Last month, deputy editor Tim Carlin stopped by “Beyond the Headlines” to give a preview of what to look for in the final weeks of the 2026 legislative session in Dover. This week, Spotlight’s other deputy editor, Karl Baker, joins the podcast to discuss exactly what happened. He shares how the Spotlight team tried to cover the hectic final days, the process for prioritizing what is of consequence in the “mountain” of bills, and overall themes for the end of session.
The podcast was hosted by Director of Community Engagement David Stradley.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
The last day of Delaware’s General Assemblies are famous for their late nights. How late were you at Legislative Hall on Tuesday, June 30th?
Well, the sun was up when we left. It was about, I think, just before 8:00 in the morning.
The assembly gaveled out when?
After 6:00 I think, and then we wrote the story.
Give me a level set here. Is that normal for the last night of activities?
It’s not. It’s normal to go late, not usually that late.
I think it was 2016, 2017, somewhere around there, when they stayed until 8:00 or 9:00. So it’s not record-breaking, but it was a late night for sure.
The assembly gaveled out around 6:00, but you and Tim didn’t leave until 8:00. What were you all still doing there at Legislative Hall?
You know, partying.
No, you have to grab people, get some interviews. “What’d you think about what just happened?” That sort of deal.
And then you have to write the story. We went down to the press room and wrote that, published that, as well as edited and published Olivia Marble’s story about the energy bill. It was kind of the sidebar to the main story.
Last year, you and our summer intern, Ethan Grandin, held down the fort on the last night of the session. Our team has grown since then.
On the last night this year, you were there along with Tim Carlin and reporter Olivia Marble, and then three of our summer interns – Ella Walker, Naomi Weiss and Miranda Vasquez-Vergel.
How did you all divide and conquer to provide Delawareans with thorough coverage on the final day?
Tim kind of anchored the Senate proceedings. I was in the House. Olivia was going back and forth and focusing on the energy bills, the data center bills that she wrote her story about. And then for our three wonderful interns, we just kind of directed them to go out and talk to people who seem like they are folks of influence, and ask them how it’s going, introduce yourself, and ask them, you know, “What are the conversations being had behind closed doors?” Try to do some shoe leather reporting about what was happening outside of the obvious, outside of the actual floor of the House and Senate. Because often that’s where the things actually happen.
There was something like, what, 70 bills considered on the last night?
Something like that. I think I said a mountain of legislation in the story.
There’s literally no way that even with five of you there that you can cover everything that’s going on. Which is not great for Delawareans, that we don’t really know what’s going on on the last night of the session.
But how do you all decide of all the stuff that’s going on, what are we going to cover? How do you decide what is the most consequential action?
You try to find the narrative scoops, the through lines between the individual nuggets of information to find the story that connects them all.
This year that was hard to do. I think there were just more individual nuggets that probably were there because we’re on the eve of this campaign season. But there were some through lines. There were the energy bills that we wrote about, and those are connected to organized labor because they’re the biggest institutional advocates in Delaware for data centers. There was also the Project Labor Agreement bill. The bill that would require public school construction to include a certain number of union workers.
So you can look at the different advocacy groups, the different lobbyists, and find out what bundle of bills are they pushing and why. And so you can find those narratives through that, if there’s 90 bills that are being considered, or 70 or whatever, I don’t know the numbers.
Hard to keep track, there are so many.
You can subdivide them into, “Oh, these 10 bills are connected, these five are connected, these two are connected.” And at least kind of reduce the load a little bit that way. And also, in addition to that, when you can find why things are connected, that helps the public understand the mechanisms of government, the machinations of government, a little bit better.
So in your mind, what was the most consequential piece of legislative action to happen on that last day?
Not to state the obvious, but I think it was the bond bill, the capital spending bill. It’s a lot of money, $1.26 billion, for mostly public construction, but some private construction, for the next year.
Headlining that was the $110 million that is being directed to the Port of Wilmington for its expansion at Edgemoor, its planned expansion which does seem like it’s moving forward at this point. It was uncertain for a long time.
That money was part of another pot of money within the bond bill, which came from this very Delaware system called unclaimed property.
Delaware gets a lot of money every year because it has all these companies that are legally domiciled here, and when those companies hold an asset that Delaware says is not yours, but we don’t know where the person who owns it is, we get to get it. We, as in the state, get that money or get to hold that money, and by the way, we’ll spend it while we hold it.
So Delaware gets a lot of that money, and a lot of that went to the bond bill, including to the Port of Wilmington.
