Good Morning, Neighbors.

Just southeast of Townsend, up in New Castle County, there’s a forest that state records say has been a forest continuously since 1937.

Hidden among its trees are ponds that appear each winter and vanish by summer — and, in those hidden woodland ponds, for roughly two weeks a year, an endangered tiger salamander climbs out of its burrow to breed.

The other 50 weeks, this seldom-seen creature remains underground.

Delaware’s own wildlife plan has called places like this forest THE most significant unprotected habitat for rare species in the region.

Unprotected?

That land sits under New Castle County’s strongest habitat protections. And yet four state reviews since 2021 — the latest just 10 days ago — have warned Townsend, in writing, about what happens when parcels cross the town line.

Here is the strange part: No one would have to repeal a single law to make it happen. No one would vote to remove a single protection. Lifting the gate to let development in could happen another way entirely.

And once you see how a developer could get into this forest, you will never look at a town boundary the same again.

Today’s issue of The Delaware Project examines the situation, document by document. And understanding it clearly truly matters this week: the Townsend Planning Commission and Town Council will meet jointly Tuesday, September 1, at 6 p.m., at Town Hall, 141 Main Street.

Some of your neighbors have already shared their opinions. That’s how we found out about it.

The article below explains what they’re talking about.

— Gregory S. Layton, The Delaware Project

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Good Morning, Neighbors.

Well, it’s official now. The summer is winding down. If I didn’t know by the calendar, I would have known the moment I stepped out the door this morning, straight into a spider’s web.

I did the dance. Hands to the face, a hop backward, a check of the collar. Then I stood on the step and looked at what was left: spokes, rings, gaps, small beads of glue, still swinging from the porch rail.

And standing there, wiping silk off my glasses, I got to thinking about strands.

A web holds because no thread hangs alone. The sticky spiral hangs on the spokes. The spokes hang on the frame. The frame hangs on one bridge line the spider gave to the wind and could not steer. Pull any thread, and the pull runs through all of it.

The county works the same way, and Delaware has already written part of that truth down. The state’s new wildlife plan gives its highest ranking — Tier 1 — to two spider wasps, each known here from a single female collected in 2003 in dry, sandy pine ground.¹ These wasps belong to a group that hunts trapdoor spiders, and the one nest of theirs that scientists have opened held exactly that. So Delaware now guards an insect whose whole line hangs on a spider — and the spider hangs on no list at all. No one has even published the hunt on Delaware ground. We have mapped one strand and left the next one blank.

The strands run upward, too. Each fall, songbirds pour down into Delmarva woods to refuel, and a University of Delaware–led count found more birds where the small lives — insects and spiders together — ran thick.² The web across my door was a knot in that net. So, if I’m honest, am I.

And I keep one more strand in mind, because it is on our masthead. The Bethany Beach firefly signals from a thin line of wet ground behind our dunes, and its light is guttering. More on that below.

So before the next web goes up across your door — and one will — here is what that wheel is, and what Delaware does and doesn’t know about the builders.

— Gregory S. Layton, The Delaware Project

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Let’s start with the stone, because the stone admits what it doesn’t know. We’ll have to do the same more than once before we reach the end of this story.

By 1904, the old Quaker burying ground at Motherkill, near Magnolia, had been left to go wild. Warner Mifflin’s descendants put a fence back around that ground, and they set a stone inside. But they did not write here lies. They couldn’t, not honestly. What they cut into the marble was this:

MOTHERKILL BURYING GROUND WITHIN THIS ENCLOSURE ARE INTERRED THE REMAINS OF WARNER MIFFLIN: FRIEND, PHILANTHROPIST, PATRIOT. BORN AUGUST 21ST, 1745. DIED OCTOBER 16TH, 1798.

Within that ground, whatever’s left of the man’s body remains. Somewhere in there.

But 33 years later, the place still had not been kept up very well, so the stone was carried eight miles up the road to the Camden Friends burying ground. Someone cut a new line at the bottom recording the move. In 1943, a photographer found it standing and took a picture you can still find in the Delaware Public Archives.

The stone traveled. But Warner Mifflin, whose story this essay tells? He’s still at Motherkill, in a grave nobody can point to.

That is a strange ending for a man who once asked the President of the United States for a private hour, got it, and used it to tell him that slavery was a sin.

So, I’ve gone looking for Mifflin myself, the only way the record allows. Not in the ground, but in the primary sources he left behind.

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Good Afternoon, Neighbors.

Yesterday afternoon, I spent a few hours at Killens Pond State Park, south of Felton, with volunteers from the Sierra Club’s Delaware Chapter, marking the close of the General Assembly session.

They had earned it. In July, the Governor signed Senate Bill 9, creating a state program to protect roughly 75,000 acres of freshwater wetlands that lost federal protection when the Supreme Court narrowed the Clean Water Act in 2023. According to the bill’s sponsor, protecting freshwater wetlands in Delaware by law took 38 years of attempts. The Sierra Club helped build that coalition, sitting at the same table as the Farm Bureau, the Home Builders, and the Realtors.

The chapter put real work into passing some other great bills, too, but covering them all would take at least a few newsletter installments, so visit the chapter’s page to learn more about them.

And, if you know me, some of my favorite parts of the afternoon involved asking about a professor’s research, an inventor’s design, and a community leader’s run for office. I also got a kick out of a few folks I’ve known for years in other places asking exactly where I live. At Killens, it was easy to point west and say, “Out that way.”

I love those conversations. Someone might say I have them because I’m a journalist. That’s backward. If a guy with a newsletter counts as a journalist, fine — but the interest came first.

Anyway, I’m not here to tell you about them, or the club, or me.

I want to talk about the unexpected star of the show.

At one point, I looked up and saw a familiar face watching a spot on a tree. I didn’t have my glasses on, and whatever she was watching was small. So, after a minute, I walked over to see what she was seeing.

A skink. A smooth little lizard, black with pale stripes and a tail of startling blue. I’ve known them since forever. I told them it was a five-lined skink with certainty I should have qualified.

When I was a kid, my mother more than once stepped back from the dryer because one had come in through the exhaust vent. They sunned themselves on our back steps. And I still spot them on my deck railing out near Willow Grove most days.

So, the fact that anyone was paying attention caught my attention. Within a few minutes, half a dozen people stood watching that skink. Several said they hadn’t seen one in a while. Others seemed not to have seen one at all — or maybe they had, and never knew the name, and never stopped long enough to watch.

A few basics

What it looks like. Five to eight inches, tail included. The young are black with five pale stripes and a brilliant blue tail. That blue fades with age — adult females keep a duller blue-gray, and adult males lose the stripes entirely, turning plain brown with heads that swell and flush orange in spring.

Where it lives. Damp woods and wood edges, rotting stumps, log piles, stone walls. Also porches, boardwalks, bridge footings, old sheds. So the dryer vent tracks.

What it does. Eats spiders, beetles, crickets. Hawks and small mammals eat it. Grab one by the tail and the tail comes off in your hand, still twitching, while the skink runs.

When I looked them up this morning, this fact surprised me: In late spring, the female lays a clutch under leaf litter or soft wood — and then she stays. She coils around the eggs and guards them until they hatch. Parental care is uncommon among lizards. This one does it.

Now the part I got wrong

I told everyone it was a five-lined skink. I can’t actually prove that.

Delaware has four native lizards. Two of them — the common five-lined skink and the broad-headed skink — look nearly identical as juveniles. Both are black. Both have five pale stripes. Both have that brilliant blue tail. Telling them apart at that age means counting the small scales along the upper lip, which is not something you do from six feet away with your glasses in the car.

Here’s why that matters. The common five-lined skink is secure in Delaware and doesn’t appear on the state’s list of Species of Greatest Conservation Need. The broad-headed skink is on that list, at Tier 2. So is the little brown skink.

So, a half-dozen people stood in the woods admiring an animal, and not one of us could have told you whether we were looking at a species that’s fine or a species the state has flagged.

That’s not a failure of the afternoon. That’s the condition.

And let me be careful about the other thing, too: six people who hadn’t seen a skink lately is not evidence that skinks are declining. The data say this one is doing fine. What stopped me was different — how quickly something ordinary becomes unfamiliar once we stop looking at it.

Keeping common species common

DNREC finished rewriting the Delaware Wildlife Action Plan this spring. Approved federally in April, running through 2035, listing 1,019 species of greatest conservation need. And the principle the Division of Fish and Wildlife’s director gave for the whole thing was this: keeping common species common.

Not only rescuing the rare. Keeping the ordinary ordinary.

That’s the part we skip. We know how to recognize an emergency. The harder work is holding the baseline before it becomes one.

There’s a name for how a baseline slips. Daniel Pauly called it shifting baselines. Fisheries scientists kept measuring against whatever they’d seen at the start of their own careers, so the bar dropped every generation while everyone felt they were holding steady. Nobody lied. Everybody just started counting late.

Let me be careful about counting.

I remember Canada geese in the fields along the road to Grotto Pizza in Rehoboth. Those fields are outlet stores now; that stretch was farmland into the late 1980s. What I can’t tell you is how many geese. The surveys show that across the Atlantic Flyway, migratory Canada geese declined sharply after the early 1980s, while resident, non-migratory geese multiplied. A parking-lot flock can look like abundance and still hide the loss of a migration.

I can also tell you some streams and ditches where I once caught bluegill have silted in. But that one is only my eye.

I can also tell you I haven’t seen an American kestrel in about five years. Here, DNREC says it better than I can: once common on telephone wires and fence posts, our smallest falcon “is now a rare sight across our state.” Breeding Bird Survey data show Mid-Atlantic kestrels down more than ninety-three percent in fifty years. Delaware listed them endangered in 2013.

That’s not a feeling. That’s a count.

Delaware also loses forest steadily — the Forest Service’s most recent estimate puts about 1,200 acres a year converting to non-forest, while roughly 200 acres go the other way, and it describes what remains as badly fragmented, with few large stands and a great deal of edge. The clearing happens a parcel at a time. No single parcel is the trend. The map is.

What I know for certain

The only blue ribbon I can clearly remember winning as a kid came from a second-grade poster contest at Benjamin Banneker Elementary. My poster was about DDT and what it had done to ospreys. Any other ribbons I might have received back then have been lost to memory and the various shoeboxes and storage bins I might have kept them in. Without question, though, I can still remember the pride in receiving that one in the Carlisle Fire Company’s old home on Miford’s Church Street.

But now, I take even greater pleasure in knowing I can stand at almost any saltmarsh in this state and hear an osprey’s kee-kee-kee overhead. They seem to be everywhere. DNREC calls the osprey one of Delaware’s greatest conservation success stories. They’re off the state endangered list. In the early 1990s, the Delmarva Ornithological Society and state biologists went around building nesting platforms, and those platforms still hold nests.

Bald eagles recovered in similar fashion: four active nests observed in Delaware in 1987, eighty-two observed in 2023.

Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962 and opened it with a chapter called “A Fable for Tomorrow,” about a town where the birdsong stops — fiction assembled entirely from documented harm. EPA canceled most remaining U.S. uses of DDT ten years later.

Those recoveries did not simply happen. Policy, habitat work, monitoring, volunteers, and time changed the count.

Here’s what I didn’t know until just last week, and have already begun writing about elsewhere. The wildlife area all around my house is named for Norman G. Wilder, the first professional director of Delaware’s old Game and Fish Commission, who served from October 1948 until he retired in October 1972 — the year DDT was canceled. During his tenure, the state preserved land in Prime Hook, Milford Neck, Assawoman, Nanticoke, Woodland Beach, Lums Pond, and more than a few others. In 1975, the General Assembly put his name on the Petersburg tract, thanking him for protecting what it called the state’s most treasured gift.

I drive through the man’s work almost every day. I just didn’t know whose it was.

The lesson isn’t that nature always comes back. It doesn’t. The lesson is that what people do changes the count.

The point

The skink is common. That’s the whole reason a half-dozen serious environmentalists stood around one like it was a comet.

Common is not the same as safe. Familiar is not the same as invulnerable. We don’t protect what we assume will always be there, and the assuming is the dangerous part — with a lizard, with a marsh, with a hundred-acre woodlot, with a neighbor.

Attention isn’t conservation by itself. That said, it’s usually where conservation starts: notice something, learn its name, keep a record, notice when the record changes.

And I’m not just speaking metaphorically. DNREC asks anyone who spots a kestrel to log it on eBird, because sightings tell biologists where to put the next nest box. Last year, the partnership monitored 88 boxes, and when a rescue group ended up with three orphaned nestlings from three different states, biologists matched them by age to Delaware boxes and fostered them out. Somebody drove those birds somewhere. That’s what care looks like when it’s done on purpose.

Carson called hers a fable for tomorrow. In more places than I’d like, tomorrow showed up.

So go look at something. Learn its name. Write down what you saw and where. And if you find a box turtle in the road, move it across the way it was headed — across, not away. Relocated box turtles wander far outside their home range, sometimes trying to get back, and that wandering often kills them.

A record is how memory becomes evidence. Evidence is how we notice change before absence makes it obvious. And sometimes, if we notice early enough, we get to keep the common things common.

— Gregory S. Layton, The Delaware Project

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See Clearly. Do the Work. Build Together.

Good morning, neighbors.

Let’s go for a walk for a bit, if you’re up for it. Let’s head out to the trees, the peach trees, the ones hanging ripe with fruit at this very moment. You probably know the way, but if not, that’s no problem. I’m more than happy to show you. The season’s glory we’re about to dig into isn’t far from anyone reading in Delaware right now.

And then, once we get there, let’s ask the grower where to find the ones reaching perfection at this precise moment, and pluck a few, right off the tree.

Feel the fuzz catch on your skin the way it does, how it kind of grips and then lets go. Feel the surprising weight of it — how it wants to fall, how it has been waiting all season to be exactly this heavy. Then, turn it to the sun and read whatever color it gives you.

And finally, and this is the best part, just take a big bite of it, without any fuss whatsoever, and if some juice happens to run down your chin, and maybe someone gives you a look, well, they really don’t know, do they?

And, no, this is not an essay about a snack. I’m here to dive into the century of work, right here in the First State, the lives of the men and women who brought that fruit to your mouth. We’ll cover buds cut and bound so the orchards could keep doing it right; horseshoe crabs ground up and fed to an orchard in Kent County; boats built for speed, shallow water, running fruit right up the bay, and a Middletown father and a son putting astounding profits to paper. And you don’t have to take my word for its meaning; the peach blossom itself is written into Delaware law.

So, let’s walk back to the start, now that we’re here. Let’s praise the ones who did the work — and let’s tell the truth about some neighbors the record books lost.

And then, once we reach the end of the essay, let’s all check our calendars and make plans to meet up in public. Some fine volunteers to celebrate Delaware’s relationship with the peach in the very places we’re about to travel below.

Are you ready for this?

OK, then.

Let’s go.

— Gregory S. Layton, The Delaware Project

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Good Evening, Neighbors.

Monday marks fifty-seven years since Sunday, July 20, 1969, when Eagle settled onto the Sea of Tranquility at 4:17 p.m., Delaware time, and Neil Armstrong set his boot in the dust at 10:56 that night. Delawareans watched among more than half a billion people worldwide — and what they watched had passed, unknowing, through Delaware hands.

We told the most famous part before — the women of ILC, then ILC Industries, sewing the suits stitch by stitch. Two repairs come first. Ours: a piece we posted on Facebook set their floor in Frederica. In 1969, the suits were made in Dover, at 350 Pear Street, where the state’s marker stands. Armstrong was fitted there shortly before the flight; ILC moved to Frederica in 1975. The second belongs to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, this spring: the woman in the famous sewing-machine photograph — misnamed Hazel Fellows by a 1969 caption error — is Jean Wilson, lead seamstress on Armstrong’s suit, still living in Delaware. The museum’s pages carried her restored name in every check we made this week; so does ours. So: three more Delaware claims on the Moon — and one piece of it that Delaware lost.

— Gregory S. Layton, The Delaware Project

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Good afternoon, Neighbors,

I’ve been living inside the public record of a seven-page ordinance — hearing audio, county code, GIS layers, two brand-new state laws — because Kent County is about to do something no Delaware county has done from scratch: write the rulebook for data centers before the first one arrives. I want to say plainly, up front, that this is the right instinct and the county deserves credit for it.

But at 7 p.m. next Tuesday, July 21, that rulebook gets its only public hearing, before the Levy Court at the county administrative complex on Bay Road. For most of the projects that would ever be built under it, this is the one night the public is guaranteed a microphone. So I went looking for what the ordinance protects, what it misses and who it leaves out. What follows is what I found — sources at the bottom, receipts on request and my five asks at the end.

Let’s get into it.

— Gregory S. Layton, The Delaware Project

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The short version:

• LC26-06 would set Kent County’s first data center rules — and July 21 is the only public hearing most projects built under it will ever get.

• Its setbacks hinge on a phrase the code never defines; 281 Nobles Pond homes the state just moved into county AR zoning show exactly what’s at stake.

• A 55 dB(A) cap with no night standard can lawfully leave a facility two to four times as loud as a rural Kent night.

• On 36 of 59 eligible sites, no water utility exists to write the capacity letter the ordinance requires.

On paper, Ordinance LC26-06 is a modest thing: seven pages amending Kent County’s zoning code to add “data center” as a defined use. Introduced June 9 and headed for a Levy Court public hearing at 7 p.m. Tuesday, July 21, it would allow data centers in the county’s two industrial districts — Limited Industrial and General Industrial — subject to conditions: buildings at least 300 feet from residential zoning and generators 400, a 55-decibel noise cap, a two-row planted evergreen buffer, shielded downward lighting, a bar on once-through cooling, a fully bonded decommissioning plan and letters of no objection from county and state agencies before final plan approval.

That is genuinely more protection than Kent County has today. Right now the code doesn’t mention data centers at all — which, as Planning Director Sarah Keifer told the Regional Planning Commission this month, means one “would be approved today in general business or industrial” with no data-center-specific standards whatsoever. Her department wrote LC26-06 to get ahead of an industry that hasn’t yet reached unincorporated Kent but is coming: the legislature’s own findings this summer record that proposed Delaware data centers “would almost double the current peak electricity demand of the entire State.” On July 9 the Commission recommended the ordinance unanimously. This is a county trying to protect its residents before the trucks arrive, and it deserves credit for that.

Who gets to be in the room

But the same ordinance that adds those standards also quietly settles a second question: who gets to be in the room.

In the county’s zoning shorthand, data centers would be marked “PC” — a permitted use with conditions. It sounds procedural. What it means is that a project meeting the conditions on paper is approved by county staff, administratively, with no public hearing for that specific site. A warehouse, by contrast, triggers a conditional-use hearing at 75,000 square feet — the property posted, neighbors noticed, a night to appear and be heard. A data center — a building that runs around the clock, draws power like a small city, and may stand behind rows of backup diesel generators — gets less review than a big-box warehouse on the same land.

