This past January, when describing the beginning of the legislative session in Dover, Rep. Pete Schwartzkopf was quoted in this paper as saying the following, “In 22 years, this is probably the slowest we’ve ever started.”
Week after week, the letters to the editor of this paper are filled with factual, detailed and concerned accounts coming from all corners of the Cape Region sharing real-life challenges facing our environment, economy and quality of life. To hear a politician who has spent over two decades in office saying how slow he and his colleagues in the Delaware General Assembly have been in addressing these concerns is not only troubling, but also sad.
Each day brings yet another news story of how the needs of eastern Sussex County residents are shoved aside. Be it the state Department of Education, which for the first time denied a much-needed certificate of necessity to expand classrooms at Cape Henlopen High School, or the state Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, which terminated an almost 50-year agreement with the City of Rehoboth regarding the management of Deauville Beach due to a disagreement over fees. Did Sen. Russ Huxtable offer to show some leadership for once and step in the middle of this negotiation to mediate a compromise? Obviously not.
The decline in effective bipartisan collaboration and leadership locally has been steep and quick. With recent legislative hearings of the prestigious Joint Finance Committee completed over the month of February and the lack of an appointee from eastern Sussex County in the room for the first time in a generation, the infrastructure and capacity support sorely needed here will continue to fall on deaf ears.
Getting our fair share locally isn’t something Democrats, both elected and appointed, are interested in while our beaches continue to generate millions of dollars in economic gains for the rest of the state. It's time for the slow start to kick into gear when the General Assembly reconvenes in March. Otherwise, it will just be more of the same empty promises, brought to us by the current local Democratic representation, which has shown an inability to get the job done for their Cape-area constituents.
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