Why Should Delaware Care?
The Port of Wilmington is one of the last anchors of good-paying, blue-collar jobs in Delaware. But its expansion has sparked years of pushback from residents who say a new port terminal could damage their environment and health. Two recent lawsuits from neighbors highlight that the fight over Edgemoor is not yet over.
For years, neighbors of what was once a DuPont chemical plant in Edgemoor watched warily as plans to transform the site into a port container terminal inched forward, buoyed by the political force of thousands of promised jobs.
While state officials saw the project as transformational to Delaware’s economy and to its blue-collar job base, neighbors feared it would bring heavy trucks onto their streets and diesel fumes into the air.
In response, many spoke out at community meetings. Some challenged state permits. And others pushed port officials to sign an agreement guaranteeing community benefits.
Now, with construction on the project having begun, two lawsuits filed by separate groups of residents who live around Edgemoor and in Wilmington mark their latest efforts to force the state to revisit decisions that had cleared the way for the port’s expansion.
One suit challenges a ruling earlier this year from Delaware’s Environmental Appeals Board that upheld a previous permit allowing the state to dredge the Delaware River and to construct a new wharf at Edgemoor.
In an opening brief filed Monday, the residents’ attorney blasted the ruling from the appeals board, calling it “analysis free, and wholly inadequate.” He also suggested that dredging for the Edgemoor terminal could destroy critical sturgeon habitat, and that the port’s ultimate operations could pollute the air.
“Trucks and tugboats pollute, and the record shows that truck traffic will increase by 2,400 trips per day and tugs by 472 per year,” the attorney said in the brief.
The state has not yet filed its response to the lawsuit.
Delaware Secretary of State Charuni-Patibanda Sanchez declined to comment for this story. She serves as chair of Diamond State Port Corporation, a state entity that oversees the Port of Wilmington.
The second recent lawsuit claims that Delaware officials in past years broadly failed in their oversight of the Port of Wilmington, leading to a string of mishaps that occurred under the facility’s previous operator, Gulftainer.
Among those, the lawsuit lists missed lease payments to the state, a mortgaging of the publicly owned port, and the temporary use of the Edgemoor property as a scrap tire dumping ground.
The lawsuit calls on a Delaware judge to now appoint an independent monitor to oversee the Port of Wilmington, and to declare that the state’s 50-year lease contract with the port’s current private operator, Enstructure, is invalid and void.
Officials from Enstructure declined to comment for this story.
Taken together, the lawsuits show that the yearslong effort by residents to push back against the $669 million Edgemoor plan is not yet over – even after construction began at the site earlier this summer.
Simeon Hahn, a Bellefonte-area resident and lead plaintiff in each of the cases, said the lawsuits could be “our last straw to get this project stopped.” As a retired environmental scientist, Hahn has been lobbying against the port construction plans for years, including through the launch of the organization StopTheEdgemoorPort.com.
“We’re concerned a lot about the truck traffic and the infrastructure problems that’ll be here,” he said.
The lawsuits also add to two other pending legal challenges to the Edgemoor project filed over the previous year by the Holt family of Philadelphia – the biggest port operator on the Delaware River with operations in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
Earlier this month, Hahn’s group also sought to intervene in support of the federal challenge brought by the Holts. In response, the Philadelphia judge issued an order stating he could not consider their views as part of the legal process.
“We just wrote a letter, like a friend of the court-type brief,” Hahn said.
Years of doubts
Neighbors have been raising questions about Edgemoor since at least 2018, when then-Gov. John Carney announced that Delaware would privatize operations at the Port of Wilmington through a 50-year lease with Gulftainer, an Emirati company.
As part of the deal then, Gulftainer promised to privately finance construction of a container terminal along the Delaware River in Edgemoor that could accommodate the bigger container ships that were becoming more commonplace in the industry.
By 2020, community doubts about the plans became clear when dozens of residents crowded into a public workshop in the Bellefonte community. There, many expressed fear that trucks leaving the future port toward the Pennsylvania Turnpike would bypass the adjacent Interstate 495, and instead take Edgemoor Road through their neighborhoods to U.S. Route 202.
Some also claimed at the time that state officials had not been forthright about the port’s dependence on heavy trucks.
Among them was Ed Mulvihill, a liquor store owner and now a candidate for state legislature. He told port officials at that meeting that he initially had supported the Edgemoor project, but then learned that trucks, and not trains, would be the primary way goods left the facility.
“We were told 80% by rail and then we were told (later), ‘no it’s going to be 20 to 30%.’ So, to me, it’s the bait and switch,” he said during that meeting in 2020, as reported by the News Journal.
