With a couple weeks of distance from this year’s elections, I’ve been looking at the larger picture of what the outcomes of some of these races may mean for Sussex Countians in the future.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure it’s a pretty picture.
With the re-election of so many incumbents on the state and county level, Sussex Countians are looking in many respects at a continuation of an unsatisfying status quo.
Frustration over the pace and method of growth in the eastern part of the county has continued to intensify, but no matter how many voters turn out to support candidates that favor more controls on growth and better planning for the county’s future, there never seem to be enough of them to elect such candidates.
It’s a simple matter of numbers: Those who own property in eastern Sussex — and therefore care the most about issues of infrastructure, managed growth and impact on the area’s sensitive environment — are less likely to be legal residents of the county.
These non-resident stakeholders are a unique bunch, with a unique problem. They’re planning their retirement here. They’re visiting on weekends. They’re coming for a few weeks in the summer with their grandchildren and renting out their properties to the thousands of other non-voters who have also come to count on shore-side Sussex as a retreat.
They patronize our businesses, and they pay the transfer taxes that have, until recently, kept the area solvent. But they don’t get to vote for County Council members, and they don’t get to pick our state legislators.
Their voice is represented at the polls solely by those who have already retired here and by the small group of working people — natives and imported folks alike — who have managed to find affordable housing or high-paying jobs in the area. It’s a tiny minority among those in Sussex County who are concerned about the east-side growth, those of us who get to select the people who decide how that growth will occur. The rest are left to simply watch and worry.
I won’t pretend to think that those on the other side of the issue favor uncontrolled growth that they know will destroy the value of all property in the area. Most of these folks are determined to preserve something equally valuable to them: their ability to develop, or sell for development, their own properties.
Some do stand to benefit simply from growth of any sort — the more the better, regardless of consequences. There’s no mistaking that.
But the state of the country’s agricultural economy remains so challenging that it’s as easy to feel just as much sympathy for the family farmer with 100 acres who’s looking to his grandchildren’s educations as for the desperate plight of the senior who wonders if they’ll have to again move to another state to get their dream of a tranquil beach retirement or for the parent who wonders if their grandchildren will be able to safely eat local crabs in 20 years.
Those who live on this east side of the county and favor the open ability to develop get much support from our west-side neighbors. The county has grown fat on development, its coffers continually refilled with transfer taxes as 1,500-home communities snuggle as close to the beach and bays as possible.
Those who live along the byways that bring the new residents and visitors to the beach stand to benefit from their own brand of development: the commercial services that keep that trip tenable. And western Sussex is still enough of a wide-open plain that existing bypasses, four-lane highways and other infrastructure to handle the growth without too much pain for its residents are easily feasible.
Not so for eastern Sussex, where all acknowledge that our state roadways are at or beyond capacity during the summer. The weight of traffic has begun to shift to county roads, which the county — despite the development boom — is not prepared to overhaul to meet the demand.
And the state can and will only do so much, between budget constraints and the simple fact that much of the development is targeted in the county’s Environmentally Sensitive Developing Area — essentially the same Level 4 areas under the current state development plan that the state does not really want developed at all.
The area — and its residents — are truly at loose ends, with no compromise in sight, let alone one that would vaguely satisfy both camps. Those supporting managed growth seek a greater voice in determining the area’s future, but they are stymied by those who – based partially on outdated population figures — are more open to growth and largely don’t have the immediate worries of having that growth literally in their back yards.
So, where is the way through this quagmire? Is there room for compromise that will make both sides happy? Can the county control growth so that it doesn’t exceed infrastructure? Can it do so without devastating the property values for those who must borrow against development potential to continue their day-to-day lives and protect their children’s futures?
After this month’s elections, I can’t say that I think there is such a compromise coming. Our representatives largely favor growth with no greater controls, and there is little chance for a change in that balance until there are enough managed-growth voters to force a shift. By then, it will simply be too late.
Don’t think so? Well, I have the lesson of my own childhood to support that belief. I grew up in Loudoun County, Va. — one of the fastest growing areas of suburban Washington, D.C., during the 1980s and 1990s, and one that is still growing at a tremendous pace.
Moreover, I saw that period of brisk growth through the eyes of a child of a county planning commissioner and land surveyor — someone at the heart of the changes that have happened there.
During a recent visit home, I read newspaper stories of new proposed communities of tens of thousands of homes, met with resistance from current residents, concerns over infrastructure, stress on the tax base, and loss of rural tranquility and beauty. Some wrote wistful letters from distant places of what they remembered of their childhood home towns and how it no longer exists there.
