Why Sussex County should reject Cool Spring Crossing 

In November 2024, the public rendered a judgment on the county’s policy of unrestrained growth and replaced three incumbent members of Sussex County Council with challengers who had each campaigned for smarter, more controlled growth. We now have a test of whether that change in leadership will produce a change in outcomes.

On May 7 at noon in Georgetown, the Planning & Zoning Commission will conduct a public hearing on a remnant from the past: an exceptionally large, mixed residential and commercial planned community known as Cool Spring Crossing. With 1,922 housing units and almost 500,000 square feet of commercial and non-commercial space, this is one of the largest projects ever proposed in Sussex County.

Existing infrastructure is not sufficient to accommodate such a massive demand at one location. Its projected population of 5,624 residents would make it the fourth-largest town in Sussex, trailing only Seaford, Georgetown and Millsboro. But it will lack key services commonly found in incorporated towns: no fire department and no municipal police.

Infrastructure has not kept pace with residential growth in Sussex County. Cool Spring will place demands on the roads – an additional 33,359 vehicle trips daily – the schools, fire and rescue services, the police and medical services. The developer projects full buildout of Cool Spring to take two decades. Will infrastructure improvements during the interim catch up with need? Should we forget our worries?

Past performance suggests the gap will not close fast enough to prevent major problems. From conception to completion, road improvements take longer than a decade – if everything goes smoothly and funding is available – and at this point, DelDOT has no plans for that stretch of Route 9 other than to study it. As a team from Beebe Healthcare recently made clear to county council, Sussex is 336 doctors, nurse practitioners and physician assistants short of meeting its current needs, and by 2030, that need will rise to 1,120. No plan now exists to close that gap. Cape Henlopen School District has opposed Cool Spring because its buildings are operating at capacity, with no solution for the school construction problem in sight. Lewes Fire Department is considering discontinuing ambulance services because of the excessive demand triggered by rapid population growth. 

Residents already in the area can expect to pay the price of growth in traffic jams and delays, in long-delayed doctor appointments, in overcrowded classrooms, in stressed EMS services, in delayed police responses.

The financial burden of Cool Spring falls on taxpayers, both those in Sussex and throughout the state. State officials have objected to Cool Spring four times in the past four years because they believe it is “fiscally irresponsible.” Cool Spring’s location – 637 forested and farmed acres – lies outside the growth area Sussex County identified in its 2019 Comprehensive Plan. The state used the county’s growth plan to plan its own infrastructure investments. To reverse that plan now would force the state to revise its plans and redirect money from other projects to an area where it had anticipated no development. And Cool Spring is not just another small correction to the Future Land Use Map: It dwarfs all other amendments made since 2019.

The Sussex Preservation Coalition believes amendments to the Future Land Use Map for a project of this size would set a dangerous precedent for the county. If approved, other developers will begin looking for similar opportunities in areas not zoned for growth and claim they have the right to receive the same approval. As the Office of State Planning Coordination recommended, Sussex County should delay any decision on the Cool Spring Crossing proposals until local and state agencies can undertake a “coordinated community planning effort ... to address the cumulative impact to the surrounding area and road corridors.” This would delay action until the next comprehensive plan is completed and there has been a full discussion of which areas of the county should experience growth. 

Sussex needs to synchronize land-use decisions with infrastructure capacity. As the mayor of Dagsboro, William Chandler III, recently said when declaring a six-month hold on development, “It is always harder to fix things after they are broken than before they are broken.” Avoid making the infrastructure gap even worse: Cool Spring should not be approved.