That is why July 21 matters: for practical purposes, it is the last hearing. Director Keifer was candid about the trade — the alternative, treating each project as a conditional use, carries its own catch, since conditional uses arrive with a legal presumption of approval that a county cannot overcome just because it dislikes a project. The real choice was never between this ordinance and a veto; it was between standards with a hearing and standards without one. LC26-06 gives Kent County the standards. What it withholds is a recurring seat at the table — which makes getting the standards right, now, the whole of the matter.

Where the servers would land

Where would these facilities land? Only Limited and General Industrial land qualifies — roughly 1,750 acres in 59 scattered patches, about 0.5% of unincorporated Kent County, strung along the U.S. 13 and U.S. 113 corridors. Keifer’s staff ran the setbacks against the map and found “fewer than half a dozen” sites where a data center could actually fit. The county hasn’t released that mapping, but the public inventory points to the same short list (see map): a roughly 360-acre Limited Industrial tract southwest of Harrington, the county’s single largest site; the Cheswold cluster, 13 patches totaling about 500 acres, anchored by a 192-acre tract west of town and two more of 116 and 52 acres; and a 102-acre General Industrial tract north of Magnolia, below Dover Air Force Base. The rest is some 50 small parcels of 5 to 46 acres near Farmington, Felton, Frederica, Little Creek, Camden, Woodside, Houston, Clayton, Smyrna, Kenton, Hartly and Milford — too small for a campus, but ample for the modest server buildings that, as we’ll see, escape the state’s new laws entirely.

And here the map begins to speak. Screened against Delaware’s own draft environmental-justice index — built because federal tools were undercounting burdened Delaware communities — that Harrington tract sits in one of the five most environmentally burdened census tracts in Kent County. The Cheswold cluster sits in tracts whose existing industrial-hazard scores run near the top of the index’s zero-to-one scale — 0.85 and 0.96 — with social vulnerability close behind, and whose residents are majority people of color. Cheswold is also the historic center of the state-recognized Lenape Indian Tribe of Delaware. These are not abstractions. They are the families who would live nearest the generators, the cooling fans and the truck traffic — and, under a by-right rule, the families who would not automatically get a hearing when a project lands next door.

The ordinance’s protections, meanwhile, carry seams that fall hardest on rural neighbors.

A single undefined phrase

Start with a single undefined phrase. The setbacks run from a “residential zoning district,” but the code never defines the term — and Kent County’s noise ordinance, when it grants extra protection to quiet neighborhoods, lists only the suburban residential zones and pointedly omits Agricultural Residential, the designation that blankets much of the rural county. If AR doesn’t count, a farmhouse on AR land beside an industrial parcel is owed no special setback at all — only the ordinary 75 or 100 feet a factory already keeps from a neighboring house. The very people the setbacks seem written for may be the ones they never reach.

And the map just moved. On July 1 — three weeks before the hearing — a newly signed state law returned 281 parcels of the Nobles Pond development from the Town of Cheswold to county jurisdiction, zoned Agricultural Residential by the statute itself. The county’s own GIS puts homes there 205 and 298 feet from a 17.5-acre Limited Industrial patch where a data center would need no public hearing. Whether those households are owed the ordinance’s 300- and 400-foot setbacks now turns entirely on whether “residential zoning district” includes AR.

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Then there is the sound. The ordinance caps noise at 55 decibels, A-weighted, measured at the facility's own property line, with no separate night standard. Decibel numbers deceive, because the scale is logarithmic: five more decibels is more than triple the acoustic energy and reads to the ear as roughly forty percent louder; ten more is twice as loud. By itself, 55 dBA is moderate rainfall, a refrigerator's hum up close — unremarkable at noon. But a rural Kent County night runs roughly 35 to 45 dBA, so a facility holding exactly to its limit can sit ten to twenty decibels above everything else in the dark: two to four times as loud as the night around it. The county's own noise code calls far less a violation — under Chapter 161, a steady tonal hum just five decibels over background is a "noise disturbance" — yet the ordinance never cross-references that chapter, and the A-weighted test it does use is built to discount the deep, low-frequency drone cooling plants actually produce. Lauren Hubbard, a property owner near Harrington and the only written commenter in the hearing record, made precisely this point: "A noise level that passes a dBA test during the day," she wrote, "will completely destroy a homeowner's ability to sleep at night." She asked for a nighttime low-frequency limit, for sound modeling under still-night inversion conditions rather than idealized daytime ones and for limits on ground-borne vibration. The county's answer so far is that setbacks and buffers will handle it — but planted trees do almost nothing to stop low-frequency sound, and a flat cap says nothing about 3 a.m.

Water nobody can vouch for

Then there is water. Cooling can consume millions of gallons, and the ordinance sensibly requires a letter from “the applicable water utility” confirming capacity — except that on 36 of the 59 eligible sites, including the two largest at Harrington and Magnolia, there is no certificated water utility. No one exists to write the letter. Water there would mean on-site wells under state groundwater-allocation permits the ordinance never mentions, with no county requirement to report withdrawals or to show that neighboring wells won’t drop. When the Commission met on July 9, residents pressed exactly this fear in the public comment period; one recalled neighbors’ ponds falling 4 feet in a single dry summer.

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Where the new state laws stop

The largest questions — grid strain, who pays for new transmission — sit above the county, and the legislature has just acted, passing two bills (awaiting the Governor’s signature as this is written) that put the biggest energy users in their own rate class and require them to build or buy their own clean power. But for data centers those protections begin at 30 megawatts, so a smaller facility — the kind that fits Kent’s many modest parcels — slips beneath both laws, leaving LC26-06 as its only rulebook. And the rate-class shield reaches only customers of PSC-regulated Delmarva Power, while the service maps for the Cheswold cluster are genuinely unresolved: territory layers show Delmarva, the member-run Delaware Electric Cooperative and Dover’s municipal utility all claiming overlapping ground there. Depending on whose line the meter hangs from, the state’s signature ratepayer protection may never reach the county’s biggest eligible site — a distinction no resident should have to discover from a utility bill.

The warning 45 minutes north

If anyone doubts the stakes, look 45 minutes north. Early this year a developer proposed “Project Washington,” a 1.2-gigawatt campus near Delaware City backed by 516 diesel generators and roughly 2.6 million gallons of stored fuel. Delaware’s environmental agency ruled it a prohibited heavy-industry use, and in March the state’s Coastal Zone board upheld the denial — “if 1.2 gigawatts being consumed isn’t heavy,” one member said, he didn’t know what was. Demand turned away from the coast looks inland, and Kent’s industrial land is inland. New Castle County wrote its data-center rules only after proposals were in the pipeline and, by press accounts, watched them get largely grandfathered. Kent is doing the harder, wiser thing — writing the rules before the rush — which is exactly why they should be as strong as the county can make them.

What to ask for — and when

None of this is an argument against LC26-06. It is an argument for finishing it. The Levy Court can adopt the ordinance and, in the same motion, close the gaps its own record has already exposed. Five fixes would do most of the work:

• Define “residential zoning district” to include the agricultural districts where most rural homes actually sit, so the setbacks reach the people they were written for.

• Require a public hearing for the largest facilities — above the state’s new 30-megawatt data-center line, borrowing its anti-splitting aggregation rule — just as a large warehouse already gets one.

• Tie the noise standard to Chapter 161 and add a nighttime low-frequency limit, with compliance modeled for a still night, so the rule protects sleep and not merely a daytime reading.

• Classify battery storage, which the state’s clean-power law all but requires on site and the ordinance never mentions.

• For the 36 well-dependent sites, substitute a state groundwater determination for the unobtainable utility letter, and require annual water-use reporting.

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  July 21, 7 p.m.

  

  The hearing is at 7 p.m. Tuesday, July 21, before the Kent County Levy Court at the county administrative complex, 555 Bay Road, Dover. Residents may speak in person or send written comment to the Levy Court commissioners and the Planning Department beforehand. After that night, most future data centers on this land would be approved without another hearing — a project would come back before the public only if it needed its own power plant or a rezoning. This is the moment the county’s neighbors are actually in the room. A good ordinance is about to become law. Whether it becomes a strong one is, for the next seven days, still in the hands of the people it is meant to protect.

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  This piece draws on the text of LC26-06 and the July 2, 2026 Regional Planning Commission packet; Kent County Code Chapters 205 and 161; the RPC’s July 2 hearing and July 9 unanimous recommendation (quotations from citizen audio recordings, pending official minutes); the written public comment of Lauren Hubbard (packet pp. 71–72); a county-wide GIS inventory of eligible industrial land screened against Delaware’s draft Environmental Justice Index, a first-draft tract-level tool; DNREC’s February 3, 2026 Coastal Zone status decision on Project Washington and press accounts of the Coastal Zone Industrial Control Board’s March 26 affirmance; enrolled House Bill 445 and House Substitute 1 for House Bill 233; House Bill 472 as amended (Chapter 85:340, signed July 6, 2026), whose Section 1 lists the 281 de-annexed Nobles Pond parcels and whose Section 2 zones them Agricultural Residential effective July 1; and Delaware Business Times reporting (July 10, 2026) on New Castle County’s grandfathered pipeline. Acreage, water-service, electric-territory, and parcel-distance figures come from state and county GIS layers at locator precision — parcel-to-district distances are measured edge-to-edge on the county’s own zoning and parcel layers, and electric territories in particular remain unresolved candidate sets; the utilities’ own published service-area maps are illustrative and cannot assign specific parcels — and all of it should be confirmed against certificated records before any formal filing. The map plots patch centroids only; the county’s certified zoning maps legally control.

See Clearly. Do the Work. Build Together.

Good Morning, Neighbors.

Stand at the edge of a fresh clearing in Sussex County, and you will see one tree left. Maybe two. The machines leave them the way a barber leaves a stray hair — not on purpose, just not worth the trip back. Around them, the ground is scraped to sand, the brush raked into long brown piles, and the birds that lived there wheel overhead with nowhere to come down.

We have watched a great deal of this. Delaware was once almost entirely woods — some 1.1 million acres, nearly 90% of the state, before the axes came. By the early 1900s, we had cut our way down to about 350,000 acres. A century of farm fields going back to forest clawed a little of it back — and then we began giving it away again. Today, Delaware stands at roughly 349,000 acres, essentially back at that hundred-year-old low. And here is the part that belongs to us: since 1986, nearly all of Delaware’s forest loss has fallen on this one county. Sussex has given up more than 36,000 acres of forest in that time — the state’s own foresters counted it. We are the front line, and we have been for 40 years.

So when the County Council takes up a new forest ordinance on July 14, it matters more here than anywhere. And the ordinance — Ordinance 26-05 — is not a bad-faith document. It deserves a fair reading before it gets a hard one.

— Gregory S. Layton, The Delaware Project

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What the law does, and what it doesn’t

Give it its due first. For the first time, the ordinance would set a forest-retention standard on land slated for homes: keep 30 percent of the forest in our Growth Areas, half of it out in the countryside. When a builder clears past that line, they must replant at two to two-and-a-half times the excess — a higher ratio than the county’s own working group first proposed. It backs the rules with bonds and steep fines. Those are real teeth, and after 40 years of loss, real teeth are worth something.

But read what that 30 percent actually guarantees, because the arithmetic is not what the headline suggests. Here is the hinge: a builder owes no replanting at all until the clearing crosses the retention line. In a Growth Area, the first 70% of the forest can come down for nothing — the mitigation only applies to what is cut beyond that point. So the rational move, the one most builders will make, is to clear right up to the line, keep the required thirty percent, and replace not one acre of forest. (The ordinance still asks for a scattering of individual trees on the developed lots — but that is landscaping: a few saplings per acre of yard and pavement, not forest.) Push past the line, and the mitigation does kick in — two to two-and-a-half times the excess; the county’s own worksheet shows a fully cleared 10 acres owing six acres back. But no one profits from over-clearing, because every extra acre taken costs two acres replanted on the builder’s own land, and the ordinance offers no fee to make up the difference. The threshold is set right where a builder would stop anyway.

So the promise on the ground is the floor, not the replanting: 30% of the forest kept in the Growth Areas, half in the countryside, and — where a builder stops at the line — nothing put back as forest. Do the countywide sum, and it comes out below half. Split new development evenly between Growth and Rural land, and keep the forest at an average of 40%; steer more of it into the Growth Areas, as the Comprehensive Plan intends, and it falls further still. On the land Sussex builds, this ordinance is written to leave less than half the forest standing — and where any replanting is owed at all, it comes back not as forest but as a planting a fraction as dense. The law requires as few as 100 live trees per acre — with stems spaced some 20 feet apart. A standing Delaware forest carries roughly six hundred trees an acre, on average, and that counts only the ones already an inch thick; it says nothing of the seedlings, shrubs, and vines woven in below. Even to call an unplanted stand “naturally regenerated,” Maryland requires 400 woody seedlings per acre.

A hundred saplings on a 20-foot grid is not a forest. It is the memory of a forest, planted in rows.

And there is one more gap, and it is a wide one. Everything above — the 30 percent, the 50 percent, the mitigation that follows — binds homes alone. The forest-preservation rule reaches residential and mixed-use development, and nothing else. A standalone warehouse, a factory, a data center on the same Sussex ground owes it nothing: no retention floor, no replanting, no replacement forest. On the Delmarva, where the data centers are already coming, that is not a small omission.

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The neighbors that a field of saplings cannot hold

Here is why the difference between a forest and a planting is not a matter of taste. A forest is a set of structures — hollows, standing deadwood, a mast of nuts, loose bark, a dark and unbroken interior — and each structure is home to something. Take the structures away, and you take the animals with them, no matter how many stems you count. Meet a few of the neighbors who would have nowhere to go.

The Eastern Screech-Owl. Megascops asio. Barely taller than your hand, bark-colored and still, it nests and roosts in tree hollows it cannot carve itself — it depends on a cavity that decades of decay, or a woodpecker, opened first. It will take a nest box; it will live at the edge of a town. But a field of young saplings holds no hollow at all. (Listen by day for a racket of scolding blue jays and chickadees — small birds mob a dozing owl, and the commotion gives it away.)

The Southern Flying Squirrel. Glaucomys volans. It does not fly; it glides on a fold of skin stretched wrist to ankle, sailing between old trunks in the dark. By day, it sleeps in a tree hollow (or my brother’s deer stand) — often an abandoned woodpecker hole — in the oak-and-hickory woods it leans on for nuts. And it is no gentle vegetarian: it ranks among the most carnivorous of all squirrels, taking insects, eggs, even carrion. A field of saplings gives it no hollow to sleep in and no mast to eat.

Flying squirrels, filmed in Sussex County by my brother, Bruce Layton, in his deer stand, used with permission.

The Silver-haired Bat. Lasionycteris noctivagans. By day, it tucks under a loose flap of bark or slips into a hollow or a standing-dead snag — roosts that only older trees and time provide, where it raises its young. Loose bark and snags are the marks of an aged forest; a young planting will not grow them for decades. And Delaware’s cave bats are already in freefall: white-nose syndrome has killed them by the millions, and the three species it strikes hardest — the little brown bat, the northern long-eared bat, and the tricolored bat — are all listed as endangered in Delaware. The northern long-eared bat is now endangered nationwide.

The Luna Moth. Actias luna. Pale green, wide as your open hand, trailing two long tails — and the adult never eats. It has about a week to live and spends all of it finding a mate by moonlight, hunted the whole time by bats. Those sweeping tails are its answer: they throw a false echo back at a hunting bat, drawing the strike to a tail tip rather than the body. Its caterpillars are raised on our native hardwoods — hickory, walnut, sweetgum, birch, persimmon. Cut the hardwoods, and there is no moth.

The Eastern Whip-poor-will. Antrostomus vociferus. It lays its eggs on the open forest floor, timed to the moon — its chicks hatch about 10 days before the full moon, so the parents can hunt all night by its light. By day, it vanishes into the dead leaves. It needs uncluttered woodland with clearings close by, and the Cornell Lab now ties its decline to exactly what we do here: open forest turned to suburb. As the woods break into house lots, the song goes quiet — a sound leaving Sussex in our lifetime.

The clock a forest keeps

The ordinance sets its bar for a “successful” replanting at trees merely able to reach two inches across — in seven years. A stem as thick as your wrist, in seven summers. And the tree needs only have the potential to get there; nothing in the law says it must actually arrive. Hold that number next to what these animals need, and the gap is the whole story.

A planting can close its canopy in 15 or 20 years — fast and genuinely worth doing. But the structures come slowly. Oaks and hickories generally don’t bear a meaningful mast of nuts until they are twenty to thirty years old, and don’t carry the heavy, reliable crops a flying squirrel counts on for another decade or two beyond that. Cavities — the hollows a screech-owl and a flying squirrel need — form in large trees over many decades; big natural den trees and standing snags are typically features of forests s60 to 100 years old and older. Loose, sloughing bark, the silver-haired bat’s daytime cover, is a mark of age, not youth.

And some things a planting can never grow at all. Many of our woodland songbirds — the deep-forest warblers among them — need a core far enough from any edge that the nest predators and the parasitic cowbird cannot reach the nest. The Delaware Forest Service says as much: fragmentation “creates more edge and an advantage for the parasitic cowbird” and leaves “less interior forest for plants and animals that require this specific habitat.” The ordinance’s smallest legal “forest” is 10,000 square feet — about 100 feet on a side, just under a quarter acre. A patch that size is all edge. No amount of time turns it into an interior.

So the honest arithmetic is this. Clear a Sussex woods, and the county’s rules can be fully satisfied by a grid of wrist-thick saplings that will not offer a hollow, a snag, a full mast, or a dark interior for the better part of a century — if the parcel is even large enough to grow those things, which most are not. “No net loss of acreage” is not “no net loss of life.” They are not close.

The fix is small, and almost everyone wants it

Here is the part that should give us all some hope. This is not a fight between two camps. The county’s own working group — builders, farmers, and conservationists together — had already written the fix, and all 10 of its members approved it. A forest, they said, should mean a stand with at least 100 trees per acre, at least half of them six inches thick or more — and they named their aim in plain words: “meaningful stands of trees … and not scattered small-caliper plantings.” And at the June hearing, by the Cape Gazette’s account, the home builders and the forest advocates — who agree on almost nothing — rose to ask for the very same thing: to define a forest by more than its acreage. The draft before Council kept the working group’s opening sentence and cut that test.

