It’s high time residents of Lewes take a long, hard look at what’s happening in our community, who’s pulling the strings, and why. The overdevelopment in, around and surrounding our once-peaceful town has grown to extremes beyond the wildest imagination, especially for those of us who grew up here. I’m not sure who’s in favor of the growth. Lewes City Council has had a complete turnover in the past several years – except for the mayor – for very good reasons. Residents decided council leadership was flawed. Four new councilpersons have been elected to change the course of action of a conflicted agenda, and now it’s time to clean the slate and vote for a new mayor – Andrew Williams.
The previous course of action has been delay, defer, deflect, stall, back-room politics, lack of transparency, favoritism, suspect reporting or lack thereof, inconsistencies and rapid annexation without proper long-range infrastructure planning.
Council is now seeking public input for a revised comprehensive plan and BPW is trying to negotiate with Sussex County on where to put all the sewage that comes with development and annexation. The city and BPW battled it out legally and ultimately settled their differences after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayers’ money on legal fees. The Fisher’s Cove fiasco was settled out of court with the city buying a $500,000 lot and paying large legal fees with taxpayers’ money. Another settlement with a property owner on New Road was settled out of court using our tax dollars.
The beach parking committee failed on two attempts to designate parking spaces on Lewes Beach knowing that it would cause an uproar since a survey shows so many residential encroachments on both city and state roads. Despite a motion from the bike and pedestrian committee, Cedar Street bike lanes never happened because the city prefers free parking instead of pedestrian, cyclist and motorist safety. This alone could be considered a violation of the council’s oath of office to protect residents.
Free parking on what should be bike lanes results in an extremely hazardous situation for all and causes overcrowding of a limited sandy space with day visitors and no bathroom facilities provided – this is not acceptable community leadership.
With the construction of 297 Tower Hill homes on New Road and other development throughout our water recharge area and sewer district comes more sewage directed to a treatment plant in a tidal wetland despite arguments from sea-level rise activists. Whatever happened to proper strategic planning, prioritized asset assessment and life expectancy, capital reserve funding for capital replacements, long-range sinking funding? This is called fiscal responsibility, which appears to be lacking with the current leadership.
What about urgent and critical issues like taxation without representation? Taxpaying Lewes property owners who are not permanent residents do not have the right to vote on issues that impact their property.
What about the impact on our drinking water from the environmentally disastrous sewage spills over the past three years and the flooding of the low-lying sewage sludge pits at the wastewater treatment plant on high tides, storms and full moons? Lewes does not have an emergency dune restoration plan and no critical plan for Lewes Beach resiliency nor mitigation.
Lewes needs new leadership now! Elect Andrew Williams for mayor. He will make things happen.
-
A letter to the editor expresses a reader's opinion and, as such, is not reflective of the editorial opinions of this newspaper.
To submit a letter to the editor for publishing, send an email to newsroom@capegazette.com. Letters must be signed and include a telephone number and address for verification. Please keep letters to 500 words or fewer. We reserve the right to edit for content and length. Letters should be responsive to issues addressed in the Cape Gazette rather than content from other publications or media. Only one letter per author will be published every 30 days. Letters restating information and opinions already offered by the same author will not be used. Letters must focus on issues of general, local concern, not personalities or specific businesses.
