Silver Lake saga: no good ending can come

As each day passes, the new house rising on the edge of Silver Lake becomes an ever-larger monument to a serious lapse in common sense in Rehoboth Beach. Not only is the rising structure a negative symbol for a city typically sensitive to the natural environment, it also represents a potentially expensive financial risk for the city that grows greater each day.

No amount of legal wrangling can excuse the blatant fact that by all measures of building and environmental sensibilities, the house being constructed - almost in the water - is too close to the lake.  Even by Sussex County’s liberal building and setback standards, the construction is way too close.

Any remotely sensible person looking at the situation would reasonably conclude that some kind of mistake was made when the building permit was issued. It’s hard to imagine a clearer situation for applying the phrase that we hear so frequently in these times: “What were they thinking?!?”

Silver Lake is one of Rehoboth’s most distinctive natural treasures, along with Lake Comegys, Lake Gerar, the ocean and the beach. If anything, it deserves unique consideration when it comes to building projects.

Many jurisdictions apply special overlay zoning to such ecosystems using terms like critical area and environmentally sensitive zones. Given that Silver Lake - one of the few naturally occurring freshwater lakes this close to the ocean on the East Coast - is already environmentally degraded, special consideration is even more appropriate.

At this point there can be no good ending to this unfortunate Silver Lake saga.  It’s too late to say city officials should have stopped the project dead in its tracks when they first saw how close it would be to the lake.  They did not, despite the wildly whipping red flags.

City officials can, however, keep things from getting even worse.  They can admit the obvious, that something is seriously wrong, halt construction and work with the homeowners for a resolution that includes taking down what’s already built and moving the structure back from Silver Lake by a reasonable distance.

Let’s stop the hemorrhaging of legal fees and save those dollars for a settlement that will make the city, the homeowners and Silver Lake whole again.