That is the whole ask. Not to stop the law — to finish it. Put the working group’s test back into the definition of a forest, so that a field of saplings cannot be called one, and so the 30 percent we keep is 30 percent of a forest, not a promise redeemable in wrist-thick sticks. Restore the test.

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Do the work: contact Sussex County

The County Council decides this on Tuesday, July 14, at 1:30 p.m., at 2 The Circle in Georgetown. You do not have to be an expert. You have to be a neighbor, which you are.

• Come, or watch, or call. Attend in person, watch the live stream at sussexcountyde.gov/council-chamber-broadcast, or call in at 1-302-394-5036 (code 570176).

• Write the Council. A short, plain note carries weight. You can reach the Council and submit a comment through sussexcountyde.gov. The five members who will vote are Douglas Hudson (President), John Rieley (Vice President), Jane Gruenebaum, Matt Lloyd, and Steve McCarron.

• Ask for the one fix. However you say it, the message is simple: This is a good law. Make it a real one. Put a test of age and structure back into the definition of a forest.

We have lost 36,000 acres. We are not asking to freeze the county in place or to stop a single family from finding a home here. We are asking that when we say “forest,” we mean the thing itself — the hollows and the mast and the dark, the owl and the moth and the small gliding shadow overhead. That is worth a clause. It is worth an evening in Georgetown. It is worth an email tonight.

The night shift cannot speak for itself. We can.

See Clearly. Do the Work. Build Together.

Good Morning, Neighbors.

It passed in the dark, the way seeds do their best work. At 2:49 on the morning of July 1, 2026, the Delaware House said yes to Senate Bill 9 — 39 votes for, 1 against. Twenty minutes later, at nine past three, the Senate agreed to its final shape and sent it on its way. In all that long passage, from a June floor to a July dawn, only a single vote was ever cast against.

Then the sun came up over the marsh, indifferent and generous, the way it always does. Stand at the edge of a shallow pond on a July morning, and you would hear it wake: a green frog twanging like a loose banjo string, the wet chuckle of a wren, the dry creak of last year’s reeds finding the wind. You would smell the sweet dark rot of a living wetland — that green, mineral breath the earth makes only where water is let to linger. You would feel the peat give underfoot, soft as a held breath.

Senate Bill 9 — the Wetlands Stewardship Act — is Delaware’s promise to look after water like this: the swamps, bogs, and vanishing ponds of the state’s interior, and the freshwater swales behind its dunes — the wetlands a 2023 Supreme Court ruling pulled outside the federal line. To feel what the promise is worth, you have to know what lives in the water it guards. So come inland, away from the coast we usually picture, into a country stranger and richer than any map admits.

The act does something quietly remarkable: it names, one by one, seven kinds of wetland that Senate Bill 9 calls Unique — and each of the seven is a world.

— Gregory S. Layton, The Delaware Project

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Begin with the coastal plain seasonal ponds, the shallow, secret basins scattered across Delaware’s Coastal Plain, concentrated most in New Castle and Kent. They fill with winter rains and a rising water table, and by late August, most have turned into cracked gray mud. Because they dry out, no fish can hold them — and that emptiness is the point, for it makes them a safe nursery. On a raw March night, the water rings with breeding frogs, and the oddest voice in the chorus, a hollow bark like a hound calling up a well, belongs to the barking treefrog, a plump green climber near the northern edge of its range. Around it, fairy shrimp row upside-down through water that will not last the season, and a marbled salamander guards the eggs she laid last autumn in the dry basin, waiting for rain to float them free. Later, a hand-long salamander, marbled gold on black, hauls itself in to breed and then vanishes underground for the year — the Eastern tiger salamander, among the rarest amphibians in the state — a life of going down and coming back. On a sunlit log rests a small black turtle flecked with yellow, as though flicked with a wet paintbrush: the spotted turtle, a Delaware species of concern squeezed by lost habitat and the poacher’s bucket. And when the pond draws down and bares its sandy rim, a low pink daisy with a gold eye opens where the water stood — rose coreopsis, one of the state’s rare pond-shore plants.

Move to the coast, and the wetland changes again. Behind the foredune, in the low damp swales where a skin of fresh water floats over salt, lives the Bethany Beach firefly — a rare firefly of the Delmarva coast, first known from Delaware. For a few nights from late June into July, its males rise over the sedge with a quick double flash of green, a pulse of light meant for no one but each other.

Inland and north, where cold groundwater seeps to the surface and never quite lets go, lie the peat-land fens. Kneel, and the ground is a wet sponge of sphagnum, cool to the hand even in July. The sundew grows here, no wider than a coin, its red tentacles beaded with glue that shines like dew and is a trap; orchids stand in the sedge, the fringed pink of rose pogonia and the magenta torch of grass-pink. Down in the tussocks, small enough to curl in a cupped hand, hides the bog turtle — North America's smallest turtle, an orange blaze at each temple, so secretive that most people who live beside her never learn she is there. And at dusk, a slow, uncommon firefly threads the seeps: the mysterious lantern firefly, a rare light of the Delmarva peatlands, found in only a handful of places in Delaware and Maryland.

The north keeps its own kind of wetland, too — the Piedmont stream valley wetlands, threaded through the rolling hills above the fall line, where the water runs rather than stands, clear and cold over stone, and skunk cabbage shoulders up through the mud in earliest spring with a smell you do not forget. Buried in the clean gravel of such a stream lives one of the state's most exacting tenants: the dwarf wedgemussel, a freshwater mussel no longer than a thumb, federally endangered, so intolerant of dirty water that its presence signals the clean, steady flow so many creatures need. It asks only that we keep the water clean — the plainest request in all of nature, and among the hardest for us to grant.

Then come the swamps of standing timber. In the bald cypress swamps of the south — Trap Pond among the northernmost stands of wild bald cypress left in America — the trees rise straight from tea-dark, tannin-stained water, their knees breaking the surface like a congregation risen to sing, while high in the shade a small gold bird rings out a loud, ringing tweet-tweet-tweet: the prothonotary warbler.

And in the Atlantic white cedar swamps — dense, dark, and so fragrant that a single cut board will scent a whole shed — grows the cedar itself, and with it, and nowhere else, a small emerald butterfly whose caterpillars eat cedar and only cedar: Hessel's hairstreak, a green flake adrift in the canopy.

And there are the black ash seepage swamps — few and far between, and, as we will come to, already under the blade.

Kneel at a bog’s edge in high summer and a wild blueberry, warm from the sun, breaks sweet-then-tart across the tongue: the taste of ground too wet to plow and too dear to drain. All of it — the shrimp and the orchid, the turtle and the mussel, the cedar and the berry — is what Senate Bill 9 was written to stand between and the bulldozer.

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Here is the plain meaning of the morning: Until now, Delaware was the only mid-Atlantic state without protection for its own nontidal wetlands — the General Assembly said so in the bill’s opening words. When the Supreme Court’s Sackett decision redrew the federal boundary in 2023, roughly 75,000 acres in Delaware fell outside the line in a single stroke. Senate Bill 9 draws a state line where the federal one retreated and sets a goal we have never dared name: no net loss of wetland acreage or function, a reach for net gain, and the resilience of these lands to a changing climate held up as a public purpose. Where the federal government stepped back, Delaware stepped in.

And now an honest neighbor owes you the rest of it. A law is a frame, not a finished house.

Almost everything that will decide how much this protects has not yet been written. The meaning of the words themselves — what counts as a “wetland,” what is “nontidal,” what earns the guarded name Exceptional Value, how you tell a high-functioning marsh from a low one — along with the fees, the maps, and the screening tool, all wait to be drawn by a twenty-five-member advisory committee that must submit its proposed regulations to the State by the first of August, 2027. The terms are the whole game, and the game is only now beginning. Until those rules are adopted and published, the new protections sit on the books but are not yet in force — and in that gap, the old, narrow rules carry on, and the 75,000 acres wait.

And the wetlands will not wait politely while we finish. The sea is leaning in — salt creeping up the freshwater creeks, killing cedar and cypress from the roots and leaving the bleached gray spars we call ghost forests. The emerald ash borer, a metallic-green beetle no longer than a fingernail, is killing ash trees across the state, the black ash of these seepage swamps among them — imperiling one of the very seven kinds this act just named. Ditches drain. Nutrients run, greening water that ought to run clear. Phragmites marches in, tall and dense and silent, until a single plant stands where a hundred used to breathe.

These are not reasons for despair. They are the work. A wetland saved is not saved once. It is saved, and saved again — the way you keep a house, or a friendship, or a child — by showing up.

So, the passage of Senate Bill 9 is a good morning and a true one. Let yourself feel it. For decades, the idea of protecting these acres was barely a whisper in Dover; this morning, it is a bill the Governor will be asked to sign. That happened because neighbors who agree about almost nothing — farmers, home builders, and conservation groups — decided this one thing was worth agreeing on.

The next room to build is the committee table, along with the rules that come from it. That committee must first meet by the first of August — less than a month from now — and then has until 2027 to write the rules that give this law its teeth. Watch for the Governor’s pen. And when those rules are drawn, be the neighbor in the room, the letter on the desk, the plain voice at the hearing. The bill was the easy part; the keeping is the rest of our lives.

The bog turtle does not know a bill has passed. She knows only that the water held. Let us keep it holding.

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See clearly. Do the work. Build together.

Good Morning, Neighbors.

A week ago, the 153rd General Assembly finished its work. The closing session ran through the night. The last vote we tracked came at 5:32 in the morning on July 1. Lawmakers went home at dawn.

A week is enough time to see the whole board. So today we do three things. We report how all 26 bills we tracked ended up. We look hard at the state budget you are paying for. And we follow the story past the gavel — because for 16 of these bills, the most important month is the one we are in right now.

– Gregory S. Layton, The Delaware Project

See Clearly. Do the Work. Build Together.

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First, a correction

In our sine die coverage, we told you the session’s final vote came at 3:09 AM, when the Senate agreed to the Wetlands Stewardship Act. That was wrong. The official record shows the chambers kept voting for more than two hours after that. The bond bill passed the Senate at 4:12 AM. The grants-in-aid bill cleared its last vote at 5:32 AM. We own the error, and the record here is the corrected one.

The final ledger

We followed 26 bills from start to finish. Here is where they landed.

Twenty-one passed both chambers. Seventeen of them are ordinary bills — new laws, once the Governor signs them. The other four are constitutional amendments and follow a different path. We will walk that road in a minute.

Five did not make it. One was voted down. Four simply ran out of time — they died waiting in a committee or on a calendar when the gavel fell.

What happens after the gavel

Here is the part most coverage skips. Passing the General Assembly does not make a bill a law. Every bill still needs an answer from the Governor — and there is more than one answer he can give.

He can sign it. It becomes law. Simple.

He can veto it — send it back and say no. But in Delaware, a veto is not the last word. Lawmakers can override it: if three-fifths of all the members elected to each chamber vote to pass the bill again, it becomes law over the Governor’s objection. That is 25 votes in the House and 13 in the Senate.

And that is not a dusty rule in an old book. It happened in the middle of the long night we just covered. Last August, Governor Meyer vetoed SB 75, a bill that limits how far counties can zone retail marijuana stores out of existence. The Senate voted in January to override, 14 to 6. Then, at 3:26 in the morning on July 1 — the session’s last day — the House finished the job, 25 to 16. Look at that House number: 25 is the bare three-fifths minimum. Not one vote to spare. SB 75 is law today, and no Governor’s signature appears on it anywhere.

Why three in the morning? Because the chance was about to vanish. An override must happen before the Assembly that passed the bill closes for good. The bill’s House sponsor, Rep. Osienski, put it plainly on the floor: if they did not act before the end, “it just can’t come back up.” One member asked, in reply, why the vote had to come while the state was asleep. Both things are on the record. When the gavel falls for the last time, every unfinished override dies with the session.

Or the governor can let the clock answer for him. The Delaware Constitution provides that after the Assembly adjourns for good, a bill becomes law only if the Governor approves it within 30 days. No signature by the deadline, no law. There is no quiet path where a bill becomes law on its own — and because a bill that misses the deadline is never sent back to lawmakers, there is nothing for them to override. After adjournment, silence kills.

That clock started on July 1. It runs out at the end of this month.

So where do we stand? The pen is moving. This morning — July 7 — Governor Meyer signed his first bills since the budget: a three-bill banking package covering digital assets and stablecoins. None of those three were on our tracked list. Of the seventeen bills we followed, one is law so far — the operating budget, signed June 30 — and sixteen are still waiting. That is not a warning sign. End-of-session bills are signed in waves through July, and today's ceremony says the waves have begun. We will publish the signing ledger as it fills in.

One more wrinkle worth knowing: on money bills, the Governor does not have to take all or nothing. The Constitution allows him to strike individual spending items and sign the rest. Keep that in mind as we turn to the budget.

The budget, in full

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Your state budget is not one bill. It is four, and each does a different job.

The operating budget (SB 335) — signed June 30. This is the everyday budget: schools, health care, state workers, public safety. It totals about $7.53 billion in General Fund spending for the year that started July 1. It passed the Senate 21–0 and the House 36–3.

The one-time supplement (SB 336). Exactly $146,199,300 in one-time spending, kept apart from the everyday budget so it does not lock in future costs. Its largest single line — $100 million, about 68 cents of every supplemental dollar — is set aside for the overhaul of Delaware's public school funding. The fine print rewards close reading, too. Nearly $12 million goes to running the 2026 elections: election day, early voting, and upgrades to the voter-registration and campaign-finance systems. And one line — $967,600 for freshwater wetlands — only unlocks due to SB 9 passing. The budget was betting on the wetlands bill before it passed.

The bond bill (HB 500). The construction budget: roads, schools, water projects, ports. About $1.26 billion, including $110 million tied to the Port of Wilmington’s Edgemoor expansion. It passed the House 39–1 at 3:41 AM and the Senate 17–3 at 4:12 AM.

Grants-in-aid (SB 337). About $99.4 million for the groups that hold communities together: $40.5 million for government units and senior centers, $42.3 million for one-time grants and community agencies, $15.5 million for volunteer fire and ambulance companies, and just under $1 million for veterans’ organizations. It cleared its final vote — 39–0 in the House — at 5:32 AM.

Now, the civics. The bond bill and grants-in-aid each needed a three-fourths supermajority — but for two different reasons, and the difference matters. The bond bill needs three-fourths of the vote because it lets the state borrow money. Grants-in-aid need three-fourths because they send public money to groups that are not part of the state — the fire companies and nonprofits named in the bill. Same steep bar. Two different rules. In a 21-seat Senate, three-fourths means 16 votes — and the bond bill got 17. One vote to spare, at four in the morning.

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The energy session: who pays, and who builds

The biggest cluster of the year was about your electric bill, and the two bills work as a matched pair.

HS 1 for HB 233 answers who pays. It puts the biggest power users — think data centers — into their own rate class, so the grid costs they generate are assigned to them rather than spread across everyone’s monthly bill.

HB 445 answers who builds. Those same large users must produce or buy their own clean power, ramping up to 100 percent of their needs within ten years — instead of drawing down the supply the rest of us depend on.

Passed together, they are one idea in two halves: if you grow the demand, you carry your own weight. Both now sit on the Governor’s desk.

Around that pair:

SB 326 caps how much of Delmarva Power’s non-essential capital spending can be billed back to customers — $70 million a year through 2027, then five percent of the company’s rate base after that. It does not touch storm response or tree trimming.

Three consumer-protection bills — SB 308 on load forecasting, SB 321 on community energy billing, and HB 393 on third-party electric suppliers — passed earlier and also await signature.

And one died with zero votes against it. HB 470, which would have let Delmarva own battery storage, passed the House 39–0 on June 18 — and then sat in a Senate committee until the session ended. A bill nobody voted against can still run out of time. That is the nature of the final week.

How the votes fell

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You asked us to follow the data-center bills closely, so here is the voting record, plainly told. Delaware’s House has 27 Democrats and 14 Republicans. The Senate has 15 Democrats and 6 Republicans.

The record shows a clear split — not between the parties on everything, but between two kinds of energy bills.

On utility accountability, the parties largely agreed. SB 326, the Delmarva spending cap, passed the Senate 20 to 1. In the House, every Democrat and three Republicans voted yes. The battery storage bill passed the House with no opposition. The consumer-protection bills drew wide support from both parties.

On the data-center pair, the chambers split by party — with one striking exception. HS 1 for HB 233 never received a single Republican yes vote at any stage: 25–9 in the House in June, 15–6 on a straight party-line vote in the Senate, and 27–8 on the final House vote, where six Republicans answered “not voting” instead of no. Every Democratic vote cast on the bill, in both chambers, was a yes.

HB 445 is the exception, and it is a puzzle worth sitting with. In June, four House Republicans voted for it — one was a co-sponsor. Then the Senate amended it and passed it 21 to 0: every Democrat and every Republican. Nine hours later, the same text came back to the House, and Republican support fell to zero — eight no votes, six “not voting,” and the co-sponsor now voting no. Same bill. Same night. Two chambers of the same party, on opposite sides of the board.

We are not going to tell you why — the roll call records votes, not reasons. But one recorded fact points to the fight: at 2:12 AM, a motion was made to recess so members could read the Senate’s amendment before voting on it. It failed, 15 to 26 — thirteen Republicans and two Democrats voted to pause and read; the majority voted to press on. Nine minutes later, the House passed the bill. Whatever else divided the chamber at two in the morning, the record shows a dispute over time to read.

The long night, on the record

For those who like their history hour by hour, here is closing night as the roll calls tell it.

• 9:45 PM — The House passes SB 326, the Delmarva spending cap, 30–11.

• 10:01 PM — The Senate passes HB 445 unanimously, 21–0.

• 10:50 PM — The Senate passes HS 1 for HB 233, 15–6.

• 1:25 AM — The Senate passes HB 180, the voting-rights restoration amendment, 16–5 — lifted from the table where it had been laid the evening before.

• 2:12 AM — A motion to recess and read the amendment to HB 445 fails, 15–26.

• 2:21 AM — The House gives HB 445 final passage, 26–8.

• 2:37 AM — The House gives HS 1 for HB 233 final passage, 27–8.

• 2:43 AM — The House passes the hospital-cost bill, SS 2 for SB 1, 41–0.

• 3:09 AM — The Senate agrees to the Wetlands Stewardship Act, SB 9, 20–0.

• 3:41 AM / 4:12 AM — The bond bill passes the House, then the Senate.

• 4:14 AM / 5:32 AM — Grants-in-aid passes the Senate, then the House. The board goes dark.

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The Constitution moves slowly — on purpose

Delaware changes its Constitution in an unusual way. An amendment must pass the General Assembly twice — once now, and once again, word for word, after the next general election, by the newly elected Assembly. The Governor never signs it. The election in between is the public’s say. So an amendment that passed this year is only halfway home.

