DL Open Thread: Wednesday, November 12, 2025

I was really hoping that Brianna Hill would be at the Spotlight Delaware Members Mixer.  Why? Because many of her articles make me angry for the best possible reason-she brings superior critical thinking skills to everything she writes.  In so doing, she sheds light on the worst elements of the Delaware Way.  Take this story, which serves as a companion piece to the Gibraltar article:

The Wilmington City Council will now have more oversight of the city’s embattled land bank – an organization that has faced criticism in recent years over a lack of transparency and financial mismanagement.

On Thursday, the council passed an ordinance that will require council members to approve certain appointments made to the board of directors of the organization, formally called the Wilmington Neighborhood Conservancy Land Bank.

It passed four months after council members vowed to make reforms to the organization just as it faced a tipping point of criticism sparked by its rehabilitation of a stately historic mansion, called Gibraltar. Some even suggested dismantling it.

In June, Councilwoman Zanthia Oliver introduced the ordinance to mandate council approval for new Land Bank board members.

Shortly thereafter, the organization’s executive director, Bud Freel, asked her to hold the ordinance for further discussion. 

During that time, the Land Bank’s board appointed Leroy Tice, a Wilmington-based personal injury lawyer, to the Land Bank board. Tice previously had served on former-Mayor Mike Purzycki’s transition team, along with Freel and Rick Gessner, the Land Bank chair. The involvement of Purzycki in the Gibraltar project — he lives next door and is leading its renovation now as a private citizen after directing funding to the project as mayor — has become a flashpoint to the latest criticism of the land bank.

To state the obvious, there is no innocent explanation for this appointment.

Asked if Freel wanted Oliver to hold the ordinance to get Tice appointed, Freel said, “one is not connected to the other.”

That, my friends, is a lie.  Read the entire article, then read the other articles by Brianna Hill.  That is essential reporting, and yes, people are paying notice and acting on it.

China Fights Climate Change While US–Doesn’t.  Talk about yer role reversals:

In the United States, the Trump administration is reversing efforts to protect the climate. In Europe, nations grapple with how, and how quickly, to embrace a green future.

At the same time, something remarkable is happening in other parts of the world. Countries with big and quickly growing economies are taking advantage of China’s emergence as a renewable-energy superpower. They are going green in a hurry.

China makes that possible, exporting solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and electric vehicles all over the developing world while investing billions in factories that make those things in the nations where they are sold.

It won’t solve the problem of climate change, the reporters say. Most countries continue to get most of their energy from fossil fuels. They mine coal, build coal plants and produce oil. China alone emits more greenhouse gases than the United States and the European Union combined. There’s still plenty of smoke in the air.

But the falling price of China’s renewable tech has allowed developing countries to satisfy a larger percentage of their energy needs internally. It reduces their reliance on imported fuel and develops their economies.

Sure would’ve been nice for the United States to build part of its economy on the world’s green energy needs.  But, since there’s actually no climate change, might as well reopen ‘clean coal’ plants. Idiots.

Nothing Gets By These Senate Dems:

A provision of the legislative package that would end the government shutdown allows senators to bring lawsuits if federal law enforcement seizes or subpoenas their data without notifying them, with potential damages of $500,000 for each violation.

The language appears to allow GOP senators to sue over steps that the Justice Department took during special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into President Trump related to the 2020 election. In October, Senate Republicans revealed an FBI document that showed investigators had obtained phone record data from eight senators and one congressman for calls they made in the days before and after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The records were obtained pursuant to a subpoena in 2023, and the new legislation covers alleged violations dating back to 2022.

To answer your question–I’m sure the ‘Justice’ Department has already prepared the checks to go out to the ‘violated’ Senators.

Apparently, somewhere, Trump made Veterans’ Day about himself.  Dog Bites Man.

A Comprehensive Guide To Trump’s Pardons.  Absolute corruption:

The beneficiaries of President Donald Trump’s mercy in his second term have mostly been people with access to the president or his inner circle. Those who have followed the rules set out by the Department of Justice, meanwhile, are still waiting.

Trump has granted clemency to allies, donors and culture-war figures — as well as felons who, like him, were convicted of financial wrongdoing. On Friday, he granted pardons to 77 people, including Rudy Giuliani and other allies tied to efforts to overturn the 2020 election, though they are mostly symbolic because federal pardons do not apply to ongoing or possible state prosecutions, which many of the grantees face. Those clemencies came on top of the commutation awarded last month to George Santos, the disgraced former New York congressman found guilty of defrauding donors and lying to the House of Representatives. Trump cut short Santos’ seven-year sentence after less than three months.

For those who followed the standard protocol set out by the Department of Justice, the sense is growing that the process no longer matters; they’ve watched the public database of applicants swell with thousands of pending cases, while Trump grants pardons to people who never entered the system at all.

Under Justice Department standards and requirements, people seeking pardons generally must wait five years after their release from incarceration, demonstrate good conduct and remorse, and file petitions through the Office of the Pardon Attorney. But Trump’s actions in his second term show he has largely abandoned that process.

Those who have followed the rules are still waiting. They include small-business owners with decades-old fraud cases, veterans seeking to regain the gun rights that were stripped away with their convictions and people working jobs far below their experience because of the stigma of a criminal record.

In his second term, the break from the formal process has only widened: Only 10 of the roughly 1,600 people granted pardons had filed petitions to the Office of the Pardon Attorney, and even within that small group, some did not appear to meet the Justice Department’s standards and requirements.

A huge chunk of the pardons, roughly 1,500, were people convicted for their roles in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. The rest have come largely through back channels. In some of the more striking cases, Trump’s pardons erased not only criminal convictions for defendants tied to large-scale corruption and financial crimes but the restitution judges had ordered or that defendants had agreed to pay.

It’s ProPublica,  so it’s top-notch reporting.  Read the entire piece.  You’ll know more once you’re done.  Granted, you’ll be angrier…

I Smell More ‘Delaware Way’.

The developers of a massive warehouse near Middletown secured a major legal win last week, which may clear the way for their long-stalled warehousing project that faced years of county resistance.

In an opinion issued Nov. 3, a New Castle County Superior Court judge admonished a key argument used by county officials to delay the project, calling it “legally indefensible.”

Dermody sued the county in April 2024, claiming that county land-use officials “arbitrarily failed or refused to perform” their duties when they did not respond to questions posed by New Castle County Councilmembers about the planned development.

At the center of one of its challenges in the Court of Chancery is whether or not further traffic studies would be necessary to move the proposal forward.

According to the recent opinion issued by Judge Charles Butler, the county, Dermody and DelDOT signed an agreement that waived a requirement of a traffic impact study. The opinion also said that in the months leading up to the lawsuit, county land use officials said a traffic study wasn’t required for this project. 

But months later, the county “unilaterally decided” that a study would be necessary to continue the project, according to Butler’s opinion.

Can we take ‘the county’ out of this and, at least in the first instance, substitute the name ‘Matt Meyer’?  David Carter thinks so:

New Castle County Councilman David Carter, who represents the area where the warehouses are slated, questioned the signed agreement, calling it “inexcusable by the prior County Executive and DelDOT.”

“In an ill-advised step, they committed the County and the State to a major infrastructure obligation without the supporting analysis,” Carter said in an email.

In his statement, he claimed traffic studies needed for future infrastructure projects had yet to be completed, and that the agreement was signed with “outdated” and “incomplete” traffic data.

A spokesperson for Gov. Matt Meyer, who was County Executive for New Castle County at the time of the agreement, did not respond to a request for comment.

Did they just keep on Carney’s ‘spokesperson’?

What do you want to talk about?