House District 9 Primary Conversations: Ayanna Khan Flowers, Gemma Lowery​& Michelle Wall

So my work has been really about opening doors for people from the beginning who are often been left behind. I have been doing a lot of advocacy in this space just to ensure that policies are fair and equitable for all.

So my advocacy has taken me to Legislative Hall down in Dover, and also to the Capitol in Washington, D.C. So I can be part of the policy building, the policy creation, ensuring the policies are equitable for all.

So for me, that was a wake-up call where I needed to just step my advocacy up and now run for this seat

So my priorities are straightforward. Day one, for the past 15 years working in this MOT district, it has always been about economic opportunity that reaches everybody; that reaches every neighborhood.

I was able to inject almost a million dollars back in funding and resources back in this very community from when I started here back in 2013, being an intern and a volunteer and serving on boards. So I’m really about supporting working families, supporting our schools, which I’ve been doing, creating pathways for jobs, accessible healthcare, all those things.

So for me, I am really an outside-the-box thinker. I am not a politician by any means. So I think that’s what’s needed. We need folks who can think of other strategies, that’s able to hold others accountable that’s not gonna put the burden back on the residents. Building a small business back in 2015, being laid off from my corporate job in the most tumultuous of times, building a nonprofit in the height of the pandemic – that is my strength.

I work well under pressure. I know how to build communities and bring people together. I know all about partnerships and collaborations. I know about scaling a business, growing a business, creating a statewide nonprofit to help individuals. So I have that small business economic mindset where we have to just look at other strategies ’cause we’re hitting working families really hard.

We’re hitting our senior community really hard, and we have about eight or nine senior communities here in the MOT area. For me, when the chamber was growing and we ran into funding bumps, I could not expect the small businesses that are already having a hard time to fill those gaps. That would be unfair when I’m the one responsible for bringing opportunities and resources to them.

So I think that’s where we fall short, where we’re depending on the residents with tax increase after tax increase, with referendums, with energy hikes, with all the things back to back. We have to really look at closing the funding gaps in other ways.

My differentiation is that I have this experience. I’m down in Legislative Hall advocating. I’m not just here now as a newcomer popping up because I need a title, because I need a job or to fill employment gaps, right? So that’s the differentiator with me and my opponents in this primary race.

I’ve been doing this work. So one of my slogans is, “I am not new to this. I am true to this.” I am really true to this. I am down every session really down in Legislative Hall either giving public comment or either writing letters of opposition or letters of support or just meeting with legislators one on one, either in person or in Zoom.

So that’s my differentiator. I haven’t seen my opponents down in Legislative Hall doing that. I don’t see them giving public comments and advocating. I don’t see them at the bill signings. I’m part of policy creation. I’ve helped with so many policies, creating bills, where I’m bringing people to the table to say, “This is what we need.”

So affordability and access is definitely a barrier, especially for single parents. We need more facilities in that space, but the small businesses that are trying to open up those types of centers are dealing with a lot of red tape. So it’s a continuous conversation we’re having where access and affordability is a problem, especially down in Sussex County.

So they’ve built out different priorities for us to tackle in the state, and the lieutenant governor is spearheading that, and she’s been doing an amazing job. And we’re continuing those conversations, so also looking at transportation, the workforce, and it’s all part of the ecosystem that’s creating barriers for these families.

But we need more access and more affordability and tiers. So for me, it’s never a one-size-fits-all because every family is different. We’re looking at tiers. We have a whole system built out for that.

The 20 years in healthcare was career number three. I started in banking, and then I was in fabrics with Gore for a while. But I’ve always had this kind of process improvement, how can we do things better vibe, no matter what the career that I’ve done. So it’s also opened my eyes to, like, when things are broken, how you need to fix it.

And you always need to go to the people that are gonna use the solution. And I just keep seeing that just translates. I keep seeing it out in the world, out in politics, out in everything where we’re telling people what we’re doing for them, but we didn’t bother to ask them what they wanted. So that underlying theme, it got to the point where I was frustrated enough with waiting for someone else to do it, that I thought, “Well, this is in my head.

It seems to resonate and work. Why don’t I try?” And the why wait turned into why not. And honestly, that’s what pushed me is what could I do differently instead of helping people one-on-one if I could get to Dover? Like, what could we do on a much bigger level if I was in the room where the conversations were happening and maybe could say, “Where’s the people

that need their voices in the room?” Or bring all that experience into the room as just something different than what’s normally in Dover.

I believe I have a very unique perspective because I’m born and raised in Delaware. I went through Delaware schools. I raised my kids here. I’ve been an advocate and a person who has supported across lots of different areas in the state. So I know the state very well, but I’ve also experienced it.

And I think that brings something different than hearing about it. All of us in the race plug in in different ways in how we provide our service, but I cross a lot of barriers and categories that a lot of people don’t. I’m a biracial female.