Four of our tracked amendments finished that first leg and now wait for the Assembly you will elect in November:

• The right to marry (SS 2 for SB 100) — defeated in the House in late June, revived, and passed 28–12 on the second try. Twenty-eight votes is the bare two-thirds minimum. Not one vote to spare.

• Citizen voting (HB 430) — says only people, not corporations, may vote.

• Constitutional cleanup (HS 1 for HB 320) — fixes outdated wording; no policy change.

• Voting-rights restoration (HB 180) — ends the permanent loss of voting rights after a felony conviction, passed 16–5 in the Senate at 1:25 AM.

Three amendments fell short. Reproductive Freedom (SS 1 for SB 5) passed the Senate back in March 2025 but never got a House floor vote. Voter-registration timing (HS 1 for HB 88) was defeated 26–14 — two votes short of two-thirds — and though a revival was signaled, it was never called. And HS 1 for HB 440, which would have let voters approve future amendments directly, by referendum, never reached a floor vote at all. It died under the very two-step rule it was written to change.

Here is the plain math behind all of this. Two-thirds of the House is 28 of 41. Two-thirds of the Senate is 14 of 21. When the bar is that high, a handful of votes decides whether a change moves forward or waits two more years. And in November, you are not just choosing lawmakers — you are choosing the people who will cast the second-leg votes on all four surviving amendments. A vote this fall is, quietly, a vote on those four questions, too.

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The rest of the ledger

Hospital costs: SS 2 for SB 1 did something rare — it passed with zero no votes in either chamber: 21–0 in the Senate, 41–0 in the House. Starting with 2028 rate filings, it ties what hospitals can charge health plans to Medicare-based benchmarks, and it pushes insurers to put more of each health-care dollar into primary care.

Housing: The Housing for Every Delawarean Act (SS 2 for SB 23) cleared both chambers.

Wetlands: SB 9 builds a state permit program for roughly 75,000 acres of nontidal wetlands that a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling left unprotected. It was the 3:09 AM vote.

Voting: the Delaware John Lewis Voting Rights Act (HB 444) — state-level voting protections, effective July 2027 — passed the Senate 21-0.

Schools: two funding bills (SB 302 and SB 303) passed without a single no vote.

Firearms: dealer licensing (SS 1 for SB 300) crossed on a 14–7 Senate concurrence — a three-fifths bill, because its trigger is a license fee.

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Beyond the gavel: three things to watch

1. The signing ledger. Sixteen bills, thirty days, one pen. We will track every signature — and any item the Governor strikes from the money bills — through the end of July.

2. Your electric bill, at the PSC. The action has moved from Legislative Hall to the Public Service Commission. On June 29, Governor Meyer publicly asked the PSC to keep Delmarva’s delivery rates unchanged while it reviews the company’s request for an increase. And the public comment window on Delmarva’s standard-offer-service docket runs into late July. That is a place where your voice counts right now, before any newly elected official takes a seat.

3. November. Four constitutional amendments are waiting for the Assembly you elect this fall.

That is the whole session, neighbors — 26 bills, start to finish, and the month that decides what sticks. Thank you for walking with us.

Want to reach the people who cast these votes, or the office holding the pen? Text RESIST to 50409, and Resistbot will carry your words.

The Delaware Project — Tools to govern ourselves together.

Good Evening, Neighbors.

Nine days. That’s what remains before Delaware’s 2026 primary field takes its shape. At noon on Tuesday, July 14, major-party candidate filing closes — the primary ballot will be set, and the November picture will come into focus, though minor-party, unaffiliated, and write-in candidates have their own routes and later dates.

Everything below reflects the state’s candidate lists as of July 3 — a snapshot, not the final word, because the field keeps forming right up to the deadline. But the shape is already clear. This is a turnover year — and one House seat could decide whether Democrats can take the first step toward amending Delaware’s constitution without a single Republican vote.

Let’s walk through it together.

— Gregory S. Layton, The Delaware Project

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What we're voting on

This year, Delaware fills a U.S. Senate seat and our lone U.S. House seat; three statewide row offices — Attorney General, Treasurer, and Auditor; all 41 State House seats and 11 of the 21 State Senate seats; and county offices in New Castle, Kent, and Sussex. Governor and Insurance Commissioner sit this cycle out — they return in 2028.

The field, by the numbers

From the July 3 lists:

• 26 contested primaries — 22 Democratic, 4 Republican

• 10 open seats — the Treasurer’s office, two State Senate seats, seven State House seats

• 17 incumbents facing challengers — among them a sitting Attorney General and the House Majority Leader

The geography tells its own story. Nearly all the Democratic primaries cluster in New Castle County. The four Republican primaries are the U.S. Senate race and three downstate House seats.

Who's leaving

A big turnover wave is moving through Dover. Five House Republicans are stepping away — Jeff Hilovsky (RD 4), Kevin Hensley (RD 9), Charles Postles (RD 33), Ronald Gray (RD 38), and Richard Collins (RD 41) — three in Sussex, one in Kent, one in southern New Castle. Democrat Debra Heffernan (RD 6) is retiring, too. So is the Senate’s highest-ranking member, President Pro Tempore Dave Sokola (SD 8), along with Republican Sen. Dave Lawson (SD 15). Statewide, Treasurer Colleen Davis is stepping down.

And the seventh open House seat opens not by retirement but by ambition: Rep. Mara Gorman (RD 23) is running for Sokola’s Senate seat, and her House seat opens behind her.

Add it up: seven open House seats, two open Senate seats, one open statewide office. Ten in all.

The supermajority question

Here’s why a handful of these races carry weight far beyond their district lines.

Amending Delaware’s constitution requires a two-thirds vote in each chamber — passed twice in two consecutive General Assemblies, with an election in between (Article XVI). It requires no Governor’s signature and never goes to the voters for ratification. Delaware is the only state where constitutional amendments proposed by the legislature become law without voter ratification.

Democrats already hold two-thirds of the Senate: 15 of 21 seats, with 14 being the threshold. In the House, they hold 27 of 41 — one seat short of the 28 needed. One more House seat would let Democrats pass the first leg of a constitutional amendment without a single Republican vote — though any amendment must clear the same two-thirds bar again in the next General Assembly, after another election.

The nearest opening sits in RD 9, where Hensley is retiring: a district with 10,164 registered Democrats to 5,854 Republicans (and 7,799 unaffiliated voters), yet Hensley held the seat for years as a Republican. Three Democrats are competing in the primary there; Republican Jamar Money has filed for November.

Whatever your politics, that’s a reason September matters. Primaries are where these candidates get chosen — and the neighbors who show up carry real weight.

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Watch the Treasurer's race

Colleen Davis’s retirement leaves a three-way Democratic primary: Ted Lauzen, Mike Miller, and Michael Alexander Smith. As of July 3, no Republican had filed. If the major-party field holds through July 14, that primary would be the only major-party contest listed for the office — and could be decisive in practice.

Dates & details

Delaware runs closed primaries — you vote in your own party’s contest. The deadline to switch parties (May 29) has passed, with one exception: if the DMV registered you automatically and never asked your party, you can still choose one any time through September 15 — and 2026 is the last year that quirk applies.

• Register to vote (or update your address) by Saturday, August 22 — check your status at ivote.de.gov.

• Early voting: September 2–5 and 8 (7 a.m.–7 p.m.), then September 9–13 (11 a.m.–7 p.m.). No early voting September 6–7.

• Absentee: request by September 11; ballots must be received — not just postmarked — by 8 p.m. on Primary Day.

• Primary Day: Tuesday, September 15, polls open 7 a.m.–8 p.m.

Thinking of running?

The major-party door stays open until noon, Tuesday, July 14. Statewide candidates file with the State Election Commissioner; legislative and county candidates file at the county elections office where they’re registered. Pay the party filing fee by check (capped at 1% of the office’s salary for the term), provide residency-verification documents, and request the required State Bureau of Identification background check by the filing deadline — details on the state’s “Getting on the Ballot” page. Running outside the major parties? Independent and minor-party candidates have their own routes and later dates, laid out on the same page. Second thoughts? Withdraw by 4:30 p.m. Friday, July 17, and keep your fee.

What we’re watching between now and July 14

• Does a Republican file for Treasurer? As of July 3, none had.

• New Castle County Council District 3. Councilwoman Janet Kilpatrick had not filed as of July 3, and we’ve seen no announcement either way — the one seat whose status is genuinely unresolved. (Republican Melissa Brayman is listed as a provisional filer for November.)

• Late entries. The state’s lists update each business day; any race can still change.

We’ll update the board once the deadline passes.

The ballot is nearly set. What comes next belongs to us — learning the names, checking our registration, showing up in September. Do the small, unglamorous thing that makes the big thing possible.

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See Clearly. Do the Work. Build Together.

Sources: Delaware Department of Elections candidate lists (updated July 3, 2026, 7:56 p.m.) and primary election pages; Delaware House and Senate caucus rosters; Delaware Constitution, Articles II, III, and XVI; Spotlight Delaware (May 18, 2026); Ballotpedia. This piece is a dated filing snapshot — races may change through the July 14 deadline.

Good Morning, Neighbors.

Drive any Delaware road this month, and you can read the yards like a page. One lawn has gone to straw. The gardener stands out in the evening with a hose, coaxing petunias that wilt by noon, paying the water bill twice over, losing a slow fight to a sky that will not rain. Next door, another yard stands green. Bees work a stand of purple spikes. A hummingbird drops in at a spray of red. That ground has not been watered in weeks — and it does not need to be.

This is no ordinary dry spell. As I write, the whole of Delaware sits in drought — all three counties, every acre of it — and nearly half the state has slipped into “extreme,” the worst grade the drought map keeps. It has been the fourth-driest start to a year here since the record began in 1895. The heat has risen to meet it: the National Weather Service has laid an Extreme Heat Warning over the entire state through the Fourth of July, with highs near 100 and a heat index climbing toward 110. In a summer like this, the choice a gardener made last fall is written plainly across the yard for the whole street to read.

The difference is not luck, and it is not a greener thumb. It is a choice, made once, at planting time. One gardener bought what the big store stacked by the door. The other planted what belongs here.

You can be either kind of gardener. This is a note about becoming the second — and why, in a hard, dry summer, that choice quietly says something about who you are.

— Greg Layton, The Delaware Project

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The plants that belong here are built for here

Start with a plain fact. The wild plants of Delaware have met this drought before. They met it a hundred years ago, and a thousand, long before the first fence line went up. Heat, sand, clay, salt wind, an August that bakes and a March that floods — our native plants were shaped by all of it. They send their roots down deep, hold their water, and wait. They do not quit when the rain does. That is not a garden trick. That is ten thousand years of practice, bred into the root.

Now walk into a big-box garden center. The front table is a wall of color, bred bright for the greenhouse and the sale, most of it born far from here and built for a world of steady water and mild days. Buy it, and you have signed up to stand in against a Delaware summer with a hose and a prayer. The natives — if the store carries them at all — ask for none of that. They were made for the very heat that is wilting everything else.

Choose the plants that already know this place, and the place takes care of them. That is the whole secret. Right plant, right spot, and the work mostly does itself.

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What a native garden really is

But there is more here than a smaller water bill, and it is the part that matters most.

A yard of native plants is not just decoration. It is a table you set for your neighbors — and by neighbors I mean the small, winged lives that cannot cross a season without us. The monarch cannot raise her young on a petunia; she needs milkweed, and milkweed is vanishing from the land. The ruby-throated hummingbird, back from Mexico in May and half-starved, needs a red bloom open and waiting. The bees who pollinate a third of what we eat need flower after flower, spring to frost. Plant what they grew up beside, and you feed them. Leave them only lawn and imported color, and they go hungry at your door.

And it runs deeper than nectar. Most of what a songbird carries to its chicks is not seed but caterpillar — soft, green, easy to swallow, the one food a nestling can grow on. Down at the University of Delaware, the entomologist Doug Tallamy has spent years tracing where those caterpillars come from: native plants, and almost only native plants. A native oak or a native blueberry feeds hundreds of kinds of caterpillars; an import from another continent feeds almost none, because the insects here never learned to eat it. A recent Delaware study made it plain — cameras on bluebird nest boxes caught the parents flying in, and more than four in ten of the bites they brought their young were caterpillars. No native plants, no caterpillars. No caterpillars, no birds.

That is the quiet machinery a native yard sets running, one link pulling the next. The milkweed you plant for the monarch also fills the wren’s beak, by way of the caterpillars it raises. The serviceberry that drops June fruit for the catbird first feeds the moths a chickadee hunts, branch by branch. And a few plants carry far more of this load than all the rest — the oaks and wild cherries, the goldenrods, and, on this very list, the highbush blueberry; ecologists call them keystone plants, because so much of the living web hangs on them. Set even one in the ground and you are not decorating. You are holding up a corner of the world.

So this is what a native garden is, underneath: an act of care. You are tending a small patch of the living world and giving shelter to the ones who lean on it. There is no gentler power a person holds — to make a piece of ground kinder than you found it.

Where to begin

Match each plant to the ground you already have, and let it go to work.

For the hot, dry, sun-struck ground — the strip by the mailbox, the bank that bakes:

• Butterfly weed roots deep, drinks from far below the dust, and burns bright orange all July. It is milkweed — plant it, and you have joined the monarch’s road.

• Wild bergamot rises in a soft lavender haze that smells of mint when you brush it. Bees mob it; so do the little clearwing moths that hover like hummingbirds at dusk.

• Black-eyed Susan gives weeks of gold on no water at all, then feeds the goldfinches its seed come fall.

• Flowering spurge throws a cloud of tiny white blooms — a home-grown stand-in for baby’s breath — and it grows wild in our dry fields and roadsides, so your hard strip is already its kind of home.

For the low, wet ground — the dip that stays damp, the corner by the downspout:

• Cardinal flower lifts a spike of pure scarlet built for one guest: the hummingbird, whose long bill fits its long throat like a key in a lock.

• New England aster closes the season in deep purple, just as the last monarchs pass through Delaware on their long haul south — the late fuel that carries them.

• Blazing star sends up violet spikes that bloom from the top down, and the butterflies and native bees work them hard all summer.

For the shady ground — under the trees, along the north wall:

• Wild columbine hangs red-and-gold lanterns in spring, right when the first hungry hummingbirds arrive, and little else is open.

• Golden ragwort spreads a low, tidy carpet that stays green through winter and lifts a yellow haze each spring — living mulch that tends itself.

• Cinnamon fern unrolls tall, arching fronds in a wet, shaded corner and gives a garden the green bones it needs.

For a wall, a post, or a fence — coral honeysuckle, our own well-mannered vine. You know the honeysuckle that strangles our hedgerows and swallows whole trees: that is the invader from Japan. This one is native, and it behaves. It hangs coral trumpets a hummingbird cannot pass up, then sets berries the songbirds eat. Same family, opposite story. Plant the neighbor, not the bully.

And if you plant nothing else, plant a shrub — the long gift, the one that outlives the season and often the gardener too:

• Serviceberry flowers white in April, then hands you sweet June berries the birds will race you for — a small tree that feeds two tables at once.

• Highbush blueberry gives you berries off your own bush, draws some thirty kinds of songbirds, and turns a deep, clean red in fall. Ours by birth, and delicious.

• Spicebush is the quiet workhorse of the shade: its leaves raise the spicebush swallowtail, and its red berries fuel the thrushes on their way south.

A shrub is a promise. You set it in the ground now, and it feeds birds and children long after you have stopped counting the summers.

The yard that talks

Here is a thing the drought makes plain. When your yard stands green and full of wings in a brown August, the street reads it — the same way you read those roadside yards on your drive. A neighbor slows down. Someone asks what that purple spike is, or how you keep it alive without a hose. And you get to tell them.

That is not a small thing. Yards like this are spreading across the First State, one at a time, because one green corner makes the next person want one. You are not only planting a garden. You are joining a quiet company of Delawareans who have decided that home ground should hold life — and you are showing the next person how it is done.

Learn it where it grows

You do not have to figure this out alone, either. Right here in Delaware, up in Hockessin, sits Mt. Cuba Center — a native-plant garden and research center that has spent decades studying which of our wild plants best serve our wildlife and teaching the rest of us how to grow them. Walk their gardens, and you can see these plants full-grown before you buy one; lean on their trial research, and you can choose well; sign up for a hands-on class in native gardening or landscape design, and you can learn the craft from people who know it cold. Several of the plants pictured here were photographed at Mt. Cuba. If you want a place to begin, begin with them.

The ones that need us most

A few of these have grown scarce in Delaware’s own ground. The state’s plant records show wild bergamot, blazing star, and wild columbine hanging on in only a county or two — thinner now than they once were, squeezed out by pavement, plowing, and the slow loss of the open, sunny places they favor. That is not a reason to leave them off your list. It is the best reason to put them on it.

When you set a scarce native in your yard, you are doing more than filling a bed. You are giving a Delaware plant back a little of the ground it lost — a small, private act of bringing it home. Just never take them from the wild; digging a rare plant only deepens the hole it is already in. Buy them instead from the people who raise them for exactly this. Native-plant nurseries carry them, and so do the Delaware Nature Society’s native plant sales — the next is September 19 — where bergamot, blazing star, and columbine are regulars alongside dozens more, raised close to home (DelNature.org).

Do that, and your yard becomes a small refuge for the very plants that need one. Enough refuges, stitched yard to yard down a street, and a scarce native stops merely hanging on — and starts, quietly, to come back.

Start with one plant, one spot

You do not have to tear out your lawn this weekend. That is the very idea that stops most people before they start. Do the opposite. Pick one plant and one spot. A single butterfly weed in the hot corner. One clump of cardinal flower where the ground stays wet. Set it in the cool of fall, water it through its first season while the roots reach down, and then step back and let Delaware take over.

Then watch who comes. The first monarch on the milkweed. The first ruby-throat at the red trumpets. The first fistful of blueberries in June. Small acts, quick rewards — and somewhere in there, without ever quite deciding to, you become the kind of person who tends this ground. That is how it always starts. One plant, one spot, and a small change in who you are.

We do not so much own this land as keep it for a while, and hand it on. The birds that nest in your serviceberry will raise their young there long after you. The monarch you send south this fall will send her great-grandchildren back to your milkweed. That is the bargain, and it is a good one: care for a small patch of Delaware, and it will care for the ones who come after you.

So plant something that belongs here. Set the table for your neighbors. Give the ground something better to remember.

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See clearly. Do the work. Build together.

