Many Rehoboth Beach residents were alarmed by the plans for the site of the golf course. In one of the many grass roots movements in Rehoboth Beach history, the citizens mounted an opposition to the plan and it was scrapped by the developers. The property would eventually become Country Club Estates.

That relatively small event, a part of my own years and experience from a child in Rehoboth to serving as its mayor, is only the latest part of a story going back over one hundred years. Most people who enjoy Rehoboth today don’t remember that, until citizen opposition overturned it, the height limits for buildings along the boardwalk and downtown was 85 feet, double the current limit. Most people don’t remember that Grove Park, where today we have the Farmer’s Market, 5Ks and so many other community events, was once a commercial trailer park. These and many other battles are all part of our history, many taking place under my years as a commissioner and as Mayor.

There were efforts to sell the City’s park land as early as 1914, when the City condemned part of Sea View Park and divided it into building lots. In April 1920 another effort almost succeeded when four City Commissioners, in the absence of Mayor Robinson, voted to subdivide and sell off Central Park, Holly Park, Martin’s Lawn, and the remainder of Sea View Park. The Commissioners met again in October 1920 and, this time led by then Mayor Dr. Walter Robinson, rescinded the action. It is interesting that Mayor Robinson and one Commissioner, both absent from the first meeting, were joined by newly elected Commissioner Horn (of the Horn’s Pavilion family) in voting to save the City’s parks.

Preserving our three lakes and the public parks.
Also in those early days, appreciating the natural beauty of Rehoboth Beach Irenee DuPont began to buy land in order to protect and guide its development. In October 1921 he bought 78 lots along Park and Oak Avenues and Kent, Sussex, Third, and Gerar Streets. He made major improvements to Lake Gerar, largely creating the lake we know today. Recognizing the natural beauty and impact on the northwest side, he plotted the area northwest of the Lake into large lots. In the early 1980’s one of these lots was subdivided into five smaller lots. Neighbors, led by Mary Campbell, who owned many of these large lots that Mr. DuPont had created petitioned the City to create a special zoning district so that the remaining lots would not be carved into small lots.

Another case I witnessed was that of returning Grove Park to a public park. At some point years ago the City had established a trailer park on this land which was referred to as Shaw Park. Many citizens did not feel that 35 trailers occupying this public land was a proper use. In the late 1980s the citizens of this City voted, in a non-binding referendum, to forgo the $54,000 in annual revenue and return this area to park land.

Today Rehoboth Beach residents, property owners, and visitors all cite the unique character of Rehoboth Beach as its attraction. That unique character was not happenstance. It was the result of many difficult decisions made by political leaders that were focused on the future of our community. It is helpful to our understanding of the present to provide context for those decisions.

Rehoboth Beach enacts zoning 29 years before Sussex County does.
Rehoboth Beach enacted the City’s first zoning code in 1941 as one of the first municipalities in Delaware to do so. By comparison, Sussex County did not adopt a zoning code until 1970.

Although the county has had a zoning code since 1970, the weak nature of it is evidenced by the Route 1 of 2008. Any resident of Rehoboth or visitor can attest to the chaos that such weak zoning has created.

Despite the rejection of the plan for the Country Club golf course, during the mid to late 1960s a majority of Rehoboth’s City Commissioners supported rapid and unregulated real estate development. During this period the building height limit was raised from 50 feet to 85 feet in commercial areas. One of the more specious arguments that was made to support the increase was the fact that in 1964 the Rehoboth Beach Volunteer Fire Company had bought a new Snorkel fire truck with an aerial device that could reach 85 feet.

Over the next several years a number of new buildings at this height were constructed. In response, the citizens began to become involved in local zoning politics once again. A group of citizens made a major impact on the City Commissioners and other citizens by displaying a model of 85-foot buildings along the boardwalk. The model shocked people and demonstrated that such construction would lead to the absence of sunlight on the beach in the afternoons.

