changes.
Council members also confirmed to Spotlight Delaware that Anderson’s amendments were not in their agenda packet, so Anderson’s speech was the first they had heard of the changes.
Councilman Roy Sudler, one of the more vocal officials opposing a vote on the ordinance Wednesday, said he did not feel comfortable making his final decision when he hadn’t yet had time to do an “in-depth analysis” of the amendments Anderson presented.
Anderson, however, said the amendments were minor and did “not change the substance” of the overall ordinance, so he did not see the need to refer them back to committee.
The council voted 6-1 in favor of sending the ordinance back to committee for further review.
Councilwoman Tricia Arndt voted against the motion, saying officials have “debated enough” and that she had sufficient information to move forward with a vote. Anderson abstained from voting.
Calling in the Attorney General?
A heated discussion about whether the ordinance should be voted on at Wednesday night’s meeting splintered the council along the same lines that it has been divided at previous discussions of the proposed measure.
Anderson and Council President Fred Neil spoke out unequivocally in favor of the ordinance, while Sudler, along with Council Members Gerald Rocha and Andre Boggerty once again expressed their concerns about the regulation.
“Our emails have been flooded with pros and cons on the vote,” Neil said at the meeting. “One is a canned message that is identical from people in and out of Dover. Others that support this ordinance have been local and personally written, and they outweigh in number the ones that we received that are opposed.”
While Boggerty said he supports the idea of traffic and pedestrian safety, he repeated an argument he has made at previous discussions about the ordinance that the state government could soon pass updated legislation on loitering and panhandling, which would supersede any ordinance the city council passes.
“We’ve spent all of this time, all of this energy, all of this negative exchange for it to be moot,” Boggerty said.
In 2024, Jennings told all municipalities not to enforce anti-loitering and anti-panhandling laws they have on the books, after the ACLU sued the state and the city of Wilmington over their respective regulations. Members of the State Senate and the DOJ have since been working on an updated loitering and solicitation bill, a spokesperson for the DOJ told Spotlight Delaware in November.
In discussing whether to ask the attorney general’s office to speak with city council about the ordinance, officials sought guidance from Dover City Solicitor Dan Griffith.
Griffith said he thought it was unlikely the state would weigh in on the city ordinance.
At the same time, Griffith referenced a situation in early 2022 when he was the solicitor for the City of Seaford and Jennings’ office sent a letter to the city explaining why the DOJ believed an ordinance the city was considering was unconstitutional. That ordinance required fetal remains from a Planned Parenthood in Seaford be disposed of in a “dignified manner,” according to reporting from WBOC.
Seaford still passed its ordinance, and Jennings sued the city in Delaware’s Court of Chancery, resulting in a major win for abortion rights groups in Delaware around the same time that Roe v. Wade was overturned at the federal level.
“The likelihood of getting a deputy attorney general to show up and express the state’s position on this, in my experience, would be surpassingly unlikely,” Griffith said at the meeting.
Mat Marshall, a spokesperson for the DOJ, told Spotlight Delaware earlier this week a city ordinance would fall under the purview of the city solicitor, not the DOJ. But he said Jennings’ office would be willing to speak to the council about relevant state statutes.
Ultimately, council members voted 7-2 in favor of having Griffith request that Jennings attend a council meeting within 30 days to weigh in on the ordinance. Anderson and Arndt voted against the motion.
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/