Measures aimed at protecting swathes of mostly privately-owned sensitive Sussex County land from sprawling development will be included with a controversial map in the first draft of an updated county growth plan which was expected this week or next.
Heeding state requirements, county officials will likely put development restrictions on nearly 40,000 acres of land identified for protection in state resource area maps updated last fall. Regulations would likely come through the plan’s supporting ordinances.
County planning consultant Paul Driscoll said this week that the state resource area maps will be included in the draft he planned to present late this week or early next, along with ways to protect those lands despite a pending lawsuit.
“The county policies toward the (state resource areas) are part of this first draft. They will be in there,” Driscoll said, adding that county officials will review the policy “in-house” before presenting the draft to the public.
The state maps drawn in September identified more than 38,000 acres of unprotected environmentally sensitive lands, including large blocks of forests, rare-species habitats and wetlands. That acreage represents roughly a third of the areas identified in the county, about 6 percent of county land and some privately-owned farmland.
Protected areas include federally- and state-owned conservancies. According to state officials, more than 5,000 acres of forests have been lost statewide since 1990 — mostly to development — and agricultural land continues to diminish and be overtaken by urban land uses. Since 2000, more than 6,300 building permits have been issued in the Coastal Point’s south-coastal Sussex coverage area alone, according to state and county records.
Delaware Department of Natural Resources Secretary John Hughes has consistently said the state would not support the mandated update without such protections, but he said outright development prohibition is not necessary.
His rhetoric is backed by the Delaware Land Protection Act, approved in 1990 but not enforced until now.
“Each county government shall adopt and incorporate overlay zoning ordinances, guidelines and specific technically based environmental performance standards, design criteria and mitigation requirements, where appropriate, that shall apply to significant ecological functions and identified historic and archeological sites on these lands,” Chapter 75 of the Delaware code reads.
The lack of enforcement for the better part of two decades contributes to distaste on the part of some property owners over potential new restrictions, Sussex County attorney Jim Griffin said last week.
The calls to protect land have been largely unpopular with owners of large parcels statewide. They claim that development restrictions essentially strip valuable equity from their land.
Individual property owners in each Delaware county — flanked by 3,000 supporting land owners who are in similar situations — filed a class-action lawsuit in Chancery Court late last year, claiming that mandated restrictions on private lands are “unconstitutional.”
Trial is not expected until September in the suit, which names the state, state officials and all three Delaware counties as defendants. Griffin said last week that he does not believe the property owners’ claims will be backed in court, adding, perhaps, that the filing was a statement of their collective distaste and commitment to action to protect the rights of the Delaware land owner.
Some property owners, though, are not as adamantly opposed to the idea of protection as others. Jim Bennett, an Omar resident and local farmer, owns two properties, portions of which are identified as sensitive and worthy of protection in the state resource-area maps. He recently agreed with Hughes, saying that precious county land should be protected from ubiquitous development.
“Everyone tries to equate things to dollars and cents,” Bennett said. “There is a lot to say about having an attractive place to live and bring up a family. There’s a mentality out there that if you own land you should be able to do what you want with it. I don’t believe in that,” he added. “We all ought to be aware of other people besides our own selfish concerns.”