If that all makes sense.
Tim Carlin was on the podcast a month ago before the final stretch of the legislative session, and he was trying to highlight some of the top things he was going to be looking for during these last days. The first one was property tax bills.
As most Delawareans know, there was major concern last year about the first in 40 years property assessments and resulting tax increases that were seen by many.
Legislators promised that they would do something. What did they do to try to address this issue?
They didn’t do as much as I had thought. Well, I shouldn’t say they didn’t do as much. It was not as contentious.
The main thing they did was Dave Sokola’s bill, which gave school districts the right to increase property taxes by 2%, or their property tax revenues, I should say, by 2% every year, rather than a lump 10% every five years.
And that five year number is important because they have to do an assessment every five years.
That’s right. We hadn’t done an assessment for, depending on the county, 40 years plus. Now they’re required to do it every five years. So, we get to write about this controversy every five years now.
I think that’s probably the principal direct property tax bill. Now, there also was, back in the bond bill there’s money going to school districts from, again, that unclaimed property pot of money for school construction. Now, that will have an indirect impact on property taxes and such because that won’t have to fund as much school stuff as it would otherwise.
So, they’re freeing up whatever the fungible dollars are within school districts to do other things.
In addition to allowing school districts to raise their rates every year, the legislature also codified this ability to split the tax rates between residential and commercial. Is that correct?
That’s right. They passed a bill that, as you said, officially put into statute that New Castle County districts have this ability to charge different rates.
What they didn’t do was pass a separate bill, introduced by the Senate Pro Tem Dave Sokola, that would’ve allowed them to create additional tax rates for different kinds of businesses – multifamily residential property would have a different tax rate from other businesses, among others.
There’d be mixed-use property, you know, the businesses on the ground floor, or apartments above, would have a different tax rate. That was a bill, as I said, introduced by the Senate Pro Tem, also supported by the governor, who sent a letter to legislators asking for their support of this bill.
The bill didn’t make it out of its committee, or didn’t move on to the Senate or the House floor.
The other thing that Tim said to look out for is legislation around data centers and energy prices. What happened on that front in the last few days?
To my surprise, they passed a bunch of bills on it. They passed a bill that said you have to – you, as in data center companies – have to bring at least a portion of your own energy that you use. You have to generate it yourself.
They passed a bill that would limit Delmarva Power, the state’s largest utility, from being able to recoup dollars it invested on what the state would deem non-mandatory infrastructure investments. Now, that’s interesting because the question I had, and I still haven’t had an answer to this, was what specifically isn’t mandatory or non-mandatory infrastructure investment? Specifically, is infrastructure investment to accommodate a proposed data center that could be coming?
When a data center comes in, I think they have to build new infrastructure, maybe a substation. Would that be considered mandatory or not mandatory? And if it is not mandatory, could that effectively kill a data center proposal?
That was a question I had. In my mind, it’s still lingering. I don’t know that answer. But they passed that bill, and others.
Now, you said you were surprised that happened. Why?
I was surprised because it’s a debate. In legislation, in hotly debated legislation, there’s going to be one side that loses.
And if the one side that loses has a bit of money behind it, it can then use that money to maybe influence an election so that the next time they can try to have a lawmaker who sees more like them. And we are on the eve of a campaign. So I was thinking lawmakers would take a safer route, but maybe in their minds this is a safer route or maybe they were being bold. Who knows?
There was unexpected contention in the final hours regarding House Bill 75, which originally passed in the House actually last year and would’ve removed the statute of limitations on child sexual abuse civil claims, as well as some other things. Can you talk us through what happened there, and why this was a surprising last-day contention?
There was an amendment to that bill. On the surface, it seems like, oh yeah, of course you’re going to pass it. There was an amendment to that bill that, as I understand it, would have effectively allowed the state to remain indemnified, so to keep the state from being able to be sued for claims, past claims, like this.
Now I don’t know if the state has any potential liability. I don’t know of any sexual assault cases that involve the state at this time. But, that was the debate.
The Senate ended up passing the bill with the amendment. And so it came back to the House, and the sponsor, Representative Tim Dukes, said, “Well, let’s just strike it from consideration,” and he kind of indicated he might bring it back again, or the House might bring it back again.
Why did he decide he wanted to strike it?
I don’t think he had the votes, in either the House or the Senate, to undo that amendment.
When I read the article, I was like, “Why would someone want to put in an amendment that would say, ‘No, we’re not going to remove the statute of limitations. We’re going to keep it. You have to report within two years,’ and that we’re going to put a cap on the damages that can be charged here?” It was an odd last-night activity.