Stopping the buildings tall enough to block the sun.
This group of citizens formed the core of what ultimately became the Rehoboth Beach Homeowners Association. Their activity attracted a wave of new citizens into the political process, including individuals who became candidates for the City Commission, getting elected on this highly-charged height-limit issue. As a result, in the early 1970s the new City Commission, with vision and strong citizen support, lowered the height limit on the boardwalk and in the commercial area from 85 feet to 42 feet, eight feet lower than it had been prior to its being raised in the late l960s.

Building on the success of the height limit fight and still dissatisfied with the direction of development within the City, the Commissioners, in 1976, undertook a major rewrite of the zoning code. Notably, hotels and motels were no longer permitted in residentially zoned areas of the City, as had previously been allowed.

Development and density issues continually confronted the City Commissioners in the 1970s. One of these issues was the idea of a downtown parking garage, which has been proposed numerous times since 1925.

The “chop down the trees” mentality.
One developer on the City commission proposed that the City’s Central Park, the seven acres of natural woods between Columbia and Oak Avenues in the Pines, be used for a parking lot.

Another Commissioner wanted to divide Central Park into lots and sell off many of them to pay for a new sewer system.

Still another Commissioner suggested that the City cut into the woods in Central Park to build the City’s tennis courts there instead of where the courts are now located, at Deauville Beach.

Another City Commissioner, troubled by the fact that the woods were in a natural state, proposed that it be developed for the Little League

In 1981 John Hughes, now Secretary of the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, became mayor. During his tenure, with the sense that development was again eroding the character of the City, a major study and rewrite of zoning codes, addressing density and other issues, was initiated. The study continued under the leadership of the next mayor, Kimber Vought. It was finalized and adopted in September 1991, at the end of my first year as mayor.

Before this major revision of the zoning code, a developer needed only 2,500 square feet of land to erect a residential unit. The standard size of Rehoboth’s lots today is 5,000 square feet. Standing alone, this change dramatically decreased the trend for what was called at the time "motel-type" development.

In response to what one Commissioner who was a prominent real estate agent called the "canyon effect" in the commercial areas, the Commissioners also enacted zoning code revisions that required commercial buildings to be built with an increased set-back from the street as they were built up. Without this vision over the years, today we could have canyons of 42-foot (or if the developers in the l960s had their way, 85-foot) commercial buildings on both sides of Baltimore, Rehoboth, and Wilmington Avenues.

Ways to stop outsized building.
At the same time, the Rehoboth City Commissioners saw the need to limit the size of residential buildings that could be constructed on the City’s typical small lots of 50 feet by 100 feet. Until then a house could be built to any size so long as it did not cover more than 50% of the lot and did not exceed 35 feet in height. This could have quite conceivably yielded a three-story house of 7,500 square feet. The Commissioners researched what other communities had done and found the concept of FAR or Floor Area Ratio; the relating of the square footage of a structure to the lot size, meaning that a 3,500 square foot home could be built on the typical 5,000 square foot lot. As it turned out, homeowners and developers at the time were not rushing to build to the maximum 3,500 square feet. There was limited upsizing but nothing like what was to come starting in 2001, so a 0.7 FAR seemed adequate.

Also in 1991 the City Commissioners addressed another issue of density. Many lots in Rehoboth Beach had additional garage apartments in their back yards. The Commissioners revised the zoning code so that such living quarters could no longer be expanded and that new garage apartments would not be permitted as an additional dwelling unit on a single lot.

A plan for all Rehoboth and its five distinct neighborhoods.
In l996 to l998 the City Commissioners produced the first Long Range Plan for Rehoboth. The economy seemed flush, at least at the higher levels, and the push was on to build bigger and bigger houses on every small lot. This, and related issues, presented still more choices to be made about protecting the character of Rehoboth Beach, or not.

The plan identified five distinct residential neighborhoods. The City contracted with the University of Delaware to do a study of what physical features characterized each of these neighborhoods, including set-backs, size of lots, size of structures, garages, height, architectural features and other factors that made each unique.. The purpose of the study was to provide factual support for the changes the City Commissioners felt were needed to protect the unique character of our City.

