The following letter was sent to the Rehoboth Beach Mayor and City Commissioners, with a copy submitted to the Cape Gazette for publication.
We are writing to address certain measures we understand are under consideration by the current administration. We will try to address these three issues based on perhaps deliberately shadowy public information. All three raise inevitable questions about elected leaders with solely business-based motives and anti-homeowner political gamesmanship behind them.
1. The Jolly Trolley idea of paying for a tourist trolley to run through residential neighborhoods is a farce, an invasion on these residential neighborhoods such as Henlopen Avenue, with tourist trash strewn from noisy, environmentally unfriendly public conveyances, with squawking loudspeakers invading homeowner privacy and diminishing the value of their real estate investment.
And the only justification we can imagine for it is to dump people from overloaded downtown beaches into residential neighborhoods in North Rehoboth. It is intrusive and would obviously invite ongoing and continuous legal challenges.
A dumb idea sneaking through the “off-season.” More follow.
2. Putting our taxpayer funds into a financial rescue package of the “dock under the cliff” behind the museum is questionable too on financial and legal grounds.
Who benefits? Isn’t the canal part of the Inland Waterways and therefore under Corps of Engineers control? What caused the budget on this difficult-to-engineer project to balloon out of control? Who is accountable for this idea and its administration? Who runs all this if it is built and how much does that realistically cost?
3. Any discussion of proposals altering and increasing FAR limits on porches, decks, etc. should be part of a process involving public hearings and perhaps a voter referendum, both of which – precedents would show – were crucial to the passage of any previous FAR measures and changes.
Citizen participation is mandated.
Once again, pro-business measures subject city homeowners and taxpayers to loss of rights, and bills from ongoing legal challenges, while the outsider business beneficiaries - in Sussex County, Dover, and the LLC factories in Wilmington - pay none of the bills.
Stan and Betsey Heuisler
Rehoboth Beach
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