Why Should Delaware Care?
A report from the Delaware State Forester, who oversees forest preservation around Delaware, found that Sussex County lost 21,000 acres of forestland over the past two decades, a decrease of about 10 percent. Sussex County officials are aiming to reverse this trend with a newly approved forest preservation ordinance, but conservation advocates say the measure is too generous to developers.
The Sussex County Council has approved a set of rules for forest preservation in southern Delaware, the latest chapter in the region’s debate over balancing the demand for growth with maintaining green spaces.
The preservation ordinance, which establishes a concrete definition of what counts as forestland in Sussex County and creates minimum requirements for the amount of trees a developer must preserve on a property, has undergone numerous rounds of discussion and revisions over the past year.
The majority of county council members lauded their affirmative vote on Tuesday morning, saying they equitably balanced the interests of developers and conservationists.
But land preservation advocates are criticizing the council, saying it watered down the original proposal and bowed unnecessarily to the suggestions of local developers.
“Apparently, the council believes that it’s more important to assist the builders than to protect the forest,” Joe Pika, president of the Sussex Preservation Coalition, an influential group of residents that advocates for land conservation in the southernmost county, told Spotlight Delaware.
Jon Horner, president of the Home Builders Association of Delaware, said he supports the measure, and described it as “reasonable changes” that are long overdue.
Both New Castle and Kent counties already have forest preservation ordinances, which Pika said go further to protect forestland than the measure Sussex County adopted.
Sussex’s preservation ordinance was first discussed as a part of the recommendations presented last summer by the Sussex County Land Use Working Group, a task force assembled by county council to suggest reforms to the area’s approach to development.
It then went through a series of discussions among county staff and the Planning and Zoning Commission, before being introduced to the county council in July.
Council’s consideration of the measure also comes in the immediate run-up to the November 2026 election, which will determine who is in office when the county’s 2028 comprehensive plan — a once-in-a-decade review of property zoning across the county — is solidified.
County Council President Doug Hudson and Vice President John Rieley are up for reelection this fall, while the three more recently elected council members, all of whom ran, in part, on an anti-development platform in 2024, will serve terms through 2028.
Nonetheless, all five council members gave speeches before casting their votes on Tuesday, seemingly trying to defend their recent approach to development and preservation.
“It is not a binary choice between ‘pro this or anti that,’ it is about finding the correct balance,” Rieley said. “What will be remembered is that we, the council, passed a tree or forest preservation ordinance.”
All five council members ultimately voted in favor of the preservation ordinance, though Councilwoman Jane Gruenebaum, who founded the Sussex Preservation Coalition, was the most vocal in expressing concern about a number of the provisions that she said do not go far enough in preserving forests.
What’s being preserved?
County council members appeared to have reached consensus about the majority of the ordinance’s provisions in the Tuesday vote.
Still, the questions of allowing developers to pay a large fee instead of preserving trees on a property, and whether there should be a delay before the ordinance goes into effect, became points of contention.
The approved measure defines a forest in Sussex County as “a vegetative community dominated by trees and other woody plants covering a land area of 1 acre or greater.”
Pika, the preservation coalition advocate, said his group had lobbied the county to make the threshold qualifying as a forest as small as a quarter of an acre, but the council opted not to include the change.
The ordinance also includes provisions requiring developers to preserve between 30% and 50% of the existing trees on their properties, depending on whether the property is located in what is designated by the county comprehensive plan as a “growth area,” or a “rural area,” respectively.
If a developer does not preserve that minimum 30% or 50% of trees, they must re-plant at least double the number of trees they removed.
This summer, a disagreement emerged between council members over whether to include an additional clause allowing developers to pay a large fee — or a payment in lieu — if they did not meet the minimum preservation requirement or chose to re-plant trees.
Under the proposal, revenue generated from payments in lieu would have been allocated to the county’s open space preservation fund.
Councilman Matt Lloyd spoke in favor of the payment-in-lieu option at two recent meetings, arguing the revenue would “go really far” toward allowing the county to purchase more farmland in his district, which encompasses the municipalities of Seaford and Laurel.
Gruenebaum, whose district includes the eastern side of the county, where land prices are substantially higher, was the most vocal opponent of the concept.
Gruenebaum said the idea “came out of the mouth of Jon Horner,” the president of the homebuilders association, and would represent the county capitulating to the interests of developers with every part of the ordinance.
When asked by Spotlight Delaware about his reaction to the controversy over whether to include the payment-in-lieu option, Horner asserted that Gruenebaum was mischaracterizing the proposal, because she “doesn’t want a single tree cut down in all of Sussex County.”
The council ultimately opted not to include payment in lieu in the final ordinance.
Lloyd and Gruenenbaum again butted heads over whether the preservation requirements should go into effect immediately, or after a six-month buffer period for developers who had planned their projects under the prior greenspace regulations.
Lloyd said at the Tuesday council meeting that it is only fair to give developers more lead time, saying he is “too business-friendly to leave people out in the cold like that.”
Gruenenbaum conversely argued that council members had been discussing the concept of a preservation ordinance since last summer, so developers have had plenty of warning these requirements were coming.
The council eventually compromised on a three-month buffer period, meaning the ordinance will go into effect in December 2026.
Developers who have already submitted site plans to the Sussex County Planning Department will not be subject to the ordinance’s requirements.