In the race of aggressive – some say out-of-control – development swarming over Rehoboth Beach in the early 2000s, with partitioning and teardowns of cottages replaced by out-of-character huge buildings changing forever the character of Rehoboth Beach, our planning Commissioners in 2002 and 2003 crafted a new State-mandated Comprehensive Development Plan, which was adopted by the City and approved by the State. It became, and is now, the blueprint that serves to guide City action toward providing a bright and livable future for Rehoboth Beach, including the protection of its unique character. This time citizens showed up in force to support me as mayor and the planning and City Commissioners.

In 2003 a galvanizing public event was the wanton destruction of numerous large and historic trees in response to the draft plan on a large property at Columbia Avenue and Grove Street. This was exactly the kind of aggressive action that has activated Rehoboth citizens for one hundred years, and it happened again. Citizen demands grew daily that the recommendation in the Comprehensive Development Plan be acted upon immediately to rezone the north side of Columbia Avenue from commercial to residential to match its decades’ long use and to protect the character of the neighborhood. The Commissioners held a seven-hour public hearing in the packed Fire Hall. Citizens showed up and spoke up and made it very clear that they strongly favored measures to protect both the downtown commercial district and their neighborhoods through zoning code changes.

In 2005 the City Commissioners were asked to address the flood of teardowns and construction of maxed-out houses on small lots. Working from the Comprehensive Development Plan, and with overwhelming support of its citizens, the choice was made to lower the FAR from 0.7 to 0.6, or a house of 3,500 sf to 3,000 sf on a 50 X 100 ft lot.

As it was said at the time, it became clear that it was not that the houses were too big, but that the lots were simply too small. This was another community choice to just say "no" – this time to out-sized homes on very small lots, and preventing a town of McMansions sweeping over our traditional neighborhoods and changing forever the character of Rehoboth Beach.

Citizens vote in support of prudently controlled growth.
In 2005, the Commissioners amended the zoning code to discourage townhouse developments in our little city, a phenomenon that was overtaking so many other coastal and resort cities and has become the predominant development feature replacing the farm lands just outside our city limits. The new zoning code also limited the size of new commercial buildings to discourage teardowns and to keep structures more in scale to those around them.

These zoning code changes alarmed the developers, who engineered a referendum intending to overturn the action of the City Commissioners. The referendum in September 2005 drew a huge turnout, and the developers’ referendum was resoundingly defeated. The community had spoken clearly about the direction they wished the City to take. They were completely unwilling to sacrifice the character of Rehoboth Beach for short-term development profits or to accept greatly increased density in the City in a flood of over-sized houses and townhouses..

I was proud to be reelected as mayor on this issue in 2005, as was Commissioner Dennis Barbour, who won a seat on the City commission. In 2006 the City Commissioners took up another key element of the Comprehensive Development Plan passing a comprehensive tree ordinance. Though acknowledged as a unique and vital feature, the extensive tree canopy of Rehoboth had too long been taken for granted. Citizens expressed alarm at the number of lots, with magnificent trees, that were being clear cut. The 2006 zoning code also protected our small business area from the encroachment of massive residential buildings in the commercial district, the target of developers continually seeking to build the maximum size building possible on our small lots.

History tells us there will always be demand for inappropriate development fueled by those interested in short-term profit. As citizens, we all have the obligation to remain aware and involved, and understand that the unique character we say we treasure was hard won and is worth protecting. I am so thankful that those who preceded me were willing to make the tough choices. This serves as inspiration and works to motivate me as Mayor.

On the tough issues and difficult choices that lie ahead, the questions for me, and I believe for all of us, are: what best protects the unique community character that all these courageous past decisions have created? What is in the common interest? And what does the community want? If we make the right choices, we will never lose our way or dishonor the unique community so many have worked hard to build.

Sam Cooper, Mayor of Rehoboth Beach