A debate on an ordinance that would allow county officials to trade density requirements for money quickly turned personal Tuesday, with Sussex County Council members squabbling with each other and members of the public testifying at the podium inside council chambers.
Sussex County Council President Dale Dukes (D-1st) even asked one member of the public — who had denounced the ordinance and council for considering it — to leave the county.
“If you don’t like Sussex County, maybe you should consider going back where you came from,” Dukes said forcefully, prompting grumblings from others in attendance. He later apologized.
The ordinance would allow developers to build up to four condominium, apartment or townhome units per acre in an agriculture/residential zone that regularly allows two units per acre. They would gain the additional density by paying the county either $15,000 or $20,000 for each unit that exceeds density requirements. The ordinance also requires stricter buffer requirements off county roads.
Money raised through the plan would be used for open-space preservation. It would be funneled through the county’s open-space preservation program, run through a county partnership with the Sussex County Land Trust.
An amendment that was suggested Tuesday — after members of the public suggested little open space would be preserved within the development-pressured eastern part of the county — would force county officials to spend that money in the area where the development was approved, possibly within the same “hundred,” under the measures used to define particular areas of the county. That notion temporarily eased some strife at least among councilmen Tuesday.
Vance Phillips (R-4th), author and champion of the ordinance, argued Tuesday that the ordinance closes a loophole that allows developers to ask for 12 units per acre in the two-unit zone. Phillips conceded, though, that the county rarely, if ever, hears such applications in the AR-1 zone, let alone approves them. Lawrence Lank, county planning and zoning director, could not remember any such application.
Many, including Councilman George Cole (R-5th), have denounced the ordinance, claiming that it allows developers to buy their way out of county requirements and for development to further intrude on environmentally sensitive land. The ordinance only allows developers to exceed density requirements in growth zones — but that includes the Environmentally Sensitive Developing Area, an overlay birthed in 2003 to protect the sullied inland bays from further pollution. Next to agriculture, residential development is the largest nutrient polluter of the “highly-enriched” inland bays.
Others have also worried that such development would only serve to worsen roadway congestion problems — especially on the eastern side of the county, where development has been booming. Several Sussex county roads, including a portion of Route 26, were included in the list of the state’s 25 most congested roadways in a recent report prepared by TRIP, a Washington non-profit that researches traffic issues.
Still, others have lauded the ordinance as a smart-growth concept that will allow the county to continue to preserve open space across the county — a way to capture revenue that the county currently does not collect when it grants increased density.
Phillips has also added that developers who submit applications under this ordinance would not be granted automatic approval, although those applications will be expedited and reviewed quicker than others that do not ask for additional density.
Preston Schell was one of three Sussex County Land Trust board members to testify in favor of the ordinance Tuesday. Like other Land Trust officials and Phillips, Schell said that the ordinance creates a revenue stream for open-space preservation, and he singled out Cole, who has been vocal in his opposition.
“The way to be an effective politician would be to get these people on your side and not to ostracize them,” admonished Schell, also a developer with Schell Brothers, mirroring Dukes earlier comments. “If you don’t like it, be proactive and stop being a storm of negativity.”
Cole, the ordinance’s primary opponent, took much of the beating Tuesday, for his opposition to the ordinance, which another councilman called hypocritical.
Phillips, author of the “density for dollars” ordinance, said that Cole has voted to approve four of the six developments in the last year that have exceeded density requirements as laid out in county code — a point Cole did not argue. Phillips voted to approve all six of them. Cole said Tuesday that he approves developments when the uses fit the surrounding land but remained adamantly opposed to putting a “For Sale” sign on the county’s agricultural, residential land.
“The county’s not for sale,” Cole said. “It shouldn’t be for sale. You never turn things down,” Cole added in just one of many shots at his fellow councilman, whom many perceive as developer-friendly.
And that only prompted further strife.
“All you do is downgrade the council,” Dukes said. “I would hope that you would have more respect.”
But Cole received some support from those testifying at the public hearing, with one woman suggesting the council needed to take a lesson from 1980s drug policy.
“You can just say no,” she told the council members, reminding them that they have the ability to deny any application that doesn’t fit the letter of the county’s current density requirements, even if they rarely use that ability.