And, as here, there were those who drew the bottom line at property rights and the benefits of growth on a massive scale. And, as here, there was always the lingering threat of legal action if development was not approved.
But I also stood in the back yard of my childhood home one night. I saw a sky filled with stars — and nearly as many airplane lights. Where once there were deep woods, now there are houses full of people, from border to border.
And I heard that night a distinct and troublesome whoosh where once there was the silence of night in the suburbs — the whoosh of cars rushing around the town’s bypass. (A bypass my father says people now avoid, in favor of the very routes through town that it was created to reduce impact upon, so crowded have those bypasses themselves become.)
Crime has boomed. Environmental concerns have skyrocketed. Ways of life have disappeared as farmers and horse breeders sell large tracts to developers. The need for infrastructure, fire protection and patience have grown exponentially. It’s so very different and it’s frightening.
I own my home here. I made a conscious decision to come to live in this place and cherish the idea of it as a place where my young son will grow up. And as much as I love where I grew up, I don’t want this place to go through the kind of change that one has.
I also refuse to be one of those who settles in a new place and then says it should stay frozen in time, exactly as it was. I want the small conveniences that development brings, to have things closer and perhaps a little more to do in the winter.
But I don’t want a 2-mile drive to the beach to take a half-hour. I don’t want people fighting over parking spaces or a spot on the sand. And I don’t want to worry about whether the fox my neighbor spotted last week is the last one that will call this area home or whether my son will even find a blue crab in the Assawoman Wildlife Refuge in 10 years, let alone be able to eat it.
We stand at the brink, at the threshold of the future of this place. The decisions we make now — as voters and as government officials — will determine what this place becomes in the future. Decisions made in 10 years will be just the icing on the cake. The time to mold the future and make sure our growth is wise is now.
I admit I don’t trust those decisions to our neighbors on the west side of the county, or to those who have drawn the line merely at asking developers to pay a little more to exceed the minimal limits we’ve already put upon them.
I asked my father what, in hindsight, Loudoun County’s planning commissioners could have done to more wisely plan for its future some 10 or 15 years ago. As an advisory-only board — like Sussex County’s — they had little real power, other than to recommend. But even then he said they only followed the plan that was already in place — a plan that allowed for the massive growth that came.
So now is Sussex County’s plan — one lacking real foresight on where growth has gone to date, let alone will go in the future, and one to which our county council has consistently allowed leeway in favor of development instead of proposing tighter restrictions and higher benchmarks.
And I don’t expect that to change with future drafts. There has been too much said of how the county coffers could further benefit from growth while no one has concretely related that growth to infrastructure and quality-of-life issues.
I don’t believe those of us living in eastern Sussex County can leave the fate of our life here, of our properties and our children’s future to those whose concerns are with developers, large landowners and next year’s tax receipts, or with those who don’t have to worry about bumper-to-bumper traffic confounding their weekend errands.
And — brace yourself for it — I think the only way to avoid doing just that, until it’s far too late, is to look not to increase representation on the county council but instead to seek to break from the yoke on the eastern part of the county and seek self-determination.
Indeed, I think one of the geographically largest counties east of the Mississippi should be split in twain, like to like, with more efficient representation for each of its two disparate halves.
As the line has traditionally been drawn between the southern part of the state and the north, so too have the differences between east and west in Sussex County become so increasingly clear in the last few decades that official acknowledgement is warranted. Our issues are different, our lives are different, our area is different.
Our battles now should not be over how many west-side councilmen will vote to approve a development they’ll never themselves drive past, but instead to bridge the less disparate viewpoints within the eastern side of the county so that all are protected to the best of our ability.
We need to work together to find a compromise that those of us who live here and own property here can all cheer — a real plan that will preserve our future.
I hope I’m wrong, but I have little hope of that being done while conflicting interests of east- and west-side Sussex Countians seem to inevitably lead to problems that disproportionately affect the fewer number of residents on the east side. And the worst part of that is that something needs to be done right away — yesterday, a decade ago…
Drastic re-evaluation of the future of the county — and of the eastern part of the county — needs to be made now. We have no luxury of time to wait for the next census, or even really the next election.
I have seen the future, and it is not one that many of those who live here and own property here now are going to be able to claim to love as much as we love this place now or when we came here. And it is a future that, one day, all of those who call Sussex County home will have to reckon with.