I attended the Jan. 27 meeting of the Sussex County Planning & Zoning Commission as an interested party in the Coral Lakes development. I own a home on Aintree Drive in Chapel Green that abuts the proposed development, so I have a dog in the hunt. It was my intention to observe, but what I saw and heard has convinced me that something has gone very wrong.
In the presentation I heard, a Schell Brothers representative characterized their actions at Coral Lakes as acting as “good stewards of the land.”
Those are powerful words. I sat there and chewed on them, but I couldn’t get them down. A “good steward of the land” would not propose clear-cutting a mature forest to shoehorn 315 homes onto building lots as small as 7,500 feet carved from wetlands and poor soils. If this is what we have come to accept as “good stewardship of the land” in Sussex County, we indeed have lost our way.
I heard counsel for the applicant assert that the commission should dismiss the State of Delaware’s Level 4 development designation assigned to the vast majority of this land in their deliberations. A designation issued where the state does not support major development. I was angered when she went on to justify this assertion by pointing out to the commissioners that they had approved many Level 4 projects already in the Coastal Zone. I became outraged when I realized she was only referring to a clear signal sent from the commission to the developer community that the state planners’ designation would not be an issue for their applications.
I heard the engineer admit that while they are taking all measures to prevent stormwater flow toward the Chapel Green neighborhood, where the land slopes, there was not much they could do. When I look into those woods from my backyard, the land slopes up. At the top of that slope are 5.12 acres of wetlands that somehow in this process are now no longer wetlands. I have seen a foot of water in those acres many times, and when it appeared, it didn’t go away very quickly.
As a last-minute gambit, Schell Brothers revealed they would install a “ditch” on the Coral Lakes side of the neighborhood buffer to divert water away from Chapel Green. This was new and there were no details forthcoming, but water doesn’t run uphill, so I fear this water will end up in Sarah Run, a stream that regularly floods Chapel Green now.
What I did not hear was a single question or request for clarification from any of the commissioners to the development team. I can only trust that in their closed sessions they will be “good stewards of the land” because that is their responsibility, not Schell Brothers, and they must reject this proposal.
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