Good Morning, Neighbors,

Two hundred fifty years ago this summer, a handful of colonies decided to build something new. Delaware — small, salt-marsh green, and first to say yes to the Constitution — has always punched above its weight in that story. This weekend, the whole state turns out to mark the milestone: fireworks over the Christina and the bay, hand-cranked ice cream on Shipcarpenter Street, kids on bikes trailing streamers, and the Declaration read aloud on the Circle in Georgetown.

Here’s where to be, day by day, from the Brandywine to the Broadkill.

A few notes before you pack the cooler. Early July runs hot and humid here, so bring water, sunscreen, and a little patience for holiday traffic. Times can shift with weather and heat — I’ve named each host so you can double-check before you head out. And the State Fire Marshal is asking for extra caution this year: leave the big shows to the pros, and keep sparklers well away from little hands.

— Gregory S. Layton, The Delaware Project

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Friday, July 3

Northern Delaware (New Castle County)

Brewing Change for USA 250 — 10–11 a.m. Read House & Gardens, 42 The Strand, New Castle. Aaron Vederman and Dwayne Foster of The Mercury Cafe and Teahouse tell the story of tea, boycotts, and the power of buying local during the Revolution — with a tea-blending session. $15/person; ticket includes a house tour, through the Delaware Historical Society.

Independence in Action! — Noon–4 p.m. Delaware Historical Society, 500 block of N. Market St., Wilmington. A family afternoon for the Declaration’s 250th: Delaware Shakespeare’s Embers of Freedom, Revolutionary-era writing and printing, a little espionage, and document discovery. Free. Registration is required for the 12 p.m. Delaware Shakespeare performance in Old Town Hall.

Dog Days of Summer: 1776 — 8–10:30 p.m. New Castle Court House Museum, 211 Delaware St., New Castle. An outdoor screening of 1776 on the Green, with a little history of the film. Well-behaved leashed dogs welcome.

Central Delaware (Kent County)

Bally’s Dover Casino Resort Fireworks — 5–10 p.m., fireworks at dusk (about 9 p.m.). Bally’s Dover Casino Resort, Dover. Food trucks, giveaways, photo ops, and a fireworks display. Free to attend.

Southern Delaware & the beaches (Sussex County)

Red, White & Zoobilee — 7–9 p.m. 3 Palms Zoo & Education Center, 1060 Vandyke Greenspring Rd., Townsend. A calm, sensory-friendly twilight at the rescue sanctuary: lantern-lit paths, rescue stories, marshmallows at the Old Glory Gazebo, and classic American music. No fireworks. $6/person; babies 12 months and under free. Tickets online or at the gate.

Milford: Light Up the Night Laser Spectacular — 5–9:30 p.m., laser show at 9 p.m. Bicentennial Park, NE Front Street, Milford. Live music from Mike Hines and The Look, plus vendors, artisans, food trucks, face painting, and family games — capped by a patriotic laser-light show instead of fireworks.

Bethany Beach: The Funsters in concert — 7:30 p.m. Bandstand, Garfield Parkway, Bethany Beach. A holiday-week concert to kick off Bethany’s celebration (this year also its 125th). Note: the town parade has been postponed — new date to come. Fireworks are set for Saturday night.

Old-Fashioned Sussex County Fourth of July Celebration (Day 2) — Georgetown Speedway, 22206 Speedway Rd., Georgetown. Friday brings a tractor pull and antique tractor show; the carnival runs all weekend. Some days are ticketed — check Georgetown Speedway for gate prices and ride wristbands.

Statewide

Governor’s Bike Tour — Connecting Delaware Communities — 9 a.m. at Marmy’s Creamery, 133 N. DuPont Blvd., Smyrna; 11:30 a.m. at Cowgirl’s Creamery at Emerson Farms, 1049 Jamison Corner Rd., Middletown. Day two of a three-day statewide ride linking small-town traditions, preserved history, and open space. Public stops — just show up.

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Saturday, July 4 — Independence Day

Northern Delaware (New Castle County)

A Day to Commemorate Our Patriots — 10 a.m.–3 p.m. Old Swedes Historic Site, 606 N. Church St., Wilmington. A free tribute to the 44 Revolutionary War patriots buried here, with the story of Old Swedes and New Sweden, an NPS 250th passport stamp, a “What America Means to Me” art exhibit, a wreath-laying, and a Let Freedom Ring bell ceremony. Free.

Grievances of the Declaration — noon–1 p.m. New Castle Court House Museum, 211 Delaware St., New Castle. A close read of the Declaration’s lesser-known grievances. Free.

Safari Sprint — July Fourth at Delaware Park — noon–7 p.m. Delaware Park Casino, 777 Delaware Park Blvd., Wilmington. Live racing, food trucks, vendors, and the family-friendly Safari Sprint races. Register through DelawarePark.com.

Celebrate 250 on the Riverfront — 2–10 p.m., fireworks around 9:30 p.m. over the Christina River. Wilmington Riverfront (Tubman-Garrett Riverfront Park, 80 Rosa Parks Dr.). The city’s marquee celebration: music, family activities, food, and local makers. Free. Two things happen within it —

• Tall Ship deck tours aboard the Kalmar Nyckel at Dravo Plaza, 920 Justison St. — 2–7 p.m. Free.

• Delaware Symphony Orchestra, a patriotic evening concert leading into the fireworks finale. (Confirm exact stage/seating with the Symphony.)

Guided House Tour at Rockwood — 2–3 p.m. Rockwood Park & Museum, 4651 Washington St. Ext., Wilmington. A tour tied to the We the People… exhibition, reading American identity through a historic house. Admission applies — check Rockwood for holiday pricing.

Central Delaware (Kent County)

Dover Fourth of July — main celebration 2–9 p.m. on Legislative Mall (between Legislative Avenue and Federal Street), downtown Dover, with food, vendors, music, and a downtown Independence Day parade. Mayor Christiansen gives opening remarks around 8 p.m. — with a tentative Dover Air Force Base flyover — and fireworks light up at 9:15 p.m., weather permitting. Alongside it on The Green —

Founding Father Costume Contest — sign-ups at noon, contest at 1 p.m. John Bell House, 43 The Green, Dover. Come as your favorite founder (categories reported as Best in Show, Best DIY, Best Humor, and Best Pup). The Green also hosts colonial lawn games, clothing and flag exhibits, and a Revolutionary Dover walking tour through the afternoon. In-person sign-ups at the John Bell House.

Revolutionary Dover Museum Exhibit — Dover Museum, downtown Dover. A Fourth of July exhibit on Dover’s Revolutionary-era story, part of the day’s downtown programming. (Check the Dover Museum for hours.)

Southern Delaware & the beaches (Sussex County)

Declaration of Independence readings on The Circle — 8 a.m., noon, and 4 p.m. Georgetown. The founding words, read aloud three times through the day.

Old-Fashioned Children’s Games — 9 a.m.–noon. Second Street, Lewes. Sack races and old-time fun for the little ones.

St. Peter’s Episcopal Church Art Show — 9 a.m.–3 p.m. A block from the Second Street games, Lewes. The parish’s annual holiday art show.

Henlopen Acres Independence Day Bike Parade — 9 a.m. Town marina on Tidewaters, Henlopen Acres. The 12th running of a much-loved neighborhood tradition.

Old Lewes Independence Day — 2–8 p.m. (see time note). Historic Lewes Shipcarpenter Street Campus, 110 Shipcarpenter St. An old-fashioned Fourth on the town campus: a Punch & Judy puppet show, musket-firing demonstrations by reenactors playing Delaware’s Revolutionary defenders, hand-cranked ice cream, tavern music from Forbes Road Frolic, colonial games, family crafts, and history-inspired refreshments from the Sussex Tavern and Lewistown Coffee-House. Free. Time note: Delaware 250 lists 2–8 p.m.; the Cape Gazette lists 10 a.m.–4 p.m. — one call to Historic Lewes (302-645-7670) will settle it.

Bring Mayberry Back to Milton — 10 a.m.–2 p.m. Memorial Park, Milton. A gentle, old-fashioned Fourth with entertainment, food, sack races, chess matches, a water-balloon fight, a pie-eating contest, and a bike-decorating contest and parade.

Broadkill Beach Fourth of July Parade — 10 a.m. Starts at California Ave. & N. Bayshore Dr., Broadkill Beach.

Prime Hook Beach Parade — 10 a.m. Begins at the north end of Shore Drive and ends at Prime Hook Road, celebrating its 30th year — with ice cream for the kids at the finish.

Trinity Faith Fourth of July Celebration & Car Show — 10 a.m.–3 p.m. New Road, Lewes. The church’s 30th annual: a car show, barbecue, bounce houses, a hay ride, and live entertainment.

Lewes Independence Day Boat Parade — around 2 p.m., Roosevelt Inlet down the Lewes-Rehoboth Canal to Fisherman’s Wharf. Watch from either bank as the judges pick the top boat.

Lewes Doo-Dah Parade — 5 p.m. Kicks off on Kings Highway and winds through downtown to Savannah Road near Lloyd’s Market. A joyful, come-as-you-are Lewes classic since 1968.

Bethany Beach: Uncaged in concert, then fireworks — concert at 7:30 p.m., fireworks after. Bandstand, Garfield Parkway, Bethany Beach.

Fireworks off the Lewes and Dewey beaches — at dusk. Go Fourth Lewes launches from a barge in the bay off Lewes Beach; Dewey Beach lights up at about the same time, from a barge in Rehoboth Bay off Northbeach.

More Sussex fireworks & festivities

Newark Fourth of July — event and vendors from 6 p.m., fireworks after dark. University of Delaware Athletic Complex, 631 S. College Ave., Newark.

Town of Laurel Fourth of July — festivities through the afternoon and evening; fireworks at dusk. 4th Street & Marshall Ave., Laurel.

Old-Fashioned Sussex County Fourth of July Celebration (Day 3) — Georgetown Speedway, Georgetown. The Funsters and Mike Hines play, followed by a tractor-pull exhibition and freestyle motocross, with fireworks around 9:30 p.m.

Statewide

Governor’s Bike Tour — Celebrating Independence Day Across the First State — the final day, with public stops: 10 a.m. at Cooch’s Bridge Historic Site, 961 S. Old Baltimore Pike, Newark; noon on The Green at Jessop’s Tavern, 114 Delaware St., New Castle; 3 p.m. at the Hockessin Fourth of July Parade; and a 7:30 p.m. finale on the Wilmington Riverfront.

Sunday, July 5

Northern Delaware (New Castle County)

Old Fashioned Town Picnic — 2–5 p.m. The Weldin House, 300 Philadelphia Pike, Wilmington (Brandywine Hundred). A free community picnic with food, games, entertainment, and historic displays at a restored local landmark. Free.

Colonial Odessa: Celebrating Delaware 250 — afternoon guided tours (roughly 1–4 p.m.). Historic Odessa Foundation, 201 Main St., Odessa. Walk the colonial village — homes, gardens, and decorative arts — and early Delaware history. Members free; adults $15; students, seniors, and groups $10; children under 6 free. (Closed July 4; confirm Sunday hours with Historic Odessa.)

Southern Delaware & the beaches (Sussex County)

Red, White & Bloom Kids’ Bike Parade (Dewey in Bloom) — 9:30–11:30 a.m. Begins on McKinley Avenue, bayside, Dewey Beach. Decorated bikes, a children’s planting activity, a moon bounce, face painting, a balloon artist, and sweet treats.

Old-Fashioned Sussex County Fourth of July Celebration (Day 4) — Georgetown Speedway, 22206 Speedway Rd., Georgetown. The festival wraps with a classic car show, and the carnival runs one last day. Some days are ticketed — check Georgetown Speedway.

Maull House Tours & Children’s Games — 1–5 p.m. The historic 1739 Thomas Maull House, Lewes. Free, docent-led tours and children’s games rooted in Lewes’s maritime and Revolutionary-era past. Free. (Confirm the exact address with the Colonel David Hall Chapter, NSDAR, before you go.)

Rehoboth Beach Independence Day Fireworks — 8–10 p.m., fireworks around 9:30 p.m. Bandstand, Beach & Boardwalk, 2 Rehoboth Ave., Rehoboth Beach. The Cape Region’s grand finale: fireworks launch from the beach at Brooklyn Avenue and are visible up and down the boardwalk, with The Funsters at the Bandstand at 8 p.m. and again after the show. Heads up: expect road closures downtown from early evening (the bandstand area closes to cars 6 p.m.–midnight). Consider the DART Park & Ride or the Jolly Trolley — and give yourself extra time.

(A note worth making: Dewey’s fireworks are Saturday the 4th, but Rehoboth’s are Sunday the 5th. Neighbors, different nights.)

All weekend: history and art to wander through

We the People… and Americans in History — Rockwood Park & Museum, Wilmington. Contemporary artists' and students’ work responds to American identity and the Declaration’s 250th, set in a historic house. Admission applies; confirm holiday hours.

An American Legacy: Self-Paced House Tour — Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library. A self-guided walk through colonial American architecture and decorative arts. Admission applies; confirm hours.

Voices From the Brandywine — Hagley Museum and Library, 298 Buck Rd., Wilmington. A self-guided, story-panel journey across Hagley’s historic acres and the people who shaped America along the Brandywine. Included with admission; confirm hours.

See clearly. Do the work. Build together.

Have an event I missed, or a correction? Reply and let me know — this is a living list, and I’ll keep it current through the weekend.

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Neighbors,

Every year, the state passes a Bond Bill — its plan for the big, lasting things it builds with borrowed money: roads, schools, public buildings, parks. This year’s bill is HB 500, and tucked inside it is one line worth a close look: $110 million for the Diamond State Port Corporation.

That’s the DSPC — the state-created company, often just called “the port corporation,” that owns the Port of Wilmington and is steering a planned new container terminal at Edgemoor, on the old DuPont plant site about three miles up the Delaware River from the Port.

Here’s the cleanest way to size it: HB 500 pays for that $110 million out of a $328 million pot of one-time “escheat” money — unclaimed property the state holds (old bank accounts, uncashed checks) until owners claim it. The Edgemoor line alone is about a third of that pot — the single largest piece of it.

But the money is only half the story. HB 500 also hands the state a new way around the permit fights that have dogged this project for years.

Read HB 500 · The Auditor’s report on the Port

— Gregory S. Layton, The Delaware Project

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What HB 500 actually does

Beyond the dollars, four things ride together:

• The money (Section 69). $110 million to DSPC to build the Delaware Container Terminal at Edgemoor — the single biggest line in the bill’s one-time escheat pot.

• The permit waiver (Section 69). The bill could let the Secretary of DNREC — the state’s environmental agency — waive any permit or approval the terminal needs, “as necessary” to get it built on time, and attach conditions to protect natural resources. But it also says those waivers and conditions can’t be appealed or reviewed by a court — including review tied to the Coastal Zone Act (Delaware’s 1971 law governing heavy industry along the shoreline) and the usual right to challenge a state agency in court.

• A freer hand on the operator’s deal (Section 75). The bill lets DSPC amend its current concession agreement — the contract under which a private company runs the Port — or strike new ones, despite some existing legal limits, as long as it later wins sign-off from the Bond Bill committee co-chairs, the Controller General, the Senate President Pro Tempore, and the Speaker of the House.

• A higher escheat ceiling (Section 76). The bill raises the annual cap on how much unclaimed property money can flow into the General Fund — from $554 million to $614 million, a $60 million bump.

Put plainly: HB 500 doesn’t just fund Edgemoor. It funds it, gives DNREC a project-specific waiver tool, blocks court review of that tool, gives DSPC more room to remake its operator deal, and lifts the escheat cap. To judge that package, you have to know the fight it’s built to end.

The fight the waiver is meant to end

Edgemoor has spent years tangled in court, and the state’s permits kept getting thrown back.

• In October 2024, a federal judge revoked the Army Corps of Engineers’ permits — the Section 10/404 permit and the Section 408 authorization — after finding the Corps hadn’t reasoned through its navigation-and-safety review. DSPC asked to join the case to defend the permits, but the court denied the request.

• In April 2025, a Delaware judge reversed and sent back the state’s Subaqueous Lands permit, ruling the Environmental Appeals Board hadn’t made findings, weighed the evidence, or explained itself well enough for a court to review.

The challengers in both cases were the Port’s competitors — rival terminal operators up and down the river, including the Philadelphia Port Authority and operators tied to Holt Logistics. That cuts two ways, and both are fair: the courts found real flaws in the reviews — but the people who brought the cases also have a business reason to slow a new rival down.

Then, in April 2026, the Army Corps re-issued the federal permits. In a detailed memorandum, it worked back through the navigation, safety, and dredging questions the court had raised and re-granted the Section 10/404 permit and the Section 408 authorization. DSPC and Enstructure amended their development agreement, and on May 26 the port corporation announced the project was ready to move “from planning to execution.” Its official notice says the finished terminal — at full buildout, across three phases — would handle up to 1.2 million TEUs a year (”twenty-foot equivalent units,” the standard way to count shipping containers).

So why keep a waiver in the budget if the federal permits are back? Because the state-side permit is the piece still exposed, and the competitors can keep appealing. Section 69 would let the state clear what’s left and close the courthouse door on it.

That is the heart of the choice. One reading: after a decade of delay and obstruction, the state is finally clearing the snags to protect a strategic asset and the jobs riding on it. The other: the state is setting aside ordinary environmental review and removing judges from a project on its own shoreline — a serious step, taken quietly, in a budget bill. Both can be true at once.

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How much, and from where

The $110 million isn’t the first public money behind Edgemoor — it’s the latest, and it has a specific job.

• Under the December 2024 development agreement, the state committed $215 million to Phase 1; in January 2025, it moved $195 million of that (plus about $4.67 million in interest) to DSPC.

• Since then, costs have climbed. In May 2026, the DSPC board formally acknowledged that Phase 1 would run over its initial budget — citing inflation since 2023, a costlier all-electric design, and tariffs on equipment — and approved an amendment to renegotiate who would pay the difference. The $110 million in HB 500 is the state’s share of that gap: it would come on top of the $215 million already committed, bringing the state’s Phase 1 stake to about $325 million.

• Delaware Public Media has reported that DSPC’s interim director put the full Phase 1 price at nearly $670 million. We hold that figure as reported; the public record confirms that the board says the cost outran the plan.

Step back, and the Auditor’s tally is bigger still — and it’s worth keeping the pieces separate, because they’re different kinds of money. Between mid-2021 and mid-2025, the state put about $233.2 million into DSPC from general, federal, and capital sources. On top of that, DSPC spent $15.7 million of its own funds, and a 2024 law forgave a $16.483 million debt DSPC owed the state’s Transportation Trust Fund.

One reason cash is the lever: by law, DSPC can’t tax, issue bonds, use eminent domain, or pledge the state’s credit. When the Port needs big money, the state is usually part of the answer.