I have kids that had special needs in school. I’m a veteran wife. I’m still going through the how do you get a disability claim through, space. I’m a labor and delivery coach. I’ve experienced moms almost dying. I’ve tried to connect people to services. And I think it just layers on until there’s a certain cumulative level of knowledge that for me, I think is a differentiator.

I think I can speak to a lot more situations and scenarios than at first glance people realize. And I think that gives me a skill set that is very different. I’m not in one lane. I’m in a lot of different lanes, but those different lanes show how the interconnectedness of one thing being broken impacts so many other things.

And I think that perspective is just different than what a lot of people bring. And I’m also one that’s not afraid to have really tough conversations with people on any side of the aisle. I don’t care. I will talk to anybody. I will work with anybody. It’s about getting to the outcome that helps the constituent or the person that’s really suffering, and whatever that has to look like, I don’t care.

Yeah, I think we’re really, especially in nine, we are really in a tough spot because a lot of these agreements were made during COVID. A lot of these approvals have already happened, and they happened in a vacuum because there was so little sharing of information. Number one, that makes me crazy, and I think Delaware does a really bad job.

Spotlight and others are trying to tackle it, but there is no one information source. As the consumer, you have to work to find out what’s going on in your community. And a lot of times, and what we’re seeing in nine is the decisions have been made. We’re going to town forums, we’re having conversations, and everybody’s expressing an opinion that really doesn’t matter.

There’s surveys. There’s just so many tools that we don’t use that we could get people’s honest feedback that we don’t avail ourselves of. I also think that as leaders, the contracting conversations for me, that’s a space that I work in with vendors and others. Getting in front of this stuff would be enormously helpful.

Having a conversation after you’ve agreed with a developer and then saying, “Okay, now we wanna define what affordable use looks, affordable housing looks like, mixed use.” They have the contract signed. They don’t have an incentive. If they wanna partner with you, it’s because they want to, and we can’t be so enamored with the deal that we don’t put in some guardrails to make sure that the community is actually gonna be supported.

This is the county, this is councilman, but we’ve gotta partner better so that it’s not explaining after the fact. It’s asking ahead of time and making sure that the community needs are brought to the conversation.

I think you just have to be really honest about it. I think the timing of when the information came out was really troubling because the fact that there were issues was known. And it didn’t come out until, well after the community should’ve been involved.

I do think as legislators we can mandate or legislate that some accountability tools have to be used. They shouldn’t be optional for the school board and the financial folks. If there’s a way to involve the community and there’s supposed to be a community board, why wasn’t there?

If there were check-ins and checkpoints in places where we could have known ahead of time that things were not what they appear to be, finding out that there’s an excess of $4 million that is magic money when the kids need real money is a problem, and especially when we have rules now where you can then put in a tax increase without a referendum.

So people were literally getting shocking news and then being held hostage to having to pay for it. I’m concerned also that there’s two schools that need to be built that now we’re short-funded. Okay. So this is a snowball effect problem because we need better finance people that can project and look into the future and see.

I know they can’t control tariffs. I know there’s outside influences that will always impact a build and what that cost is. But responsible planning is that you factor in for a certain level of variability and the swing was not millions of dollars. It wasn’t this big. We shouldn’t be this short.

As somebody who’s been in Delaware this long, I cannot tell you how my mouth dropped when I heard 40 years.

I’m like, I don’t even understand the business case where that can happen, and I think that’s first. Ripping the covers off of what happened is huge. People needed to know what happened, and I went to the town halls, I went to meetings, I listened to people scream and holler, and I get it.

I also think that as much as it’s frustrating and hard and expecting people to come up with that money within months was insane. I think that was a foolish way to address it. But there’s also the fact that for a lot of people, for decades, they didn’t have to pay the increases.

And we’ve been funding it with this mismatch this whole time. So a reckoning needed to happen. I think it should’ve been done in a tiered approach. So like, we’ve done the reassessment, here’s what we’re projecting your change is gonna be, and over the next X amount of years, we’re gonna get this corrected so that by the next assessment, you are at your new normal, we’ll say.

I think expecting like, “Here’s the assessment. We paid this company, they did whatever, now pay it in 90 days,” was too much for people. Change management seems to be lacking. I’m just gonna keep it real. There’s a process for how you change manage, and we’re not following it. We’re going discovery, rip off the curtain, here.

We’re in a place where everybody looks for someone to save them, and that’s not happening a lot, and I think people need to understand their power.

It is a team sport, but it is a messy team sport, but the way that it works is by participation. I’m out there, I’m talking to folk, they’re really apathetic. They’re so frustrated about national politics that I just wanna remind people that “your vote is your voice” sounds common, you hear it all the time, but it really, really does matter.

It’s the one time when you get to help influence. Win or lose, you were a team member. You were on that team fighting to get somewhere, and we shouldn’t be so disturbed by what’s happening outside of Delaware that we forget to participate in Delaware.

