DIGEST: Late Summer 2022
City of New Castle News, Information, Interviews & Events
I. August News Round-Up
Electric Rate Increases Likely Worsened by Coal Plant Extension
Earlier this year, MSC director Scott Blomquist appeared before City Council to explain why, suddenly and unexpectedly, electric rates were about to go up: the coal-fired Indian River Power Plant was shutting down in June. The owners did not want to continue with an unprofitable operation and the decrease in supply, he explained, meant sudden changes in the local power market.
Then the plant got a partial reprieve, in a state deal to keep part of it operational, essentially back-stopping local supply while improvements are made to the broader power grid in Delaware and newer energy sources are brought online. The current extension runs through 2026.
Yet, in what seems a no-win situation for consumers, residents throughout the state will now see electricity costs “increase by about $6.45 a month, [and] much of that growth is directly related to keeping the Indian River Power Plant running.”
According to Ken Natale of MSC, our local utility is still hammering out what effect the “must run fees” that are part of the extension deal will mean for New Castle customers. He expected the commissioners to discuss that at their August meeting on the 30th.
Get more of the story in this detailed article from DE Online.
Battery Park Playground committee secures $100K State Grant
The parent- and resident-driven committee looking into playground improvements for Battery Park has secured $100K in funding through the state bond bill, thanks in part to assistance from local state Senator Nicole Poore. The grant would fully cover the currently-projected costs of Phase I, which is to include several updated attractions for both big and small kids. (See the image below for our mark-up of what is to be part of which Phase.)
Speaking to Council this month, committee member Suzanne Swift seemed intent on getting the Phase I expenditures authorized right away. Council president Platt and city solicitor Losco, however, pointed out that because state funds are being used, a bid process will have to be followed. So far only Kompan, which makes outdoor recreational equipment and has worked on other playgrounds around the county, has been consulted. Although Swift had very high praise for the company, Platt directed city staff to work with the committee to set up a ‘Request for Proposals’ to solicit alternate bids.
Ms. Swift fielded questions about the ongoing maintenance of any improved facilities (also addressed in comments by Trustee Pres. Toner, see below) as well as the needs of other neighborhoods around town with outdated playgrounds (or none at all). She stated that establishing ongoing fundraising - already under-way in search of funding for Phases 1b and 2 - would be key for both. The committee has talked about other playgrounds as potential projects, but Swift noted that moving into other areas would necessitate getting folks in those neighborhoods involved.
Trustee President Toner’s statement to City Council
Pete Toner, president of the Trustees of the New Castle Common, addressed City Council this month, starting with thanks for its members’ work and a nod to how rare he prefers to keep such exchanges. His comments are below.
I’d like to start with thanking you all for your service to our city. You are available to residents seemingly every day for discussion of any issue. If each of you worked on average 20 hours per week, at 52 weeks per year, at a rate of a little more than $3,300/year… this equates to $3.20 per hour. A lot of work for $3.20, but it beats an ear of corn!
I was advised by a Trustee older and wiser than I when it came to matters of the City and attending City Council meetings. He looked at me and said, “here’s what you do…. don’t do it!” Well this is for the discussion of some necessary topics so this is unavoidable.
I’d like to start with ONCOR, I commend their efforts in soliciting our state senator and winning a grant for some new playground equipment. I would like to compliment these parents, they have been stalwart and worked tirelessly to shepherd this process. The part I need to clarify for Council’s perspective [is] the level of involvement from the Trust. As long as the budgetary requirements are confined to “mulch only,” the Trust will maintain an active role. But our Property Maintenance committee had serious concerns when it came to the maintenance of this equipment long term; we thought the limitations of the warranty were spurious and lacking. The time restraints on the plastic, moving parts and the lighter metals compared to the steel… Our advice [is] to make sure you have a plan for an annual maintenance budget, after this original round of funding.
Speaking as a resident, I have nothing but compliments for the NCPD, every interaction I’ve had with our police force has been efficient and with the utmost professionalism. On the topic of policing: “The broken windows theory states that visible signs of crime, anti-social behavior and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes. The theory suggests that policing methods that target minor crimes such as vandalism, loitering, public drinking, jaywalking, and fare evasion help to create an atmosphere of order and lawfulness.”
Bottom line your public safety budget is lacking, you should be placing a premium on attracting and keeping young officers. And to borrow a line from President Biden: “Don't tell me what you value, show me your wallet, and I'll tell you what you value.”