Today, Mulvihill is running in a three-way Democratic primary against Rae Krantz and Ralf Santana to replace the retiring Rep. Debra Heffernan (D-Bellefonte).
Asked recently about the port expansion, Mulvihill said it is an issue that from “day one we weren’t super happy about.” But, he argued, there is little a newly elected legislator can do now to stop it.
Krantz, a software engineer, said she does not support the port expansion, asserting that state officials had not formed a sufficient plan to mitigate the impacts of truck traffic and other harms on neighboring communities.
And Santana, a security officer for the Social Security Administration, said he opposes the plans because of what he called the state’s lack of transparency around various data, including air quality studies.
In all, the candidates’ similar sentiments highlight a sharp divergence from the broad support the project has generated among other Democratic politicians, including the local incumbent legislator Heffernan.
Who has the right to challenge a project?
A year after the 2020 public workshop, a group of four residents living in the Wilmington area formally challenged the Edgemoor dredging permit before the Delaware Environmental Appeals Board — a little-discussed administrative board that hears challenges to permits issued by state agencies.
In response, attorneys for the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control argued the residents lacked legal standing to bring the challenge — essentially meaning that they couldn’t prove that they would be directly impacted by the permit’s issuance.
The assertion shocked the group who questioned how people living near the existing Port of Wilmington or near its expansion site could lack standing to challenge the environmental impacts.
Marie Reed, a longtime leader in Wilmington’s Southbridge neighborhood, said during a hearing that her community had suffered for years from poor air quality and high cancer rates that she attributed to the current port facility along the Christina River.
“As a lifelong resident of Southbridge, how can you say that I don’t have standing?” Reed asked. “How can you say that the residents and the people of my community don’t have standing?”
Ultimately, the residents successfully defended the question of their legal standing before a Delaware court. The case was then sent back to the Environmental Appeals Board, which ruled earlier this year that state regulators properly awarded the dredging permit.
In June, the residents appealed the decision, leading to the pending case in front of the Delaware courts.
Jeffrey RIchardson, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said he is part of the legal challenge in order to ensure that environmental and health concerns are addressed before an Edgemoor port is allowed to be operational.
He said he is not against a Port of Wilmington expansion in Edgemoor, in principle, but argued the current plans do not amount to a good deal for residents.
“We think it is an unfair exchange to say you take the jobs, but you must ask no questions about potential harms to your family, your children, your environment, your community,” he said.
Richardson also serves as chair of a Delaware Community Benefits Agreement Coalition — an organization that is trying to convince port officials to sign an agreement with neighboring communities that would guarantee certain protections and benefits.
The critiques from Richardson and others have appeared to resonate with port officials recently.
During a meeting of the Diamond State Port Corporation on Monday, board member David Burt said the state is discussing a plan to direct heavy trucks from the port to an interstate on-ramp on 12th Street in Wilmington to ensure they do not drive along roads near Edgemoor.
“It’s a good step, significant, and hopefully a powerful step to address the community’s predominant question,” Burt said.
A judge reassigned
The second lawsuit, challenging the management of the port, launched last month with a spicy opening salvo when attorney Darrel Baker filed a motion for the judge to recuse himself because of his previous career with the Delaware Department of Justice.
Baker argued that the case had the potential to raise conflicts for Delaware Superior Court Judge Sean Lugg because DOJ attorneys have been key figures in defending past state decisions about the port’s operation and expansion.
“We want to respectfully request that your honor recuse and step aside from this particular case and not be dragged in as a potential witness or have to make adverse rulings against the Delaware Department of Justice,” said Baker, who also has served as a lobbyist for the Holt family of Philadelphia.
Opposing the request was the Diamond State Port Corporation’s attorney who argued that such a recusal is “neither warranted nor appropriate.”
“Plaintiffs do not have standing to bring this action, let alone request that your honor voluntarily recuse himself due to his prior association with the Delaware Department of Justice,” the attorney Elise Wolpert said.
Ultimately, the court sided with Baker and reassigned the lawsuit to Judge Sheldon Rennie.
As part of the case, Rennie will be confronted with the question of whether to declare Enstructure lease to operate the port void.
In their complaint, the Edgemoor neighbors argued the state’s awarding of the contract in 2023 had violated government procurement rules.
The state and Enstructure have until Sept. 16 to file their responses to the complaint.
Two days before that, they are scheduled to hold a groundbreaking ceremony for the Edgemoor project. It comes the day before a contentious primary election throughout the state.
