Residents being evicted from a homeless encampment in Wilmington on Monday woke up to find the park they’ve been living in surrounded by a fence, with the entrances being controlled by city police officers.
Wilmington officials issued eviction notices last month to park inhabitants about a month after giving them city tents to use at the park.
Mayor John Carney’s office said the fence was put up because the park was now a work site. Asked why the city would establish a work site around people still living in tents in the park, Daniel Walker, Carney’s deputy chief of staff, said this was something the city did frequently.
Oh, really, Dan? You work for this guy. That makes you, by definition, an accomplice.
I could quote this entire piece by Sarah Mueller. If this doesn’t make you angry…OK, a litle more:
Wilmington City Councilman Coby Owens said he appreciated their concerns.
“I absolutely understand how they could feel like that,” he said. “No one wants to be caged up. I’m shocked about this.”
Members of the media were barred from entering the fenced area to speak with park residents, along with some volunteers who were attempting to provide the people experiencing homelessness with water and food. Bottles of water were thrown over the fence so those fenced in could get access to them.
Owens said he was concerned about the legality of the fence barring media access to the encampment.
AG Jennings Pushes Back Against Mayor:
During a press conference last week, Carney acknowledged a concern that some people may move to sleep in other public places in the city after Christina Park is closed. He noted then that the city may need assistance from state prosecutors.
“We do need support from the (Delaware) Attorney General in terms of if there’s a need for a prosecution. I don’t intend or want to have to prosecute folks for this, but if they’re violating the law, if they’re camping in a park after dark,” Carney said.
In an apparent response Monday, Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings said in a press release that her office would not assist the city in prosecuting people for simply sleeping in Christina Park. Instead, her team would only prosecute acts of violence, and trespassing or destruction of private property, she said.
“The City did not consult us in advance. After we learned about the evictions, we were clear with the Mayor’s office that, while our Community Engagement team would be available to assist with service referrals, we would not prosecute people for their nonviolent presence in a park,” the letter stated, saying such prosecutions would be a “moral failure.”
A moral failure it is. I’ve stayed away from this. However, now I understand where Carney’s kid got his complete lack of empathy. Runs in the family.
The ‘American Flag Blue Reflecting Pool’:
National Park Service workers at the Reflecting Pool on Monday.Credit…Alex Kent/The New York Times
I just listened to your post-election day podcast about Graham Platner. I agree with your much of what you said, but want to share a slightly different take. In my view, Mainers aren’t shrugging off Platner’s baggage because Trump set so low a bar. I think Mainers are hungry for public servants who are not obviously and shamelessly full of shit.
(About me: I am a women, 67, Jewish, and have lived in Maine for 40 years. I have/had all the reservations about Platner you would expect. I did not rank him first, but I am not sorry he prevailed. Like most Dems, I will vote for him in November regardless.) Platner, I think, can and should turn the character test on its head. Character is more than just the absence of personal failure. It should mean fidelity to the Constitution, commitment to civic virtue and shared community, and progress toward a more perfect union. Collins has failed that character test in many ways and Platner knows it.
The specifics of her betrayals (her Kavanaugh vote (she just said she doesn’t regret that vote because she also voted for the three liberals on the Court); the calculated tap-dance in which she and Murkwoski always engage (vote to advance a bill, e.g., HR; but ultimately vote against it in a barely disguised game of cover-your-ass) are almost immaterial at this point. Platner is smart enough to fit these failures into broad themes: her participation in hollowing out the middle class, shielding Trump’s from the consequences of his heinous policies affecting women and members of minority groups, and the damage done to America as a result of Republican adventurism in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
These are not times for politics as usual, as you well know. So I guess Maine Dems have concluded, as Lincoln regarding US Grant: “We cannot spare this man; he fights!”
It was before dawn on a Friday in January when a Gulfstream G600 with the burnt-orange Texas Longhorns logo on its tail landed at Dulles airport outside Washington, D.C. Its owner, a little-known oil billionaire named Jeffery Hildebrand, had been summoned to the White House.
By mid-afternoon he was in the East Room, just three seats from President Donald Trump, who had recently ordered the military raid that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. Now Trump wanted Hildebrand and two dozen other energy executives to commit to investing $100 billion in Venezuela’s decrepit oil industry.
Many couched their enthusiasm with caveats. ExxonMobil’s CEO called Venezuela “uninvestable” without changes to its legal system. The head of ConocoPhillips wanted U.S. government financing.
But Hildebrand, a major Trump donor whose wife had been named ambassador to Costa Rica, had already seen how loyalty could be rewarded. Even though he had no notable operations outside the U.S., he hunched toward a microphone and said in a halting voice, “Hilcorp is fully committed and ready to go to rebuilding the infrastructure in Venezuela.”
As the founder and owner of Hilcorp, a privately held company known for buying up old, low-producing “stripper wells,” Hildebrand needs Trump’s favor. Long one of the oil industry’s top polluters, Hilcorp releases unusually large quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas that can trap 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
Hildebrand had never been a leading political contributor. But in 2024, the Biden administration issued aggressive restrictions on methane pollution — rules that would impose steep costs on Hilcorp — and the once-obscure tycoon became one of Trump’s biggest oil industry supporters, giving millions to his campaign.
Trump has since named a former Hilcorp lobbyist to a top post at the Environmental Protection Agency, putting him in charge of an effort to unravel the methane rules with help from trade groups backed by Hildebrand, a ProPublica investigation has found. That will bring a sweeping reprieve for the nation’s 700,000 stripper wells, boosting Hildebrand’s profits while saddling society as a whole with the climate fallout.