Status from the farm… The move to Historic Penn Farm is probably the best move the Trust has made in a century and will serve the Trust for its next century. It is everything you can assume: synergies, economies of scale, centralized location to our 648 acre service area. Really something to keep in mind as you consider a centralized government location to serve all 13 of our neighborhoods. In one stop, you could pay your property taxes, ask MSC a question, apply for a building permit or request a dozen other government services. You five sit in a unique position afforded to a council at [most] once in a lifetime if not a full century. This could be a generational change to show the entire town that you respect and value them.
I’ll close with the proposed dog park, we on the Trust unanimously approved use of 70% of one acre dedicated to a city request for the dog park. Can you update me on the status? Our Real Estate attorney has not heard from the City.
Autumn to bring various Traffic Disruptions to New Castle
Delmarva Power has accelerated its plans for replacing the remaining gas mains under New Castle. Phase III of the project will now begin concurrently with the completion in September-October of Phase II, which was begun in the Spring. Residents to be affected on parts of Chestnut, Harmony and Fourth Streets will be notified in September with further information.
Also starting in September, work on the Delaware Memorial bridge will reduce the number of lanes available in each direction to at most three at a given time. The northbound span, set to be repaved - two lanes at a time - with ultra-high performance concrete, will likely have the worst of the back-ups. According to the website for the bridge, the work starting this fall is “expected to take three to four seasons (two falls/one or two springs) to complete.”
According to this 10-ABC article with further details, the DRBA has warned that motorists “should expect traffic congestion and delays heading into New Jersey.’”
II. ICYMI on Social Media…
Lost Playground: Deemer’s Beach Amusement Park
We did some research into New Castle’s own forgotten summer resort of nearly a hundred years ago, collecting archival photos and more recent info to offer the full story of Deemer’s Beach.
Long-neglected Buttonwood Mansion draws New Attention
A radio spot and article on Delaware Public Media by Larry Nagengast… Pitches to the Trustees and New Castle City Council… Multiple viral social media posts about its current state… The historic Buttonwood Mansion that once served as a home to Delaware Chief Justice James Booth has been getting a lot of attention recently.
The article linked above provides wonderful detail about what’s going on with this historic structure currently languishing on the shore of the Delaware. Since its publication, with the aforementioned ‘pitches’ by Guido P. Camponelli to local bodies and others, momentum appears to be building toward a coalition to preserve the beautiful home that is one of few remaining examples of its architectural style.
‘National Night Out’ returns to New Castle
After a five-year hiatus, the city hosted a local event for this year’s National Night Out (NNO) on August 2. NNO is a nation-wide community engagement event designed to encourage familiarity, communication and cooperation between local first responder agencies and the people they serve.
New Castle NNO 2022 was led by NCPD, Good Will Fire Co., and the NC Community Partnership, with major contributions from the NC Hundred Lions Club, NC Public Library and DNREC, plus participation from BV-SPCA, Harvest Christian Academy, NC Court House Museum, Kona Ice of New Castle, and probably a couple others we’re (apologetically) forgetting!
Check out photos of the fun - plus video of Council President Mike Platt and City Administrator Bill Barthel going in the Dunk Tank to raise funds for the SPCA - on City Topics’ Instagram.
III. Brenton Grom on the ‘Landscape Campaign’ at Read House & Gardens
The staff of the Read House on the Strand has undertaken a multi-season project to rejuvenate its beautiful public garden for generations to come. To that end, the campaign will incorporate expert guidance from landscape architecture firm DAVID RUBIN Land Collective and seek extensive and ongoing public input.
Under the guidance of Brenton Grom, who took over as Director of the museum roughly four years ago, the garden has already been at the center of greater community engagement. It has been opened to the public from dawn to dusk and been a lovely setting for several new events, such as LIT for the Holidays.
We chatted briefly with Grom about what this extensive project will entail and what his goals are for it…
NC City Topics (NCT): What inspired the need for the Landscape Campaign?
Brenton Grom (BG): This campaign is going to make the Read House landscape sustainable for the next generation, not just environmentally but also financially and socially. We started with the intention of catching up on significant deferred maintenance—boxwood were dying of blight, failing trees needed to be removed, hardscape needed repairs. But we were also going to have to make decisions about editing the existing plantings that had grown and changed since the last landscape campaign in the 1990s.
NCT: What will go into those decisions?