It helps to know the recent history, too. The Port’s first private operator, GT USA, signed a 50-year deal in 2018 and promised hundreds of millions in investment. By 2022, it had fallen behind — at least $3 million in arrears on its concession fee — and after it borrowed $100 million from an insurer and then defaulted, its board was dissolved and replaced by restructuring consultants. A court found it owed the Port $21 million for breaking an earlier deal. DSPC wrote off $97 million when the relationship collapsed. Enstructure took over in 2023 and has since invested $87 million in new capital.

The case for the port

Supporters — DSPC, the operator Enstructure, the longshoremen’s union, and the Senate task force — make a real case, and it’s worth stating plainly.

• The clearest independent vote of confidence is federal money. The public-private partnership has won about $177 million in competitive federal grants — $50 million from the federal Port Infrastructure Development Program and about $127 million from the EPA’s Clean Ports Program — for the container yard, a new truck gate, electric cranes and cargo equipment, and charging infrastructure. The U.S. EPA and the federal Maritime Administration don’t hand that out lightly.

• Capacity. Fully built, the terminal would roughly quadruple Wilmington’s container capacity — to about 1.2 million TEUs a year — and allow larger ships to call here.

• Jobs. Backers — including the International Longshoremen’s Association — say the project means thousands of construction and union jobs and a chance for the Port to “compete fairly” with rivals on the Delaware River.

The state’s own leadership is squarely behind it. The DSPC chair calls it a major investment with “extensive bipartisan support,” and the Governor calls it a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” the state “cannot afford to wait” on. To supporters, the delays have been the work of competitors rather than flaws in the plan.

The questions the Auditor raised

In November 2025, the state Auditor, Lydia York, released a performance audit of DSPC covering 2021 through mid-2025 — the most detailed independent look at how the Port has been run. It raised five concerns. DSPC disputes much of it, and both sides deserve a fair hearing.

• Governance and closed sessions. The audit found the DSPC board held closed-door sessions that didn’t meet the legal test for secrecy and kept thin minutes, and that it skipped required oversight meetings on the operator’s finances. DSPC calls both inaccurate and incomplete — it says the closed sessions were proper because the Port was in active litigation, and that it oversaw the operators far more than the audit credits.

• A $97 million write-off. When GT USA collapsed and was replaced, DSPC wrote off $97 million. The Auditor flagged it; DSPC says it was a non-cash accounting adjustment — a revised estimate of future fees, not lost cash — and that its earlier paper gain on the same deal was treated the same way.

• The job’s math is dated. The headline jobs figure traces back to a 2018 study based on 2010–2017 data, before the most recent (2022) economic census — and the audit warns that relying on it risks “distorting the project’s true benefits.” The study projected 2,951 direct jobs. DSPC’s answer: the projection didn’t rest on that one study alone, and other reviews — by the operator, the Army Corps, and federal grant-makers — line up with it.

• The tire mess. Under a deal the first operator struck with a marketing company, roughly 10,000 tons of tires were dumped at Edgemoor without a permit. DSPC authorized about $2 million to deal with it and, in the audit’s words, “footed the bill” — covering about $1.1 million in fiscal 2024 to clear the site so Enstructure could take over. DSPC says it paid to remove a health-and-safety hazard after the first operator failed to.

The fair read: these are the Auditor’s findings, not a court’s verdict, and DSPC contests much of it. But they’re the public record on how the money has been managed — and they’re the backdrop to handing the same project another $110 million and a permit override.

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The politics around it

Two bodies watch this project, and they don’t always agree.

One is the DSPC board — a 15-member panel chaired by the Secretary of State, Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez, with interim director Brian Devine running the day-to-day. The other is the Port of Wilmington Expansion Task Force — created by the Senate, revived in April 2025 (SCR 47), and co-chaired by Sen. Darius Brown — who also sits on the DSPC board and represents the Edgemoor district — and Rep. Frank Cooke.

Here’s the nuance worth holding onto: both sides want the terminal built — the Governor calls it a once-in-a-generation project, and his own Secretary of State runs the board steering it. The friction is over the task force itself. Delaware Public Media has reported the administration considers it redundant — “there’s only one port board” — and at the two most recent posted meetings, November 18 and December 16, 2025, the representatives of DNREC and the Labor, Transportation, and Finance departments were marked absent. The task force’s leaders cast it as oversight the public is owed. Because both sides are Democrats, we frame the disagreement by what each says, not by side.

On the neighbors’ side of the ledger, DSPC says it has established a study group — led by the regional planning agency WILMAPCO — to assess the traffic the terminal will generate, one of the concerns raised at a November town hall that drew more than 100 people.

What to watch — and how to weigh in

The real question isn’t simply whether Edgemoor is good or bad. It’s sharper than that: how much public money, how much public oversight, and how much ordinary environmental review should ride with a project this big?

HB 500 answers part of it — $110 million more, a project-specific waiver power, no court review of that waiver, and new room for DSPC to remake its operator deal. To pass, it needs a three-quarters yes in both chambers — a high bar, because the state is borrowing — before the session ends.

With the federal permits back, the live questions now rest with the state. Watch four things: whether the DNREC Secretary uses the Section 69 waiver; what conditions ride with it; what DSPC seeks under Section 75; and whether the state puts out clear, current public numbers on total cost, state and private share, jobs, and risk.

This is the kind of choice self-governing neighbors get a say in — a big, one-time public bet, with a real upside and a real set of questions attached. A port can be a public asset. A waiver can be a useful tool. But when the state puts this much money and this much legal power behind one project, the facts should be plain enough for neighbors to see what’s being bought, what’s being waived, and who stays accountable. If you have a view — build it fast, or slow down and keep the reviews — your senator and representative are the people to tell.

Text RESIST to 50409 (Resistbot), and it will help you reach them in a couple of minutes.

Read it yourself: HB 500 and the Auditor’s report. Decide what you think.

The Delaware Project — tools to govern ourselves together.

Good Afternoon, Neighbors

Noon, July 1, 2026:

The 153rd General Assembly gaveled out in the dark — the last bill cleared at 3:09 in the morning on July 1. After two years of hearings, votes, and one very long closing night, here’s how the bills we followed throughout the session actually ended up.

The short version. Of the 26 bills on our tracker, 21 made it through both the House and the Senate. Seventeen are now on their way to the Governor to be signed into law. The other four are changes to our state Constitution. Each one finished what’s called its first leg — the Assembly passed it once. But a constitutional change has to pass twice, with an election in between. So these four now wait for the General Assembly you choose this November to take them up again. Nothing in the Constitution changes until that second vote happens.

Five bills did not make it. More on those in a moment.

Your electric bill. This was the busiest corner of the session, and two bills work as a matched pair. HS 1 for HB 233 sorts out who pays — it puts the largest power users, like data centers, in their own rate class so their costs are borne by them, not on your monthly bill. HB 445 handles who builds the power — it says those same giant users have to bring their own clean electricity to the grid rather than lean on what the rest of us already rely on. Alongside them, SB 326 caps how much of Delmarva’s non-essential spending can be passed on to customers, and three more — SB 308, SB 321, and HB 393 — tighten forecasting and consumer protections.

One worth marking: HB 470, which would have allowed Delmarva to own battery storage, passed the House with every single vote — 39 to 0 — but never reached the Senate floor before time ran out. A reminder that in the final hours, the calendar decides as much as the vote count does.

The money. The state’s spending plans crossed together overnight. HB 500, the bond bill, funds construction across Delaware — about $1.26 billion, including $110 million tied to the Port of Wilmington’s Edgemoor expansion. It cleared the Senate by exactly one vote. SB 337, the grants-in-aid bill, sends roughly $99 million to senior centers, volunteer fire and ambulance companies, veterans’ posts, and community groups. Both needed a three-fourths supermajority, and both got there.

Voting and the Constitution. HB 444, the Delaware John Lewis Voting Rights Act, passed and heads to the Governor. Four constitutional amendments completed their first leg: the right to marry, a measure clarifying that only people — not corporations — may vote, a cleanup of outdated wording, and a restoration of voting rights. Three others fell short: an amendment on reproductive freedom and one opening a public-referendum path for constitutional changes never reached the floor for a vote, and a bill on voter-registration timing was voted down.

Health, housing, and wetlands. SS 2 for SB 1, which caps certain hospital prices, did something rare — it passed unanimously in both chambers. The Housing for Every Delawarean Act also cleared. And SB 9, the Wetlands Stewardship Act, was the very last vote of the session, concurring at 3:09 AM to protect roughly 75,000 acres that a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling had left uncovered.

What happens now. The bills headed to the Governor become law once signed. The four constitutional amendments are a different story — they’re a question this November’s election helps answer. The people you send to Dover next year will decide whether those changes finish their second leg and take hold.

If any of this moved you — a bill you’re glad passed, or one you wish had — your voice still carries between sessions. Text RESIST to 50409 to reach your legislators in a couple of minutes.

That’s the session, neighbors. Thank you for following it with us. The work of governing ourselves doesn’t end at sine die — it just changes shape.

The Delaware Project — Tools to govern ourselves together.

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See Clearly. Do the Work. Build Together.

Good morning, neighbors.

Neighbors —

This is the last week of the 153rd General Assembly. Tomorrow — Tuesday, June 30 — both chambers gavel out for good and adjourn sine die (Latin for “without a day,” the formal close of a two-year session). After Tuesday, the regular session is finished.

Here’s what that means in plain terms: two years of work come down to a single day. Bills that have waited for months get their last chance on the floor in a few hours. Some cross the line. Some die where they sit. And the biggest contest of all — who pays when data centers plug into our grid — gets settled in pieces, in real time.

So tomorrow morning, I’m trying something new. At 8:00 a.m. sharp, a live day-of tracker lands in your inbox — your front-row seat to sine die. No refreshing a page, no stitching it together from a dozen news sites, no wondering what a committee vote actually meant. I’ll keep it current as the gavels fall — bill by bill, in plain language — so you can see exactly where each one stands: what passed, what stalled, and what it does to your power bill. It comes to you. Pour your coffee, keep it open in a tab, and check back when the floor heats up. You won’t have to go looking for the story; you’ll watch it happen.

For two years, the biggest question hanging over our power grid has been a plain one: when data centers move in, hungry for electricity, who pays for the lines, the plants, and the upgrades they need? Six data-center projects are already confirmed on Delmarva’s system, together asking for roughly 2.1 gigawatts — close to doubling Delaware’s all-time peak demand. The General Assembly’s answer to “who pays” is landing this week, in pieces — and tomorrow’s tracker is where you’ll watch the last of it fall into place.

Also in this issue: beyond the data-center fight, two of the session’s biggest spending bills are racing to the same Tuesday gavel — Delaware’s $1.26 billion Bond Bill (what the state builds, and how it pays for it) and the $99.4 million Grants-in-Aid bill (the community grants that reach senior centers, volunteer fire companies, and hundreds of local nonprofits). Both are further down; the grid comes first.

Here’s where it stands.

— Gregory S. Layton, The Delaware Project

Three bills across the line

Three energy bills have cleared both chambers and now wait on the Governor’s desk:

• SB 308, the Load Forecast Accountability Act, hands the Public Service Commission — the state board that regulates Delmarva — the job of checking the demand forecasts the utility sends to the regional grid operator. In plain terms: it makes the utility show its work on how much power it really expects to need, so we don’t all pay for guesses that run too big.

• SB 321 expands access to community energy and tightens billing rules for it, with added protections for lower-income customers. It’s about letting more households share in shared solar without getting snared in the fine print.

• HB 393 writes new protections into law for people who buy their electricity from third-party suppliers — the companies that pitch you a “better rate” by mail or at the door. It puts guardrails on that pitch.

These three are banked. Barring a veto, they become law.

Four at the wire

The four bills at the center of the data-center fight are in a tighter spot. Each has passed one chamber but sits in a committee in the other — so to become law, each one has to clear that committee and win a floor vote before tomorrow’s deadline. They’re waiting, quite literally, at the wire.

Two of them are the heart of the matter — two different answers to the same worry; don’t let the newest mega-users raise the bill at my kitchen table:

• Pay your own way. HS 1 for HB 233 would place very large electricity users in their own rate class — a separate billing group — so the cost of serving them is walled off rather than spread across households and small businesses. It cuts both ways: if one of these big users ends up paying more than the costs it actually causes, the surplus flows back to households and small businesses as a credit. (Newcomers: a “rate class” is just the bucket your utility sorts you into when it sets prices. Homes, small businesses, and big industrial users already sit in different buckets.)

• Bring your own power. HB 445 would require the largest energy users to produce or buy enough clean power to cover everything they use — build it, contract for it, or both — rather than leaning on the grid the rest of us share. Nuclear and battery storage count toward that; ordinary gas “peaker” plants don’t.

The other two work on the ratepayer side of the ledger:

• SB 326 caps how much Delmarva can charge customers for non-essential capital spending and packs in a bundle of billing-transparency rules: an itemized rate table on your bill and the utility’s website, regular management audits that the utility (not ratepayers) pays for, and a limit on how much of a requested increase the utility can collect before the Commission has actually ruled. Storm repair, tree trimming, and emergency work fall outside the cap.

• HB 470 would let Delmarva own large battery storage — to soak up cheaper power and release it when demand spikes — but only after the Commission finds the batteries truly pay off for ratepayers. The version that cleared the House also removed a feature in the original bill that would have guaranteed the utility a set return on the investment.

Cost allocation, supply, a spending cap, and storage: four levers, all aimed at the same machine.

One day left

Here’s the clock. A bill that’s passed one chamber but rests in the other chamber’s committee still has steps left before the gavel falls Tuesday at 5:00 p.m.: it has to clear that committee, then win a vote on the floor — and if that second chamber changes the bill, it goes back to the first chamber for a final sign-off. That’s a lot of moving parts for one day, and some of these four may not finish.

If they don’t, they don’t simply vanish. But they can’t advance once the regular session ends. From there, the only paths are a special session — which only the Governor or the leaders of each chamber can call — or starting fresh with a new bill in the 154th General Assembly, which convenes in January 2027 after this November’s election. So this week is the window. After Tuesday, it stays closed until one of those doors opens.

The grid isn’t the only thing on this wire. Two of the session’s biggest spending bills are racing toward the same Tuesday deadline — and both need that same three-fourths vote to cross. One builds the things we share and keep for decades; the other funds the neighbors who do the work in our towns. Here’s each in plain terms.

First, the Bond Bill:

The bill that builds things: the FY27 Bond Bill

$1.26 billion for roads, schools, and public buildings — where the money comes from, where it goes, and the borrowing limit it rides right up to.

Every year, the General Assembly passes more than one kind of budget. One keeps the lights on: salaries, classrooms, the day-to-day. Another builds and fixes the things we share and keep for decades — roads, school buildings, parks, courthouses, water systems. That second one is the Bond Bill, formally the Bond and Capital Improvements Act. (”Capital” just means big, long-lived things — not pencils and paper. “Bonds” means the state borrows the money now and pays it back over years, the way a family takes a mortgage to buy a house.)

This year’s Bond Bill is HB 500. It puts $1.26 billion toward Delaware’s buildings, roads, and other long-term projects for the budget year that begins July 1.

Where the money comes from

Four main buckets, plus a small reauthorization/reprogramming line, pay for it:

• Borrowing (bonds): about $364 million. The state’s “credit card” is paid back over 20 years.

• Unclaimed-property money: about $328 million. This is money the state is holding for people who lost track of it — old bank accounts, uncashed paychecks, forgotten deposits — until the rightful owners claim it. It’s real, but it’s one-time money, so it can’t be counted on every year.

• General Fund dollars: about $289 million. Regular state dollars.

• The Transportation Trust Fund: about $273 million. Money set aside for roads and transit.

Where it goes

The four biggest shares — about 84 cents of every dollar in the bill:

• State buildings and facilities — about $313 million. Much of this is work the Office of Management and Budget handles on behalf of many agencies — courthouses, prisons, health buildings — not spending on one office. Big items include the Emily P. Bissell renovation ($60M) and a Legislative Hall addition ($35M).

• Roads and transit — about $273 million.

• School construction — about $269 million, shared between the state and local districts. The single largest school project is Appoquinimink’s new middle/high school at Summit ($74M).

• State/jobs and community projects — about $205 million — libraries, economic development, the Port of Wilmington, and more.

A few things worth knowing — told straight

A few things worth knowing — told straight

• Delaware is borrowing right up to its legal limit. State law caps how much the state may borrow in a year at 5% of what it expects to collect. This bill borrows the full amount allowed — not a dollar more, not a dollar less. You can read that as careful (it stays inside the line) or as stretching (it uses every bit of room there is). Both are fair.

• A quarter of the bill leans on one-time money — the unclaimed-property fund above. Helpful this year; not a sure thing next year.

• A tenth of the bill — $110 million — rides on that same one-time money, all for one project: the Port of Wilmington’s Edgemoor container terminal. It’s the single largest line drawn from the unclaimed-property fund, and the bill also hands the state’s environmental secretary unusual authority to waive permits for the terminal, outside the usual Coastal Zone review and court appeal. One reading: it funds a strategic asset and the jobs tied to it, and clears the legal snags that have stalled the project. The other: it’s one-time money for a delayed, over-budget project a state audit recently faulted, with environmental review set aside. Both are fair.

• Colleges took a trim. The University of Delaware, Delaware State University, and Delaware Tech each receive less in this bill than last year.

• The bill is bigger than last year — up about 28%, from roughly $977 million to $1.26 billion.

Where it stands

As of the last full session day (Thursday, June 25), HB 500 had cleared its committee and was placed on the “Ready List” — ready for a floor vote, but not yet voted. Because the state is taking on debt, it needs a yes from three-quarters of the members in each chamber, and it has to pass both the House and the Senate before Tuesday’s 5:00 p.m. deadline. If it does, the projects move. If it doesn’t, they wait.

Next, the Grants-in-Aid bill:

Where our community dollars go: the FY27 Grants-in-Aid Bill

$99.4 million in community grants — paramedics, senior centers, volunteer fire companies, and hundreds of nonprofits — plus two grants the budget-writers put on hold.

Most of the state budget moves in big, hard-to-picture sums. This part doesn’t. The Grants-in-Aid Act is the slice of the budget that lands closest to home — the senior center down the road, the volunteer fire company, the food bank, the after-school program, the veterans’ post. It’s the state’s yearly round of community grants, and this year it carries $99,407,051 to groups in all three counties.

Read it yourself: SB 337.

Where it stands

SB 337 was introduced on June 25 and sent to the Senate’s money committee — the Senate Finance Committee — where, as of that snapshot, it had not yet had a committee vote, a floor vote, or any amendments. Like the Bond Bill, it needs a three-fourths vote in both chambers before Tuesday. It’s also written as a supplement — money added on top of the main operating budget (Senate Bill 335), which it amends.