So for 10 years, I had the privilege of serving on the Appoquinnimink School Board. During that time, I feel like I learned about issues that face families in my community, and not just school issues, but affordable housing, access to healthcare, transportation needs. And all of that, I think, can affect how kids succeed and then ultimately families.

So I have decided to run for this office as a natural progression of service to this community. I spent time, like, listening to residents, solving problems, bringing people together, and also being frustrated about the things that I couldn’t change on their behalf at that seat.

It was a natural kind of, “Oh, yes, I wanna do this.” I’m very interested in education funding reform, and so it was really important to me the efforts that were made during this General Assembly and specifically those efforts, how they affect my community.

And so again, if I would sum it up, it’s a natural continuation of service to a community I really love.

I think that I would wanna make sure that I don’t wanna say constituents I guess they would be constituents at that point, or my neighbors is really who they are, realize that I’m just as frustrated as they are.

If not maybe even more. Because I spent 10 years of time investing in something for me to find out that the numbers weren’t real. And I learned about the numbers not being correct as I was leaving. And I think the most frustrating thing about it is I no longer had a seat at the table to be a voice for the repair.

I mean, you’re looking at, and I know you’re well aware of this, years and years of us not reassessing properties. Years and years of education funding reform not occurring. And I think that kept hitting Appo. I think people wouldn’t be very familiar with, during my time on the board, I often said, “We run on this shoestring budget all the time.”

Well, there’s gonna be a point when that lace breaks, and I think that we saw that. And I think the district was saying again and again, these funding mechanisms that we have placed in the State of Delaware, they don’t support the challenges that we have in the Appoquinimink School District, because none of our funding mechanisms look at growth.

And that is what I wanna be as a voice for this community. Are we talking about growth? Because prior to these changes, the only meaningful education funding reform the State of Delaware saw is when we moved from a singular unit count to a secondary unit count, and those were my efforts. I mean, it was short of me going down to the legislative hall with a poster with the 327 kids or, I think that was the number the one year, that we had grown post September 30th that we weren’t being funded for, and we were trying to pull from our operating budget to cover those needs of students.

I’m not real sure how to wrap that up for you other than, again, it’s a segue of service. I learned about all of these things and I felt like the changes that are being made don’t always consider those individual challenges of my district.

I think I would ask them to look at my record of service beyond that and that I continually showed up, I continually asked questions, I continually was a voice for the people in terms of, how do we communicate better?

I tried to communicate as transparently as I could. I held bagels with a board member every Thursday following school board meetings from before I was elected through my entire tenure. I think I would say, please look to my record of service of showing up. I would always tell people at the start of bagels with a board member, “I know you’ve come here with a concern, and this meeting is a starting point.

We might not come to a resolution today. And quite honestly, we might not come to a resolution you like. But we’re gonna try.” And I always tried to value the questions I got, even the questions I didn’t know the answers to, and I’ll continue to do that because I think both a school board member and somebody who is a state representative, it’s not a fair assumption of someone to be a subject matter expert in everything.

What you’re supposed to do is get asked the question, gather the information, and make an informed decision. And I think if people will look at my record of service, then they would see that.

I think that the key to successful growth is collaboration. I raised two kids in this area.

I first joined the school board when my girls were in first and third grade. Now they’re in college. I think we’re at a place where they won’t be able to afford to come back to this community, and a lot of those decisions were made prior to me even living in this area. So I wanna make sure we’re thoughtful and intentional with all of the stakeholders around the table.

Sometimes in Delaware I feel like we make decisions in silos that impact each other. I think we saw that a lot with the reassessment. It was sort of like this triangle of blame, and everybody who was a taxpayer was sort of caught in the middle. But we weren’t really coming around the table, I think, together with the state, with the county, with the school district to say, “What does this look like?”

I think it comes back to collaboration. I think from the onset we need to make sure that we’re working as a group for what’s best for residents, that it’s not the county leading a part of the effort and the state leading another part of the effort, or the state coming in behind the county and changing part of the effort, and the school district not knowing what’s going on most of the time because they’re waiting for numbers from both.

It does need to be a collaboration of stakeholders from all of those entities where we start the process, and communication is always key. I think that’s part of the success, too. I think that’s part of the problem, too, with what Appo experienced, is they were dealing with kind of this perfect storm of reassessment occurring and then them having the budget shortfall.

I think I just want people to know, like, I’m running as a continuation of service. This isn’t a big political thing for me. I know I’m running in a Democratic primary that’s really competitive, but for 10 years, like I’ve worked on representing people, and people who didn’t always agree with me.

But I worked together on behalf of that community. I’m just interested in collaborating with others to make this a place where people wanna raise their families, where their kids will wanna return to. I experienced relocating an elderly parent to this area, and I know the challenges of looking for healthcare here.

So I just want it to be a place that people wanna call home.