Yeah, and just candidly, I didn’t have my finger on the pulse of why these moves are happening. The chatter, and this is chatter, was just that there was a concern that there could be a liability out there for the state.
You’ve referenced that it is a campaign year coming up. Tim pointed out that there are a handful of establishment Democrats who are facing progressive challengers in the primaries this year. These are people like Senator Dan Cruce, Senator Ray Siegfried and Representative Kim Williams. He advised watching to see if any of these kind of traditional Democrat lawmakers would be particularly active at the end of the session.
Did that happen? Was there an attempt at defining action from the establishment wing of the party to try to shore up support against progressive pushback?
There wasn’t really. At least nothing that stood out, nothing that either was controversial or noticeably celebrated. Every one of those representatives had their bills, as they all did, and I think they got some of them through. And I imagine they’ll point to them in the campaign season to point out what they did.
But no, to answer your question, I also was wondering, what kind of, for lack of a better word, performative thing they might do, and there wasn’t.
More broadly from that, this last day of the legislative session was just on a ton of bills that they fairly methodically, and I think they’d say deliberatively, made their way through.
Because whether they were progressive or establishment, they just wanted to have a track record of things to take to their constituents this year and say, “Look, we did stuff.”
I think that’s right.
You’ve been a keen watcher of the dynamic between Governor Meyer and Senate Democrats, particularly the tension that seems to have existed there since Meyer came into office two years ago.
Was there anything particularly noteworthy about Governor Meyer’s involvement during the home stretch of the legislative session?
There wasn’t really. It seemed to me, at least the perception was, he probably made the decision to try to stay in the background a little bit. There was no kind of overt acrimony between Senate Democrats and the governor, or really between the governor and anybody in the legislature.
With that said, I think tensions still exist.
[The podcast was recorded before Gov. Meyer vetoed a controversial expansion of Dover’s Legislative Hall from the state’s capital spending bill.]
The Assembly did override Meyer’s veto of Senate Bill 75, which would have prohibited county governments from creating restrictive zoning regulations on legal marijuana shops.
That in itself is interesting that they decided to override that. But I guess going with that, now that all these bills have passed, Governor Meyer has to sign them. Are there any bills you are particularly interested to see if Meyer vetoes this summer?
I’m looking at the data center bills, the energy bills, I don’t know what he may be thinking about those, but those are pretty consequential ones that I’ll be keeping an eye on.
I know Tim also had talked about the budget and that Meyer had submitted a budget that wanted to see a 5% cap on expense increases, and it actually ended up being closer to 7%. He signed that budget happily on the day before session ended.
He did. Once a budget is passed through both chambers, it would be a pretty significant move to push back on it.
Is there anything that surprised you that didn’t get over the line in the last few days of session?
There was this fight over, as we mentioned earlier, what they call the PLA Bill, the Project Labor Agreement Bill, which would mandate that school construction projects have a certain number of union workers on site. Union power in Dover has waned, so the fact that it didn’t pass was not too surprising on its face.
But there was a compromise to it that I was thinking would have ultimately made its way through. And that didn’t happen. I was surprised that even a pared-down version of that bill didn’t pass.
Last question for you, Karl. Is there an overall theme that you pull from this year’s legislative activities?
No. This was a tough one. As opposed to last year, where there were three themes, really, that permeated it and made it actually as a reporter easier to write. When there’s big, clear narratives, it’s fun to write.
This one, it was just a whole bunch of stuff passed.
There were some fun moments – or fun, I don’t know. There were some moments where the House and the Senate were kind of jockeying against each other, to ensure that their preferred legislation passed the parallel chambers. At one point, the House thought that the Senate was moving too slowly, so they just went into recess for about an hour and a half to wait for the Senate to continue passing bills.
But aside from that, or I guess as part of that, the theme was just that there were dozens and dozens of bills that passed in the final hours, ranging from schools to energy to wetlands preservation to the big budget spending bills.
Would that be that chaos was the theme?
Chaos is an accurate term, and it’s unsatisfying. I wish there was one clear through line that I could very cleverly recount to you all, but there wasn’t. It was just a bunch of stuff.
And the listeners will have to decide whether chaos is in their best interest as the voting populace in the state.
I imagine they’ll hear more about [the individual bills] in the coming months as this campaign heats up.
Thank you for helping listeners and our readers try to sort through the work being done by their elected leaders this year in Legislative Hall.
You’re welcome, and it’s a pleasure.