Group seeks to halt Village Centre

More than 150 Lewes-area residents packed into a standing-room-only meeting to plan, organize, strategize and raise money in an effort to influence the outcome of a pending zoning-change request for the Village Centre. The proposed 320,000-square-foot shopping center is planned for the Gills Neck Road-Kings Highway area.

“If we become the doormat to a regional shopping center, we will lose all that’s special here,” said John Mateyko, an organizer with Managing Growth Around Lewes, the group that sponsored the Friday, Aug. 7 meeting at Lewes Public Library.

Developer LT Associates LLC is requesting a zoning change for the Village Centre site. Two public hearings on the request have been scheduled. The Sussex County Planning & Zoning Commission’s hearing is at 6 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 10.

The Sussex County Council’s hearing is at 6 p.m., Tuesday, Sept. 29.

Mateyko said LT Associates has not established any reason county officials should even consider the request.

Mateyko said no aspect of the project has changed since the Sussex County Planning & Zoning Commission’s March 2008 unanimous rejection of the developer’s rezoning request for the then-521,000-square-foot shopping center.

He said LT Associate’s claim of having downsized the project – reducing it from 520,000 square feet on 68 acres to 320,000 square feet on 46 acres – is a ruse.

“What are they going to do with the remaining 22 acres? Open a turtle sanctuary?” Mateyko quipped.

“It’s not consistent with the character of the surrounding property; there is not currently a mixture of service activities along Kings Highway or Gills Neck Road; it does not promote vehicular safety on neighboring roads; it doesn’t promote orderly growth in the county; and it has been rejected by the City of Lewes, local and state elected officials,” Mateyko said, reading, in part from the planning commission’s 2008 decision.

“It really flies in the face of Lewes’ ‘Busy days and quiet nights,’” said panelist Mike Tyler.

Tyler, 14 years ago, helped form The Citizens Coalition, a grassroots organization concerned about overdevelopment in coastal Sussex County.

The coalition mounted an effort to block Tanger Factory Outlet Center plans to build a shopping center near Five Points.

Tyler said at the time that many thought Tanger was unstoppable and outlet shopping at Five Points inevitable.

But coalition volunteers raised money, blitzed media organizations, picketed along Route 1 and packed Sussex County Council and planning and zoning commission meetings opposing Tanger’s proposal whenever the project came before the county.

“You have to speak for yourself. County council is government for the people. You’re the people,” Tyler said.

He said state planning and transportation officials years ago recognized the proposed shopping center’s site as environmentally sensitive. He said a report concluded that commercial development east of Route 1 in the resort corridor should not be allowed.

“In a worst-case scenario, something’s going to happen on this land,” said panelist Dave Ennis.

“Developers will say they have a right to develop land, but they don’t have an automatic right,” said panelist Mabel Granke.

She said every municipality has the legal right to have a seat at the table with decision-makers – Sussex County Council and planning and zoning – so the community, not only the developer, gains.

The list of concerns panelists, residents and Managing Growth Around Lewes (MGAL) have is lengthy, topped by potential environmental problems that could be caused by what the group and state officials say would be an out-of-scale regional shopping center on a 63.8 acre environmentally sensitive site.

The site is less than a mile from the Lewes Board of Public Works well field, which is adjacent to Kings Highway and just north of where LT Associates proposes building. City of Lewes drinking water is pumped from the well field’s underground aquifer, which is outside Lewes city limits.

“Don’t let anybody tell you the water comes from the north,” Granke said. She said that according to state source-water experts, water enters the aquifer as a result of rain runoff, which could be affected by the shopping center’s impermeable surfaces.

Precisely if – or how – nearby commercial development could affect the aquifer isn’t known.

Ennis said there’s been no environmental-impact study to examine potential Village Centre effects.

Panelist Jules Jackson has researched whether the proposed site has archaeological significance. Jackson, who has pored over hundreds of documents archived in Washington, D.C., said site development could violate Delaware’s unmarked human-remains law. She said the remains of 60 individuals, which experts think were Nanticoke Indian predecessors, have already been removed from the site.

Jackson said the state doesn’t enforce its unmarked human-remains law.

MGAL has more than $4,000 in its war chest and plans to continue a fundraising campaign to raise money for legal expenses, advertising and other costs.

The group is also considering organized pickets, protests and possibly boycotts that would target LT - Lingo and Townsend - real estate business operations.