Matt Bucher is a resident of Milford and has spent 26 years in commercial construction estimating, served as vice president of the Milford School District Board of Education and is a trustee of the Delaware Agricultural Museum. He is also a candidate for Delaware House of Representatives’ District 33.
You do not need a planning study to see what is happening in Kent County. It is visible from the windshield.
Growth here is a fact. Whether it leaves our area better or poorer than it found us depends on decisions being made right now, most of them quietly and without much public argument. That is the part that concerns me and most everyone in this area.
I have spent decades in commercial construction estimating. The work is unglamorous, and it is unforgiving. You take a set of plans, and you tell someone what the job will actually cost, not what he or she hopes it will cost. Get it wrong, and somebody eats the difference.
That discipline is what we need to reach for when we look at what is happening around us. The cost of development does not disappear because no one considered it. It gets paid. The only questions worth arguing about are who pays it and whether those people had any say.
Start with who decides. There has been a steady push in Dover to move land use authority up and out of the towns and to standardize what gets built, and where, from Legislative Hall rather than from a town council meeting where the people affected can show up and be heard. Senate Bill 23 was one version of that. There will be others.
I understand the frustration behind it. Housing is scarce and expensive, and local processes are slow. But zoning is the last real lever a small town has over its own future. Once Frederica or Houston loses the ability to say what belongs there, it does not get that back. Whatever the state’s intentions, the practical effect is that decisions get made for us, rather than with us.
Then, there is who pays. New rooftops do not arrive alone. They arrive with children who need classrooms, with medical calls, with fires, with traffic on roads laid out for a smaller county.
The numbers are worth considering. It’s my understanding that Kent County’s paramedics run roughly 40,000 calls a year. Our state police handle something on the order of thousands, as well, with about a dozen troopers per shift covering all of Kent, a count that includes the desk sergeant. Our fire companies, staffed largely by neighbors who are not paid to do it, run 7,000-8,000 calls a year and then must come back to Dover every session to make the case for grant-in-aid all over again.
Lastly is what we are losing while we argue. Farmland is the one thing in this county nobody is making more of. The Aglands Preservation Program works — and it deserves to be funded like it matters — because a farm that goes to houses and pavement does not come back, not in my lifetime or in my grandchildren’s lifetimes.
None of this is an argument against building. It is an argument for counting the cost in advance, forcing growth to pay for growth and being straight with the people who live here.
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.
