End may be near for Five Points meetings

The efforts of the Five Points Working Group, which lobbied for improvements around the jumbled road system near Lewes, is winding down after eight years, with nearly all its proposals completed or planned.

During a Sept. 16 presentation by Delaware Department of Transportation Secretary Shanté A. Hastings at a Sussex County Council meeting, Councilman John Rieley, a member of the group, asked Hastings about its future.

“Have we concluded the Five Points Working Group at this point?” Rieley asked. “Have we settled that we completed that or are we going to continue with the Five Points Working Group?”

DelDOT staff has been discussing whether the working group is still needed, Hastings said, adding the agency planned to confer with county officials, who have collaborated on the panel.

“I’ll say … we are to a point where I don’t think we need the working group meetings,” she said.

“I still think there are a few recommendations that we have to work through, but there is probably a better way to do that than bringing folks together every few months,” Hastings added. “There’s a cost to that, there's time for all of those things, so I think we are probably at the point of pivot, but we want to have some conversations with you all before we make decisions.”

Created in 2017, the group includes DelDOT, Sussex County representatives, other elected officials, residents and businesspeople.

Rieley said the group has been successful in working with DelDOT to improve roads around Five Points, where several roads, including Routes 1 and 9, intersected in confusing and dangerous ways.

“I will say that I drive through that Five Points intersection often multiple times a week, " Rieley said. “In my view, the improvements there are working. I have very little difficulty getting through there. I haven’t seen traffic backing out onto Route 1 trying to get onto Route 9, [where] you get caught by the light, then gridlock. I have not seen that. Let’s hope it continues to work like that.”

Hastings said planning may begin soon for a project to extend Mulberry Knoll Road between Cedar Grove Road and Route 9, the top remaining recommendation of the working group.

There is enough money in the Henlopen Transportation Improvement District collected from developers to begin the first steps of the project, which include land acquisition and design work, she said.

There is no schedule for construction for all of the 2.2-mile road that was estimated to cost more than $40 million in 2022.

The planned Northstar housing and commercial development between Route 9 and Beaver Dam Road will create the western portion of the Mulberry Knoll extension through its site. The funding source for the balance could come from other developers, or the TID and the state.

Future federal aid will also be a consideration, Hastings said. 

Leah Kacanda, a senior project manager for DelDOT, provided a summary of the working group’s 2024 annual report at its last meeting April 29. The report was the subject of public meetings May 21 at Cape Henlopen High School.

“We’ve made significant headway,” Kacanda said April 29. “As we’ve been discussing, we’re kind of down to the hard nuts to crack. So we’re down to the remaining recommendations that are either in progress or still to be initiated, or kind of the bigger things to get done.”

The working group began with a list of 78 projects in 2019. The list of completed projects increased from eight in 2019 to 29 last year, while the longer-term projects dropped from 42 to four.

There were eight ongoing projects at the beginning of the year, compared with none in 2019. Another 26 projects were in the planning and design phases this year.

While improving the Five Points area was a big part of the planning, the group’s work extended miles away to look at roads and interconnections to ease congestion on Route 1. Some suggestions require policy considerations as part of the next county comprehensive plan update. 

The projects remaining from the group’s list include consideration of grade separation at Five Points; looking at east-west traffic as a system, including Minos Conaway starting at Route 9, and New, Old Orchard and Clay roads.

A priority this year will be studying elimination of unsignalized crossovers on Route 1, Kacanda said.

At the April 29 working group meeting, the next gathering was scheduled for October; however, no meeting is currently scheduled.

County council members told Hastings at their Sept. 16 meeting that coordination between the county and DelDOT has improved significantly.

“We try to work more closely with DelDOT than perhaps previous times,” Rieley said.

“Since my time on the council, I think that our relationship has grown exponentially, and it’s very, very good right now,” said Council President Doug Hudson.