|
When Chancellor William B. Chandler III of Delaware Court of Chancery offers an opinion, people listen intently.
So it was, Oct. 27, as nearly 400 county and state representatives of business, government, education, banking and health care and housing services sat silently transfixed during Chandler’s keynote address opening the 11th annual Sussex County Today & Tomorrow Conference at Delaware Technical & Community College.
The theme for this year’s conference was Let’s Get To Work, a call for those attending to work together to resolve the complex issues of growth, jobs, health care and affordable housing in Sussex County.
Chandler still lives in Dagsboro, the town where he was raised. He spoke of how he remembers, “a county where the countryside was filled with farms, fields and woods, where sand roads crossed sand roads and where even the poorest of people lived in magnificent places.” He said the influx in recent years of thousands upon thousands of new residents has changed the county so much that it seems “the Sussex County I grew up in is as foreign now as Mongolia.”
Chandler talked about what that growth has meant to Sussex. “Every year now, the economy of Sussex is less based on farming, fishing and agriculture and more on services,” he said. “The consequences are a boom on growth, high real estate values and a big disparity between the rich and the poor. Sussex County continues to be funded by low property tax rates, real estate transfer taxes and fees from development. The tragedy of overdevelopment is attributable to the beauty of our land.”
He said he worries what will happen to Sussex County when build-out occurs and the money-flow stops. “Are we mining our resources any differently than the ghost towns of the Old West did?” he asked. “Ultimately, I’m confident we’ll find the ways and means to ensure we do not completely mine the natural resources of our county so that our children and grandchildren can enjoy them, too.”
Outlining the work ahead, the annual conference featured a panel of experts to address various problems. The panel was composed of Marlene Elliott, Delaware/Maryland state director of USDA Rural Development; Saundra Ross Johnson, director of Delaware State Housing Authority; Paul Bienvenue, president and CEO of Delaware Electric Cooperative; and Jeffrey Fried, president and CEO of Beebe Medical Center.
Elliott spoke about the need for a huge investment in central sewer and water infrastructure here and around the nation. It will take a collaboration of federal, state and county or municipality contributions to achieve that goal, she said, and the price of materials increases constantly. “As the population grows, the challenges increase,” she said. “On-site septic systems contaminate shallow drinking water wells and cause high cancer rates such as we saw in Ellendale in the 1980s. It took 15 years and 43 meetings to bring sewer to Ellendale to correct the third-world living conditions there. When that project was planned in the early 1990s, the cost estimate was $3.5 million. By 2003 when the first hookups occurred, the costs had risen to $11 million.”
She explained that grassroots efforts helped find the money so low-income Ellendale residents could pay their hookup fees.
“Now, Ellendale residents are talking about getting central water, sidewalks and new affordable housing,” said Elliott. “The Ellendale success story is indeed an example of people working together to make life better.”
State housing authority director Johnson said Delaware has a 77 percent homeowner rate, the second highest rate in the nation behind West Virginia. Sussex County eclipses Delaware with an 80 percent homeowner rate, she said. But the average cost of a new home in the county is $310,000.
“Get ready, parents,” Johnson warned. “Your kids will be coming back to live with you. The homeownership costs are too high for them to afford.”
Johnson said average monthly rental prices in Sussex are also higher than most young people can afford, ranging from $500 a month for a one-bedroom unit to $780 a month for a three-bedroom unit. She said there are 13,000 substandard houses in Delaware, about a third of those in Sussex.
She then detailed a Livable Delaware initiative called Live Near Your Work that teams employers, employees and local governments in a program to assist workers in buying homes near their workplace. Collaborations such as that effort will keep the dream of homeownership alive in Sussex, Johnson said.
Fried said recent waves of growth in Sussex have had positive effects, enabling Beebe Medical Center to expand its services. “Competition is good for all of us,” Fried said. “But it can and does increase the costs of healthcare. In the next six years, Delaware will need 1,700 new nurses, a 35 percent hike in the total number statewide. Delaware educational facilities do not now have the capacity to train that many nurses that soon. But there is great opportunity ahead for those who want to become nurses. It would be very hard to find a nursing student who has to pay for education.”
Fried said growth supports expansion, but hospitals must remain focused on their communities and hospital money must be spent wisely in order to meet the challenges growth produces.
Following the panel presentations, conference participants broke into groups to explore the challenges, make connections and present choices for dealing with the issues.
|