BG: The Delaware Historical Society has grown and changed too, and the Read House gardens afford us an opportunity to bring people together from across our wide community. This includes New Castle neighbors, who offer remarkable expertise and community memory. It also includes, for example, stakeholders in DHS’s Mitchell Center for African American Heritage. Like all landscapes, the gardens we see today reflect choices and interventions made by multiple generations, each with their own agenda, and they also conceal the presence of many people whose lives shaped and were shaped by this landscape in the past. That includes thousands of years of Lenape occupants and several forgotten African American gardeners in the nineteenth century, to name a few.
NCT: How will these stories be interwoven into the project?
BG: Extensive archaeology and research over the past generation will give us ample historical material to work with, and the task is to deploy it in ways that merge New Castle’s history of beautiful design with opportunities for our present community to have meaningful experiences at the Read House. We don’t yet have any idea what that will look like, but we’re determined that visitors will have ways to feel the presence of people in this landscape who may have previously been forgotten.
NCT: How was the turnout for the public info meeting last week and what were your main take-aways?
BG: We had a lovely group that ranged from New Castle neighbors to statewide public officials. Everyone had a chance to meet David Rubin and his team at Land Collective, the internationally acclaimed landscape architecture firm helping us develop a design concept. David introduced the firm’s values and processes and guided everyone through a series of exercises to assemble public input.
NCT: Can you elaborate a bit on the process from here?
BG: We’ve already set the dates for the next two community stakeholder meetings: Thursday, September 29, and Thursday, October 27, both at 6:30. You can register to participate on the project page on our site, which also has fuller information about the project and the history of the gardens.
We’re also finalizing a digital platform for tracking progress and submitting responses to some of the same prompts offered in person. Anyone interested in participating should watch for information through our email list, which they can sign up for on our site, and through Instagram and Facebook at @readhouseandgardens.
Thanks to Brenton Grom for answering our questions - look out for a stand-alone, longer and wider-ranging interview with the Read House director soon!
IV. Editorial: Connecting Our Neighborhoods
I live in Washington Park, where - ignoring the branding on the garbage trucks and police cars that come through - it can sometimes be easy to forget that we are part of a municipality at all. Having a vibrant, activity-filled, historic downtown is wonderful (and surely the place for big events), but less meaningful if folks don’t know what is going on, or find out too late.
Now, presumably we all get the New Castle Crier that comes with MSC bills, much info is online, and people can always subscribe to the Weekly. I do not mean to discount individuals’ responsibility for keeping themselves informed, nor their agency when it comes to self-advocacy.
However, swift moves toward improvements to the Battery Park playground that could cost $1M (if not in city funds) have re-opened discussions about parity between our communities. For example, despite being one of the city’s largest neighborhoods, Washington Park has no playground (or indeed, park) at all.
2020 Census data for New Castle (and simple facts of city layout) points to our Historic district having certain civic advantages: higher median income and property values than surrounding areas, closer access to public services, higher ownership rates, more regular spending on infrastructure improvements, etc. Perhaps the ground downtown is just more fertile for the sort of citizen advocacy groups (like ONCOR) that can push local leaders to get things done.
But forceful advocacy by relatively well-resourced citizens should not be required to ensure that the benefits of living in a city are shared widely and fairly. Not all neighborhoods are created equal in terms of the resources, professional connections, and basic time-to-spend needed to form an effective advocacy group. And this shouldn’t be about “someone else” getting something, anyway. We have offices we all elect so that we can decide these things as a community.
I was pleased that Ms. Souder raised this issue in discussions about the BP playground this month, and I credit Mrs. Leary for repeatedly raising it in the past, to varying degrees. These questions come up elsewhere too, as some local organizations strive to find ways of including outer neighborhood residents (including the Library Friends, a group which has deliberately sought members and leaders from outside the historic district in recent years).
There are no magic bullets for better integrating New Castle’s neighborhoods, though there are some ideas in the 2020 Comprehensive Plan. One important first step is to increase communication. To that end, I offer a few (relatively) easy-to-implement, (relatively) low-cost ideas… some of which a Tourism/Development Coordinator - once we hire one - might contribute to:
Neighborhood Community Boards
Although they would require some maintenance, something as simple as community bulletin boards in accessible locations in each neighborhood could provide a sort of ‘civil outpost.’ In addition to official info, they could provide space for local organizations to do outreach and publicize events, somewhere for neighborhood residents to gather and chat, and more.City Welcome Packets
Over the years, both NCCP and the Trustees (each in their own context) have discussed the issue of how to help new residents integrate into town and considered variations of this idea. A ‘Welcome Packet’ for new city residents could provide residents - especially in the outer ‘hoods, where civic activity is less visible - with an important intro to the array of active organizations, unique institutions, events and local info that contribute to our public life.
