“If you build it, they will come.” They will come from Dover and Seaford and Salisbury and Milford and Millsboro and Ocean City to shop at large corporate-owned stores that will have a definite detrimental impact on the small, locally owned businesses of Lewes and Rehoboth Beach. They will snarl traffic with their coming and their going, and their tractor-trailers to supply the stores and the gas tanks. They will impact the quality of life and the environment for the many neighborhoods that are close by. Read the studies.
Route 24 is already overburdened with traffic every day. Drive it during the morning when parents are dropping off children at the middle and elementary schools, and then later in the day when parents come back to pick up their children. Traffic is stopped in both directions. And then try to drive westbound from Route 1 at rush hour when people are returning home from their jobs in Lewes and Rehoboth. Traffic is stopped from Peddler's Village all the way back to Plantation Road.
Sussex County Council, do an accurate traffic count during high traffic times, consider the catastrophic consequences of having a behemoth shopping center on a road that has current traffic issues, and think about how your decision will impact the future of the quality of life in Sussex County. This is not the location for such an endeavor. Vote no!
At the end of “Field of Dreams,” the camera pans out to show the miles and miles of people patiently waiting in their cars to see the dream. There will be no patience if Atlantic Fields is built, and it will not be a dream. It will be a nightmare.
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