The big picture: four buckets

The grants fall into four sections. Three grew this year; one shrank. The total barely moved — up about 1.1% from last year’s $98.28 million.

• Government units & senior centers: $37.09M → $40.53M (+9.3%)

• One-times & community agencies: $47.09M → $42.35M (−10.1%)

• Fire & public-service ambulance: $13.26M → $15.54M (+17.2%)

• Veterans organizations: $0.84M → $0.99M (+17.4%)

• Total: $98.28M → $99.41M (+1.1%)

The flat total hides a real shift. The one-time grants — the pot that changes most from year to year by its very nature — fell by about $6.2 million ($13.87M down to $7.64M). Set those aside, and nearly every kind of ongoing community grant actually went up, with Aging as the main exception in Section 2. So the story isn’t a cut-to-the-corner nonprofit; it’s a smaller, one-time pile-and-steady-to-stronger support for the recurring work.

The single biggest line: Our paramedics

One line towers over the rest. $22,053,743 goes to the Paramedic Program — the state’s share of running each county’s Advanced Life Support service, the medics who answer the worst emergencies. Of that, $3 million is a block grant split evenly among the counties that run an approved program.

After the medics, the largest pieces in this first bucket are senior centers ($9.92M), the county-seat package that helps Dover, Georgetown and Wilmington ($4.23M), and a set of public-safety grants — local police aid, drug-enforcement help, and a campus public-safety fund ($2.57M).

The community-agency grants, by kind

This is the part neighbors recognize by name. The second bucket spreads across hundreds of groups:

• Family & youth — $11.6M. The biggest category. Boys & Girls Clubs, CHILD Inc., the Children’s Advocacy Center, mentoring and reading programs.

• Neighborhood & community — $9.3M. Community centers, the food bank, legal aid, and public media stations.

• One-time — $7.6M. The largest active FY27 items include a $3.2M one-time pool for fire and ambulance companies, $2.0M for New Castle County, $1.0M for housing initiatives, $528,049 for the Senior Center Contingency, and $240,000 for State Fire Prevention Commission background-check costs.

• Health & disability — $5.5M.

• Economic, housing & labor — $4.5M. Habitat affiliates, housing collaboratives, job-readiness programs.

• Arts, history & recreation — $2.5M.

• Aging — $1.3M.

Fire and ambulance companies

The third bucket — $15.54 million — keeps our mostly volunteer fire and ambulance companies running. Much of it is steady, per-company support: a flat grant for fire prevention, a set amount per ambulance and per rescue truck, and so on. Two larger pieces stand out: an insurance rebate equalization that sends a base amount to each Kent and Sussex volunteer fire company ($5.07M) and a level-up grant tied to the insurance-premium tax ($1.64M).

Two grants with strings attached

Worth naming plainly, because they’re unusual and written right into the bill — both as conditions, not accusations:

• The Wilmington Senior Center’s $528,049 is held back until the Executive Director, Board President, and Treasurer jointly submit and certify a written report with a proposed reopening plan. The center closed in March 2026, and the bill spells out exactly what the plan must show before any money flows.

• The $50,000 Section 2 allocation and the $297,500 Section 3 appropriation to Marydel Volunteer Fire Company are held back until the company’s President and Treasurer jointly certify and submit a written report addressing a state Auditor’s report issued April 27, 2026, and corrective actions.

In both cases, the bill authorizes the Joint Finance Committee to release the funds once it reviews the response. These are oversight steps written by the budget-writers themselves — the mechanism, not a verdict.

The rules that most grants must follow

A grant here isn’t a blank check. To qualify, a group generally must be an incorporated nonprofit that has been operating for at least two years, practice non-discrimination, and keep real books. And the money can’t be spent on child daycare, buildings or major equipment, lobbyists, political campaigns, or services for people who live out of state. A handful of grants are also tied to other bills — for example, $140,000 for children in state care only flows if House Bill 341 passes.

Do the work

Two quick ways to weigh in — before Tuesday’s gavel, and after it.

This is the stretch where showing up counts most, because the decisions are being made now — not in the abstract. Whether it’s who pays for the grid, what the state builds, or which neighbors get a hand up, these are exactly the choices self-governing neighbors get a say in.

• Reach your legislators today. The fastest way is Resistbot: text RESIST to 50409, and it walks you through sending a message to your state senator and representative in a couple of minutes. Tell them plainly which of these bills you want moved — and that you’re watching the wire.

• The grid story doesn’t end on Tuesday. A lot of what comes next plays out at the Public Service Commission, in dockets open to public comment — and one is currently open. The review of Delmarva’s standard-offer supply rate, the default that most households are on (Docket 26-0389), is taking public comment through about July 27. That’s a place where your voice goes on the record even after the session closes.

The Delaware that takes shape this week — and the bills that don’t make it — will be decided by who shows up. So let’s use the window while it’s open.

The Delaware Project — Tools to govern ourselves together.

Good Afternoon, Neighbors.

On Tuesday evening, the Delaware House came four votes short of writing the right to marry into our state constitution. Here’s the part that catches people off guard: the bill wasn’t voted down. Only three members voted against it. It fell short anyway — because of a rule most of us never learned in school. Let me walk you through it. Once you see how it works, you’ll read these last days in Dover the way an insider does.

What the bill would do. Senate Substitute 2 for Senate Bill 100 would add a new section to Article I of our state constitution — our Bill of Rights, the part that lists the freedoms government can’t take away. It says the right to marry is a fundamental right that can’t be denied on the basis of gender, or on any ground already protected for equal rights: race, color, where you’re from, or sex. In plain words, it would protect the right to marry regardless of race or gender — covering interracial couples and same-sex couples alike — and write that protection into the constitution itself. It also says, in its own text, that it leaves freedom of religion untouched.

Why put it in the Constitution at all? Right now, the right to marry rests on two U.S. Supreme Court rulings — Loving v. Virginia in 1967 for interracial couples, Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 for same-sex couples. A state amendment would add a Delaware guarantee that doesn’t depend on those national rulings holding. That’s the “extra layer of protection” the bill’s backers talk about.

Where people actually stand on this. This is not a fringe idea. Nationwide, about 65% of Americans say same-sex marriage should be legal (Gallup, May 2026), and approval of interracial marriage now stands at 94% (Gallup), up from just 4% when the question was first asked in 1958. Support runs higher still — around 73% — across the states, Delaware among them, where same-sex marriage is already legal (PRRI). And it’s close to home here: Delaware has one of the highest concentrations of same-sex couples of any state, and the highest share of those couples who are married, by the Williams Institute’s reading of the 2020 Census. Same-sex marriage has been legal in Delaware since 2013.

How Delaware changes its constitution. This is the key, so stay with me. Most bills pass with a simple majority — more yes than no. Changing the constitution is much harder, on purpose. An amendment — a change to the Constitution — needs two-thirds of every seat in each chamber. Not two-thirds of those who vote that day. Two-thirds of all of them. In the 41-seat House, that’s 28 votes. In the 21-seat Senate, it’s 14. And it has to clear that bar twice — once now, and again, word for word, in the next General Assembly, with an election in between. No governor signs it. Your elected members carry the whole load themselves.

Here’s something most people don’t know: Delaware is the only state in the country where voters play no part in this. Everywhere else, a constitutional change goes before the people for a vote. Here, it never does — both votes belong to legislators. A bill this session, House Bill 440, would change that, adding a public referendum to the process. But HB 440 is itself a constitutional amendment, so it has to clear the same high bar twice before voters ever get that say.

Now, the insight that explains Tuesday. Because the bar is two-thirds of every seat, a member who doesn’t vote counts against the amendment exactly like a no. There’s no credit for showing up. So a vote can look lopsided in favor and still lose.

What happened. The Senate passed this amendment back in June 2025 — more than a year ago — by 16 to 5, clearing its 14-vote bar with room to spare. Then it sat. It didn’t reach the House floor until Tuesday, June 23, with only a handful of days left in the session. The House voted 24 yes, 3 no, and 14 not voting. Twenty-four is four short of 28. It failed.

Here’s the whole board, because every name is part of the answer.

The 24 yes votes all came from Democrats.

Three members voted no: Rep. Josue Ortega (D), Rep. Bryan Shupe (R), and — this one needs explaining — the bill’s own House sponsor, Rep. Claire Snyder-Hall (D). Snyder-Hall’s no was a tactic, not a turn against her bill. Under House rules, only a member who voted on the winning side can ask the House to vote again. Because the amendment lost, the “no” side won, so she switched to no to keep the door open to bring it back.

Fourteen members didn’t vote at all. One was a Democrat, Rep. Madinah Wilson-Anton. The other thirteen were Republicans: Collins, Dukes, Gray, Hensley, Hilovsky, Jones Giltner, Morris, Postles, Short, Michael Smith, Spiegelman, Vanderwende, and Yearick.

Now do the math yourself — it’s worth it. The House has 27 Democrats and 14 Republicans. The bar is 28. So even if all 27 Democrats had voted yes — every one — the amendment would still be one vote short. It could not pass on Democratic votes alone; it needed at least one Republican to vote yes. None did: of the 14 Republicans, one voted no and thirteen stayed silent. And the Democratic side wasn’t united either — 24 of its 27 voted yes, one voted no, one didn’t vote, and the sponsor cast her tactical no.

So two separate things both had to happen for this to pass, and neither did: the majority party had to deliver nearly all of its members, and at least one member of the minority had to cross over. Miss either, and 28 is out of reach. This isn’t a story with one villain. It’s a story about a bar set so high that it takes both sides — near-total unity in one party plus a hand reached across the aisle — to clear it. Carry that with you, because it shapes every big vote in these final days.

The sponsor’s reaction. In a statement from the House Democratic caucus, Rep. Snyder-Hall said the chamber “turned its back on the people of this state” and passed up the chance to “add an extra layer of protection” for the right to marry. She cast it as a setback, not an ending: “while this is deeply disappointing, it is not the end,” she said, adding that three legislative days remain and that she is “hopeful that we will be able to get the votes required to pass this incredibly basic — but important — bill.”

What’s at stake now. This was the first leg — the first of the two passes an amendment needs. Falling short here doesn’t just delay it. If it isn’t revived before the session ends on Tuesday, the right-to-marry amendment goes back to the very start: a future General Assembly would have to pass it twice more, across two more elections. Snyder-Hall’s tactic keeps a narrow door open for a re-vote before June 30 — but it is narrow. We saw the same move just last week. HS 1 for HB 88, a constitutional amendment on voter registration, failed the House 26 to 14 on June 16, needing the same 28 votes, and its own sponsor, Rep. Bush, also voted no to keep it alive. That one now stands defeated. The tactic buys a chance, not a guarantee.

You have a say before the door closes. You don’t have to wait for the next vote. Three legislative days remain before the session ends Tuesday, June 30. Between now and then, the state budget is up for a vote, and a stack of bills sits one step from the floor — any of them can be called on a day’s notice. If you want your representative to hear from you, here’s how to find them: legis.delaware.gov/FindMyLegislator. You can send a message in about two minutes with Resistbot — text RESIST to 50409. And you can see where every bill we’re watching stands, updated as they move, on our tracker.

The door’s still open. For a few more days.

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See Clearly. Do the Work. Build Together.

— Greg Layton, The Delaware Project

Note: the budget described here passed the Delaware Senate on June 18 and is now before the House. It is not yet law — which is exactly why it’s worth reading now, while the last pages are still being written.

Tucked into the smaller half of Delaware’s next budget — the one-time spending bill — is a single line: $800,000 for a program with a plain name, Stable Housing for Schoolchildren.

The money is set aside for rental vouchers for families with children in grades K through 12 who are living, right now, in homeless shelters, in motels, or in their cars. The bill says the vouchers should be sized so a family pays no more than about a third of its take-home income for rent. Up to $50,000 of it can go to running the program; the rest is meant to help families make rent — and, with it, help a child stay more steadily connected to one school.

That $800,000 sits inside a budget that, all told, runs past $7 billion. The distance between those two numbers — one small line and the whole vast document — is, in a way, the entire story of what a budget is.

A budget is the clearest moral document a government produces. Not the speeches, not the press releases — the spreadsheet. It is the place where a community stops saying what it values and starts paying for it. On Thursday, June 18, the Delaware Senate passed both halves of the spending plan for the fiscal year that begins July 1 — each by a unanimous vote, 21 to 0 — and sent them to the House, where they now sit in the Appropriations Committee. So this is a good moment to read the documents closely and ask the only question that matters: what did we decide to protect?

— Gregory S. Layton, The Delaware Project

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The shape of the whole

The heart of the plan is the General Fund operating budget — the everyday money that runs the schools, staffs the health programs, keeps the courts and prisons going, and pays the people who do that work. This year, it comes to about $7.0 billion, up 6.3% from $6.58 billion.

Six percent is not a dramatic number. But a budget that grows steadily is itself a kind of promise: that the things a state already does for its people — the things easy to take for granted until they stop — will keep being done, and done a little more fully than last year. Much of the growth isn’t new programs; it’s the rising cost of keeping faith with commitments already made.

Where does it go? Follow the money, and you find a set of priorities that look a lot like a family’s.

The children come first — by a wide margin. More than a third of the entire General Fund — about $2.5 billion — goes to public education, the state's single largest expenditure. That is the salaries of the teachers in your child’s building, the specialists who work with kids who learn differently, the basic machinery of opening the schoolhouse doors each morning.

Then comes care for the people who would otherwise go without. Roughly $1.23 billion in General Fund money goes to Medicaid and medical assistance — health coverage for lower-income families, for children, for older adults, for people with disabilities. It is one of the fastest-growing pieces of the budget, up nearly 11% in a single year. A state that lets that line grow is one that has decided not to drop people as the cost of catching them rises.

And there is care for the caregivers. The budget funds the pensions and the retiree health coverage of the people who spend their careers doing the public’s work. It puts about $11 million into Delaware’s Paid Family Medical Leave program, run through the Department of Labor, and — for the state’s own workforce — splits the cost of family-caregiving leave evenly between employee and employer beginning January 1, 2026, so that the person who has to step away to sit with a dying parent or a newborn does not also lose a paycheck. The Department of Correction alone accounts for about $516 million.

None of this is glamorous. All of it is the ordinary, unbroken work of a community looking after its own.

The other budget: seed money for what comes next

Alongside the operating budget sits a smaller, separate pot — the one-time supplemental, for things you pay for once rather than every year. This year it is $146.2 million, and here is a number worth pausing on: that is almost four times last year’s one-time budget of $37.6 million.

If the operating budget is about keeping promises, the one-time budget is about making new ones. It is where you can see a state planning.

The biggest single piece — $100 million, labeled “Future Formula Adjustments,” plus another $2.8 million for implementation — is set aside as Delaware moves toward a new way of funding its schools: the “hybrid” formula recommended by the state’s Public Education Funding Commission. The underlying bill, SB 302, has cleared a House committee and is awaiting a vote on the House floor. It is rare to see a state put nine figures behind a reform before the reform is finished. That is what a down payment on the future looks like.

The rest reads like a catalog of quiet protections:

• $8 million to stand up an Early Childhood Care and Education Alliance — the years that shape a child most.

• $2 million to clean up lead, plus $250,000 to build a secure system so school nurses can see which children have been screened for lead exposure, plus $48,000 to test the soil at the playgrounds of five elementary schools. Lead is invisible, permanent, and falls hardest on the youngest. This is the budget going looking for it.

• $800,000 for the Stable Housing for Schoolchildren vouchers we started with.

• And, in an election year, a block of money to protect the vote itself — about $6.5 million to run the primary and general elections, $1.9 million to keep early voting open, $1.6 million to upgrade the voter-registration system, and $1.9 million for the campaign-finance reporting system that lets you see who is funding whom.

The fine print that ties everything together

Here is the part that rewards close reading. Two lines in the one-time budget come with a string attached — money set aside that cannot be spent unless another bill or similar legislation becomes law.

There is $967,600 to protect Delaware’s freshwater wetlands — the marshes and swamps that, as the state’s own environmental agency notes, help filter our water and buffer our towns from flooding — but the state can spend it only if SB 9, the Wetlands Stewardship Act, passes. And there is $456,200 to establish a licensing system for firearm dealers, available only if SS 1 for SB 300 becomes law; that bill would require firearm dealers to obtain a state license and comply with related security and recordkeeping rules.

This is the budget quietly placing its bets on the session’s unfinished business. The money is already set aside, already counted — its spending authority waiting on votes that haven’t happened yet. It is the clearest possible sign of where the people writing the budget expect the final days to land. Whether they’re right is, between now and June 30, partly up to the rest of us.

What isn’t here yet

One honest caveat, because accuracy is the point of this whole project: what passed the Senate is not the entire budget. Two big pieces are still to come, and both traditionally arrive in the final days. The bond bill — the capital budget for buildings, school construction, and other long-term projects, and the jobs that come with them — is written through the legislature’s Bond Committee, which prepares it in June. And the grants-in-aid bill, which funds the nonprofits, volunteer fire companies, and senior centers that deliver so much of the care that a budget pays for, is, by long custom, the very last bill the legislature passes before it goes home. When they land, we’ll read those closely too.

The document and the rest of us

A budget is written by people we elected, in our name, with our money. That is worth remembering in a season when so much can feel decided over our heads. The big numbers — the nearly $7 billion to operate the state, the $2.5 billion for schools, the $1.23 billion for Medicaid — are largely set in the Senate-passed plan now. But the pieces still in motion are real ones: the contingent bills the budget is betting on, the bond bill and the grants-in-aid still to be written, and the choices about which protections actually cross the finish line in the days that remain.

We started with a single $800,000 line and a child who, because of it, has a better chance of sleeping in the same bed and walking into the same school all year. That is what the gap between $800,000 and $7 billion is really made of — thousands of lines like it, each one a small decision about who we look after. The document is nearly written. The last pages are not. There is still time to be heard on them.

We’ve Got Work To Do.

— Gregory S. Layton, The Delaware Project.

Dusk over a Delaware field, and the work goes on. Lamps lit against the blue, a combine brings in the winter wheat long after supper — the grain is ready, and the weather won't wait.

Good Morning, Neighbors.

So you drove out to the country, and the day is letting go — that deep blue coming down over the fields, the last light gone copper along the treeline. But the great machine is still working, its lamps lit against the dusk, droning low and steady down the rows. Behind it, a cloud of gold lifts and hangs in the headlight beam — dust and chaff, fine as smoke, settling slowly. Roll your window down, and you’ll catch it: cut straw and warm dust and a thread of diesel, the smell of a field giving up its grain. You’re not sure what you’re seeing. Stand here with me a minute, and I’ll tell you the story of it — older and stranger than it looks.

