1. Right of Way/Parking Issue
One of the issues our Town Commissioners are looking to address is how to handle and provide adequate parking.
There are complaints from Visitors, Property owners, and Business Owners that there are not enough "clearly marked" parking spaces. Our Planning & Zoning Committee members have worked hard to prepare a draft ordinance that the town commissioners are discussing.
Obviously it is important to be able to accomodate tourists for any beach community. If you rent your home, it is tough to attract rentals without the ability for tenants to park. Property values are also impacted especially if those rental properties cannot draw rental income.
If given the choice we would all prefer to utilize the public space around our property as our own but that is where the parking issue occurs.
What has occurred over the years is some fences are no longer in place and now multiple cars are parked within the property lines. There is a safety concern in the event of a fire with that many cars nearby, especially adjacent to a home.
Streets have been measured by width to help determine where the town may be able to accomodate more vehicles plus there are existing designations in the town code that the Commissioners are considering enforcing. Also under consideration is using a specific crushed stone to clearly mark the area.
Do you believe that responsibility should be shared by all homeowners on all streets or should that burden only belong to certain streets and certain properties?
Please click
here to send an email to David Main and let us know what you think.
If you want more information on the public hearing, please go to www.townofdeweybeach.com
2. Bayard Ave Flooding
The Infrastructure Committee has recommended that the Town of Dewey Beach enter into a Civil Design engineering Services Contract for the Bayard Avenue Project
with Engineering Consultants International in the amount of $53,692.00. The Commissioners approved it at the March 13th meeting and Representative Hocker and Senator Bunting have approved funds that should help us cover this cost. As part of the Clean Water Act, an application was submitted to DNREC for a 2% Low Interest loan amortized over 10 years to cover the cost of construction.
Please click
here to send an email to David Main and let us know what you think.
3. Budget
Of all of Delaware’s 57 towns and cities Dewey Beach is probably unique in that it has no property tax. Instead it relied on Transfer Tax. When real estate is sold in Dewey a 3% tax is applied. Half goes to Sussex County. The rest goes to Dewey.
In 2004 the $1,071,000 from the Transfer Tax covered almost half of Dewey’s expenses. But the recession has hit real estate hard. The decline in Transfer Tax was one of the reasons the Town ran back-to-back deficits in 2007 and 2008 totaling $967,060. So how could Dewey run over almost a million dollars and not go bankrupt? What saved Dewey was its “rainy day” fund. Before it ran these deficits Dewey had $2,391,745 in its general surplus fund. This is enough to fund almost a full year (11.5months) of expenditures.
The unanswered question is how much money should Dewey have now in its “rainy day” fund? Should Dewey get the general surplus fund back to a level where it equals a year’s worth of expenses?
Surprisingly there is no authoritative answer to this question.
In answer to a query the Director of Policy for the state office of Management and Budget said Delaware does not maintain guidelines on municipal reserve balances (letter 3/6/2007). The Government Finance Officers Association recommends
…maintain unreserved fund balance in their general fund of no less than five to 15 percent of regular general fund operating revenues, or of no less than one to two months of regular general fund operating expenditures.