… (If every mortgage insurance provider in the US can inundate new homeowners with spam, we can easily send pre-designed welcome packets when new folks move to town.)Events Outside the Historic District
Other than Shawtown’s annual Italian Festival and Parade, and occasional events held at PCA or the Hermitage, not much happens outside downtown. Granted, a lack of open spaces and venues in the outer neighborhoods (an issue deserving its own, more serious and long-term consideration) makes programming there harder. But if streets downtown can be closed for block party-like events, why not in VDV, Dobbinsville, or my own Washington Park? Even a single, yearly “roving block party” event that rotated between the outer neighborhoods, could go a long way toward making residents of those places feel more like New Castilians.
V. Late Summer Stuff to Do (Upcoming Events)
Late August (incl. this weekend!)
The NCPD Backpack (& School Supplies) Drive through 8/30.
There was a distribution event on 8/20, but collection continues for kids who may arrive on their first day still needing supplies.8/27 - Restorative Justice at NC Court House Museum, 12pm.
Lawyer and advocate Charito Calvachi-Mateyko discusses modern concepts in criminal justice with a focus on the practice of ‘Restorative Justice.’8/28 - Antiques on the Waterfront at Battery Park, 9am-4pm.
New Castle’s annual open-air Antiques Show, organized by Dordy Fontinel and benefitting Friendship House and its work on behalf of the unhoused.
8/29 - Colonial School District’s First Day of School for grades 1-6, grade 9 and kindergartners with A-L last names.
8/30 - CSD’s First Day of School for grades 7-8 and grades 10-12.
8/31 - CSD’s First Day of School for Kindergartners with M-Z last names.
September
9/8 - Dining in the Street in Town Square, 6-9pm.
Dine under an open sky in front of the Court House and enjoy a cash bar, DJ and raffle prizes, all in support of the New Castle Senior Center. Tickets $50 (seats limited).
9/9 - An Evening of Songs and Stories at NC Presbyterian, 7:30pm.
Author and storyteller Sharon Moore sings and shares stories from her recent book, Kaleidoscope: Journey of the Sharecroppers' Granddaughter. Free.9/10-11 - Chautauqua Tent Show on the Green (& online), 12-6pm.
New Castle Court House Museum co-hosts the 24th Annual celebration of local history and culture over two afternoons on the Green. Free.
9/10 - 17th District Day with Rep. Minor-Brown at WPHS, 11am-3pm.
9/13 - CSD Board of Education Meeting at WPHS, 7pm.
9/14 - New Castle City Council Meeting at the Senior Center, 7pm.
9/23 - A Little Night Music: Notes in Time performance at the Library, 6pm.
9/24 - Art on the Green in Battery Park, 10am-4pm.
The New Castle Hundred Lions Club’s beloved annual crafts show returns, featuring scores of vendors, food trucks, and more. Free admission.
9/24 - Books on the Green Book Sale (at Art on the Green).
New Castle Library Friends’ first AotG book sale was a big hit in 2021; they return this year with an even larger collection of gently-used books in many genres, plus raffles.9/24 - HNC Belgian Beer Festival at Battery Park, 12-5pm.
Also coinciding with Art on the Green this year, NC Community Partnership has teamed up with Jessop’s to offer a beer garden in the park.
October
10/1 - River Towns Ride & Fall Festival, 9am.
Ride between ONC, Del City & the Wilmington Riverfront starts 9am, with post-ride party in New Castle’s Battery Park, starting around 12 noon.10/15 - NC Senior Center’s Harvest Bazaar, 9am-2pm.
On-Going Events
Garden Yoga at the Read House (Saturdays at 10am)
Regular Historic Tours at:
New Castle Court House Museum (Weds-Sunday)
New Castle Historical Society (Weds-Sunday)
Read House & Gardens (Thurs-Sunday)
Check out the Fourth Friday Art Loop each month at participating shops and galleries around town square, including Opera House, Mo’Zart, Cobblestones Antiques and many more!
Remember, you can always check our Facebook Events Tab for an up-to-date ‘master calendar’ of what’s going on in town (that’s listed on that site, anyway)…
Thanks for reading and if you enjoyed this digest and want to see more from New Castle City Topics, please consider subscribing!
New Castle City Topics is very informative on local issues and history of our community. Keep up the great work and thank you to all who contribute to this fine online communication.