That gold in the air is wheat. And wheat is one of our oldest friends.

Go back with me — past Rome, past the pyramids, to the hills of the Fertile Crescent ten thousand years ago. Wild grasses grew there, and when their heads ripened, they broke apart and scattered their seed to the ground, as wild things do. But here and there, a plant came up that held its seed fast and would not let go. That was a strange turn: a grass that could no longer scatter its own seed well, and so leaned more and more on the human hand. To the first farmers, it was a gift — the grain stayed on the stalk, ripe and waiting. The bargain was not struck in a season but across a hundred generations: we would carry the wheat, and the wheat would feed us. Neither of us has let go since.

The first wheats were small — einkorn and emmer, tight in the husk. Then, some nine thousand years back, a farmed grain crossed by sheer chance with a wild goatgrass — botanists call it Aegilops tauschii — that grew at the ragged edges of the fields. Out of that accident came bread wheat, a single plant carrying six sets of chromosomes from three different grasses, far more than you or I. From that one cradle it walked the whole world.

Now here is the part worth knowing, because this one is ours. The wheat in this field is soft red winter wheat, and every word of the name tells you something true. Winter, for it’s sown in the fall and sleeps through the cold. Red, for the color of the bran, the thin skin of the grain. And soft — for the kernel is tender, low in the gluten that gives bread its chew and stretch. The hard wheat of the Great Plains is the usual bread-loaf wheat; ours is the gentle kind. It can lend itself to a blend, but its true gift is the tender things: cake and cookie, cracker and pretzel, pie crust and pastry — the soft, sweet edges of a life. It grows across the eastern third of the country, east of the Mississippi. So the next time a cracker snaps clean between your teeth, or you tear a warm pretzel and the salt stings your lip, the odds are good that soft red winter wheat went into it — and tens of thousands of acres of it grow right here in Delaware.

How did it come to this golden hour? Look back to last fall. A farmer drilled the seed into cool ground, and it came up thin and green, a faint fur over the brown. Then the cold came down — and here is the wonder: the wheat needs that cold. The hard months are no enemy. A long, deep chill is what readies winter wheat to flower and set its grain when the warmth comes back. It greened up in April, shot up a stalk and raised its head, and through May it turned from green to gold and went dry and rattling in the wind. Pull a head now and roll it in your palm; blow the chaff away, and a few hard kernels are left. Bite one. It cracks, then softens to a sweet, nutty paste on the tongue — the same grain, ten thousand years on.

And now, in June, it is ripe, and the machine has come. That machine is a combine, and it earns its name: in one pass it does what once took whole crews days of bent-backed labor — cutting the grain, beating it loose, winnowing the chaff from the kernel, each step by hand. Listen. Under the engine’s drone, there’s a softer sound, a steady hiss like rain on a roof: that’s the clean grain streaming into the tank. The straw drops in a long windrow behind, to be baled for bedding or spread back across the field. Work that once filled a field with laboring hands now rides on a single seat, in a cab cooled against the dust.

The grain in that tank starts a long road tonight. Milled to flour, it rises again as warm bread and birthday cake and the cracker on the cheese board — on tables from here to the shore, and some of it much farther still, for the United States is one of the world’s leading wheat exporters. One small field, part of a harvest that reaches an ocean away.

And it feeds us well. Whole-grain wheat carries fiber and iron, B-vitamins and good plant protein — the staff of life, and no idle name. The enriched flour we bake with carries added folic acid, too — a quiet public good that helps shield the unborn from defects of the spine and brain. A field of grass, looking after the smallest among us.

So here is the plain arithmetic, the kind I won’t dress up. The counters at the USDA say a Delaware field commonly brings the low-to-mid eighties of bushels to the acre — near ninety in a fine year, the low seventies in a hard one. That runs high; the whole nation makes about fifty-five. Little Delaware grows it thick. This year’s crop, the one coming off now, won’t have its final number for months yet.

What will it fetch? This week, the soft-wheat futures in Chicago sit near six dollars a bushel — but that’s the screen, not the check. Out here on the Delmarva shore, the elevators have lately bid in the low-to-mid five-dollar range, a fair bit under the Chicago number. Cash almost always runs under the futures; that gap is the basis, and here it works against the grower — set by hauling costs, nearby demand, and storage. So — and call this a layman’s reckoning, built on recent years and recent bids — a good acre might bring somewhere in the mid-four-hundreds before a single cost is paid; a hundred-acre field, perhaps the mid-forty-thousands at the elevator door.

But mind me: that’s the sale, not the keeping. Out of it come seed and fertilizer, fuel and iron, and the price of the land. Wheat rarely makes a farmer rich. It feeds him, and it feeds you, and after a winter and a summer of patient work, that is the whole point of it.

So that’s the story, neighbor — written in the gold spread out before you, in the dust hanging bright in the lamplight, in the bread you’ll break tomorrow. A grass that leans on the human hand, a farmer who cannot quit it, and a field that reaches farther than you’d ever guess.

And here it comes in. One machine, in a single pass, doing what once took a whole crew of hands — cutting, threshing, winnowing, all at a walking roar. The better part of a year’s patient work, gathered in an afternoon.

See Clearly. Do the Work. Build Together.

— Gregory S. Layton,

The Delaware Project

Wednesday, June 17, 2026

Good morning, Neighbors.

There’s a vote you don’t have, and most people never notice it’s missing.

When Delaware changes its constitution — the state’s highest law, the rulebook every other law has to follow — you don’t get a required vote. Not directly. The process lives in Article XVI, the part of the Constitution that lays out how it’s amended. A change has to pass both the House and the Senate by a two-thirds vote. The public is given notice. Then, after the next election, two-thirds of both chambers have to pass it again. Every vote that actually decides the amendment belongs to a legislator. None of them belongs to you.

Delaware is the only state in the country where amending the constitution doesn’t require the voters’ approval. In all 49 others, a change has to be ratified at the ballot box. Here, it doesn’t.

A bill moving through the Statehouse this week would change that — and it gets its first real test this afternoon. Here’s what it does, how far it goes, and where the honest disagreements lie

EXTRA: Keep up with The Delaware Project’s daily coverage of key legislation as it moves through the Delaware General Assembly here. The time to weigh in now, before June 30, when the door closes on the legislative session.

Gregory S. Layton, The Delaware Project

What the bill would do

House Substitute 1 for House Bill 440, sponsored by Rep. Kerri Evelyn Harris with Sen. Kyra Hoffner as its Senate sponsor, would put that decision in your hands — by replacing the second legislative passage with a vote of the people.

Under the bill, an amendment would still start the same way: a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate. But instead of going back to the next General Assembly for a second passage, the amendment would go on the ballot at the next general election. If at least 55% of the people voting on that question say yes, it becomes part of the constitution. The Superior Court would determine whether the 55% mark was met. (The old legislative route doesn’t disappear entirely — it stays on as a backup, which we’ll come to.)

That 55% is a supermajority — more than a simple “half plus one.” And the bill counts it as 55% of the people who actually vote on the amendment question, not 55% of everyone who turned out that day.

There’s a wrinkle worth knowing, and it’s a bit of a hall of mirrors: HB 440 is itself a constitutional amendment. So the bill that would give voters a say has to pass through the very legislator-only process it’s trying to open — twice, with an election in between — before it can take effect. Harris calls it a pilot. More on that below.

The bill also includes some guardrails on how an amendment reaches you. Before it can go on the ballot, a proposed amendment would have to get at least one public hearing — with public comment — in a committee of each chamber, and a real floor debate and a recorded vote in each chamber. It could not be slipped onto an agenda where a single vote passes a whole bundle of bills at once. And the ballot question would have to include a plain-language explanation, accompanied by a voter guide, so people know what they’re deciding.

One more thing the bill adds: any future amendment would have to stick to a single subject, spelled out in its title, the way ordinary bills already must.

What HB 440 does not do

It’s an easy bill to misread, so here’s the plain version:

• It does not let voters propose amendments. Only the General Assembly can put one forward. You’d vote them up or down, not write them.

• It does not end the legislator-only path. That path stays on as a backup (more below).

• It does not use a simple majority. The bar is 55% — a supermajority.

• It does not change the two-thirds vote each chamber needs to put an amendment on the ballot in the first place.

• It does not take effect right away. As a first step, it must pass again at the next General Assembly, after the 2026 election.

Why the bill looks different than it did

If you pulled up the original House Bill 440 a few weeks ago, you’d notice the version moving now is shorter. That’s on purpose, and the story behind it is worth telling because it connects to a fight you may have already heard about.

The substitute makes two real changes from the first draft, and the fallout from House Bill 321 — a separate fight over public notice, which we’ll come to — runs through both.

The first change is the technical amendment fast track. The original bill would have created a shortcut for so-called technical amendments — the small fixes Harris describes as “commas and things like that.” Harris said removing it was intentional, and she gave two reasons. After the HB 321 fight, she said some people worried that fast-tracking technical amendments could look like another way to keep information from the public. And the fast track was tied up with separate legislative machinery anyway: the original HB 440 was written to run alongside another bill, HB 320, and Harris said those pieces “go together” — without that other path, there’s “no reason for those pieces to be in here,” because “it wouldn’t happen anyway.” (The original also never spelled out what counted as a technical amendment, so dropping the shortcut tidied up a loose end in the bargain.)

The second change is the public notice rule itself. The state has long been required to inform the public about proposed amendments in advance — a window of 90 to 120 days before the election. The first draft of HB 440 would have moved that requirement out of the constitution and into ordinary law. The substitute writes it back in as a fixed constitutional rule.

Why the reversal? HB 321 is a separate bill, billed by its sponsors as a cost-saving measure, that would move the public notice of proposed amendments from paid newspaper ads to government websites instead. (According to Spotlight Delaware, the state has spent about $25,600 on that advertising over the past ten years — roughly $1,600 per amendment.) It drew sharp pushback: The News Journal’s editorial board condemned it and called for a veto, and a regional press association objected as well.

Harris told Spotlight Delaware she’d been drafting HB 440 for a while and had meant to release it later, but after the outcry over HB 321, “it felt like the right time.” Keeping the notice window in the constitution, she explained to us, was about not feeding the worry that lawmakers were “trying to keep information from the public.” She framed the bill as an affirmation that lawmakers want people more involved, not less. (HB 321 passed the House in April and cleared a Senate committee; Harris says it’s no longer moving in the Senate.)

The hard questions

A bill like this lives or dies on a few design choices. Here are the three that matter most — and on each, we’ll give you Harris’s own reasoning and the strongest objections.

Why 55%?

Why that number, and not a simple majority, or a higher bar?

Harris describes 55% as a deliberate middle ground. Set it too low — a simple “half plus one” — and a small, motivated minority can swing a constitutional change on a quiet, low-turnout day. Set it too high, and you get the opposite problem.

For the high end, she points to Florida, and the history there is worth getting right. Florida used to pass amendments by simple majority; in 2006, voters raised the bar to 60%. Since then, more than a dozen amendments have won majority support at the ballot box but failed anyway because they couldn’t clear 60%. In 2024 alone, ballot measures on recreational marijuana and abortion rights each won the support of most voters — about 56% and 57% — and both failed.

That, Harris argues, is the trap she’s trying to avoid: a bar so high the people seem to have a choice they don’t really have. “I don’t want a minority of folks being able to make a decision for the majority,” she told us, “but I also don’t want it to be so hard that it’s just pretending like people have options and they don’t.” When it comes to the constitution, she said, “I want to make sure we have a good showing so that we’re not taking away people’s constitutional and civil rights easily.”

Not everyone agrees that 55% is the right line. Two Republican lawmakers — Rep. Bryan Shupe of Milford and Sen. Brian Pettyjohn of Georgetown — have said they’d prefer 60%. Both say they’re open to letting voters weigh in at all; their worry is the bar's height, and, for Shupe, the shorter timeline. “We’re not talking about normal legislation here,” Shupe said. “We’re talking about the foundational constitutional principles that hold up all of legislation.”

Can lawmakers still pass something voters turned down?

Here’s the hard question, and we’re going to answer it straight: yes, they can. It’s worth understanding exactly how, because this is the part of the bill that worries people most — and, to her credit, the part Rep. Harris was most willing to talk through.

Under HB 440, after you vote on a proposed amendment, the Superior Court determines whether it cleared the 55% mark. If it didn’t, the next General Assembly is allowed to pass the amendment anyway — the old-fashioned way, by a two-thirds vote in both chambers. So an amendment that fell just short at the ballot box, or even one that most voters turned down, could still end up in the constitution by way of the legislature.

Harris doesn’t dance around that. “Technically, yes,” she told us. “I would imagine there would be hell to pay.”

She pointed to a couple of situations where lawmakers might use that path — and, notably, she didn’t frame it as overriding voters whenever they please. One is low turnout, especially if lawmakers later hear from people who say they wanted the amendment but didn’t realize the vote mattered. The other is plain confusion about what was on the ballot. She gave a real example from another of her amendments, House Bill 430 — her measure to bar corporations from voting, which says only “natural persons” can vote. (”Natural person” is just legal shorthand for a flesh-and-blood human being, as opposed to a corporation.) Online, she watched people read that as something about immigration — “Are you saying illegal immigrants can vote?” — when the term means nothing of the kind. If voters rejected something because they’d misread it, she argues, a legislature might reasonably step back in.

But Harris argues there’s a real check on that path: voting against your own neighbors is dangerous ground for a politician. “It would be a rare person,” Harris said, “that would take a vote that is contrary to where their district stands.” We asked her flat out whether “hell to pay” meant lawmakers would suffer for it at the next election. “Correct,” she said.

Not everyone finds that reassuring. Sen. Brian Pettyjohn, the Georgetown Republican who’d rather see the bar at 60%, called that same fallback “a direct slap in the face to the will of the people.”

So here’s the honest shape of it. The bill builds the override in on purpose — it’s the failsafe, the way back if a vote goes sideways. It isn’t a backroom move, either: to use that path, the next General Assembly would have to run the amendment through the same public hearings and floor debate, and it still couldn’t be bundled into a single omnibus vote. Harris’s case is that the politics make casual use unlikely: cross your voters, and you’ll answer for it. Whether that’s guardrail enough is a fair thing to weigh — and it’s exactly the kind of question worth putting to your own representative before they vote.

Why can’t we propose our own?

Here’s a misreading worth clearing up. When people hear “referendum,” a lot of us picture being able to start one — to gather signatures and put our own idea on the ballot. HB 440 doesn’t do that. Under this bill, only the General Assembly can propose an amendment; your role is to approve it or reject it, not to launch it.

Was that left out on purpose? Yes. Harris says she looked at how other states do it, but judged that Delaware lawmakers are reluctant to give up control, and she wanted something that could actually pass. She frames the bill as a starting point — a pilot, in her words. “Once we show that it’s not going to break our democracy,” she said, “I think we can look at some other options at that point. But right now I think we need a pilot, so to speak.” A citizen-initiated path, in other words, is a conversation for later, not this bill.

Where people agree, and where they don’t

Harris is candid that the reaction is mixed, inside Legislative Hall and out. Looking online, she said, she sees “people who highly support this idea” and others who are “very much afraid of it.” And not every member of the General Assembly is on board, she added — nor is every member against. She thinks that disagreement should be out in the open, so the public knows the question is unsettled and can weigh in before lawmakers act.

There’s a piece of political context worth laying out plainly because it shapes how people read the bill. Senate Democrats already hold a two-thirds supermajority — 15 of the chamber’s 21 seats, where 14 is the threshold — and House Democrats sit one seat below it, holding 27 of 41, where two-thirds is 28. If House Democrats gain that one seat this fall and Senate Democrats hold their supermajority, the party would — with its members voting together — have the votes to amend the Constitution without any Republican support. HB 440 would route amendments through the voters instead. Supporters and critics read that fact differently. Harris, a Dover Democrat, frames it as giving up an advantage on principle — “what would you want to happen,” she asks, “if you weren’t in power?” Critics point to the bill’s backup path, where the legislature can still act if a referendum fails, as undercutting that. We’ll let you weigh those readings yourself.

One of the sharpest published criticisms came from John Schenck, a Dover resident, in an opinion piece for Bay to Bay News. Schenck isn’t against letting voters decide — but he argues HB 440 has it backward. Rather than replacing the second legislative vote with a referendum, he writes, voter approval should be added on top of the existing process. That second legislative vote, taken after an election, is a safeguard in his view: if lawmakers pass a bad amendment, voters get a chance to replace them before it’s finalized. He also argues passage should require a majority in each of the three counties separately, not a single statewide tally — otherwise, he warns, New Castle County’s numbers could decide the question for Kent and Sussex. In its current form, he called the bill “a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Harris has an answer to the county concern. She argues that turnout matters, and that questions like this one can make people want to participate. Many other states use voter-ratification systems without, in her view, producing the kind of county dominance Schenck warns about. And the bill has failsafes, she argues, “that prevent just a running of one group over the other.” As a Kent County legislator herself, she notes that most votes in the General Assembly already come from New Castle County — and that the math could shift as Kent and Sussex grow.

It’s worth one last note on just how unusual Delaware’s situation is. Even setting the missing referendum aside, Delaware’s two-General-Assembly requirement may make it one of the hardest states in the country to amend its constitution, according to Quinn Yeargain, a Michigan State University law professor quoted by Spotlight Delaware. Neighboring Pennsylvania and Virginia also require two sessions, but only by simple majority. And there’s less Delaware-specific evidence to lean on here than you might expect, because the state has never used this kind of voter-ratification system before — which is part of why reasonable people are watching this one closely.

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Where it stands, and what you can do

House Substitute 1 for HB 440 is in the House Administration Committee — and it gets its first hearing this afternoon. The committee meets at 3:00 p.m. today in the JFC Hearing Room at Legislative Hall in Dover, with HB 440 first on the agenda.

If you want your voice in the record, there’s a direct way to do it, and the window is open right now. The committee takes written public comment at HouseCommitteeComment@delaware.gov — comments are accepted before the meeting and through the end of business tomorrow, and they become part of the official record. You can also attend in person or register to watch and comment online. (And you can find your own legislators and reach them anytime at legis.delaware.gov/FindMyLegislator.)

Keep in mind the long road ahead. Because HB 440 is itself a constitutional amendment, even if it passes before the General Assembly closes on June 30, it’s only halfway. It would have to pass again in the next General Assembly, after the 2026 election, before it ever takes effect. And then — if it does — the question would finally land where the bill wants it: with you.

This is the rare bill about the rules behind all the other rules. It’s worth a few minutes of your attention before that gavel comes down.

—Greg

Of, by, and for the people — see you Monday.