The plan

Audit first. Taxes last.

Make county government more efficient, more business friendly, and more accountable, while keeping taxes as low as we possibly can. That’s the whole job in one sentence.

Hold the line on spending

I put that phrase on my literature in 2022. It’s still what I believe, and nothing about the last four years has changed my mind.

Families balance their budgets. Businesses justify their spending. County government should meet the same standard, and right now nobody makes them.

So my first act on council is to propose the first comprehensive, independent, public performance audit of county government in years. Not a compliance check on whether the paperwork got filed correctly. A hard look at whether taxpayers are getting value.

Every department answers one question. Are residents getting the best possible value for every dollar spent?

The audit examines:

Vendor contracts and consulting agreements
Procurement practices and competitive bidding
Overtime spending and fleet operations
Software subscriptions and recurring services
Long vacant budgeted positions
Administrative work that technology could handle better and cheaper

Then the findings get published where residents can read them, not summarized in a meeting nobody attends.

Why this matters right now

County budgets grow because programs roll over year after year and nobody asks whether they still work. That’s convenient. It isn’t stewardship.

Look what that habit produced. Permanent costs paid for with one time federal money. A $42 million hole when that money ran out. A reassessment rollout the General Assembly had to clean up in a special session. Then, this May, a 17 percent property tax increase and a 5 percent sewer increase in the same budget.

In 2022 I said the county needed an independent group watching the budget, specifically to head off future property and sewer tax increases. I named both. Four years later we got both, in one night, in one vote.

And to close the rest of the gap, the county cut about 10 percent from library budgets and $2.5 million from open space and farmland preservation. That’s the part that ought to bother everyone in this district, whatever your politics. We are now cutting the things people actually love in order to pay for the things nobody audited.

Every figure on this page is sourced and linked on the tax bill page.

The order of operations

Four things that come before your wallet

Raising the rate is a last resort, not an opening move. Here’s the order I’d work in.

Audit out the waste

The performance audit above. Whatever it saves goes back into what residents actually care about. Public safety, parks, libraries, and the roads and pipes underneath us.

Collect what’s already owed

Unpaid fees, fines, and licensing obligations are money the county has already earned and simply hasn’t gone and collected. Chasing that is a lot less painful than raising rates on the people who pay on time.

Make public assets earn

The county owns thousands of acres. Some of it costs money every single year and gives back nothing but another round of mowing. That’s the Delaware Heritage Landscapes Initiative, and it gets its own section below.

Grow the tax base, not the tax rate

Permitting that is fast and predictable for homeowners and small businesses. Vacant commercial property brought back into use. More taxpayers sharing the load instead of a heavier load on the ones already here.

We don’t need to raise taxes. We need to raise taxpayers.

A proposal

The Delaware Heritage Landscapes Initiative

Turning public land into community assets.

New Castle County owns thousands of acres of public land. Some of it serves an important purpose. A lot of it just costs taxpayers money every year to keep mowed.

So here’s the proposal. Take selected county properties, the roadside strips, the stormwater basins, the odd corners nobody uses, and turn them into beautiful, low maintenance native landscapes.

Here’s what that gets us:

Lower maintenance costs. Native plantings need cutting a couple of times a year instead of every couple of weeks. That’s fuel, equipment, and labor the county stops spending.
Support for pollinators and agriculture. Monarchs, honeybees, and the Delaware farms that depend on them.
Natural beauty preserved. A meadow along Concord Pike beats another mowed ditch, and it holds stormwater better too.
Educational partnerships. Schools, scout troops, garden clubs, and our local beekeepers all have a reason to be involved.
Community involvement. These become places neighbors actually want to look at and take care of.
Taxpayer dollars saved. Every year, not just once.

This district knows native plants better than almost anywhere in the country. Mt. Cuba is right here. We have garden clubs that have been at this for generations. We ought to be leading on this, not mowing past it.

And there is a harder point underneath. This year the county cut millions from open space and farmland preservation because it could not afford them. Land that costs less to keep is land we don’t have to choose between preserving and affording.

“Government assets shouldn’t simply be maintained. They should create value.” Jamie Collins

Growth

Growing smarter, not bigger

“We don’t strengthen communities by putting up bigger barriers. We strengthen them by building better opportunities. I want to fix what we already have first.” Jamie Collins

Responsible growth should strengthen a community. It shouldn’t price families out of the neighborhoods they grew up in.

Redevelop vacant commercial property first

Drive Concord Pike, or Kirkwood Highway, or any of the older corridors in this county and count the empty storefronts. Half used shopping centers. Office buildings that emptied out and never came back. Every one of those already has roads, sewer, water, and power running to it, all paid for.

Revitalize those sites before we expand into open space that we cannot get back. That’s cheaper for the county, better for the tax base, and it doesn’t cost us another field.

Permitting that respects the person filling out the form

Fast, predictable, digitally tracked permits with published timelines, for homeowners and small businesses. The deck, the new HVAC, the shop fit out. People should know what is required, how long it will take, and who is responsible at each step.

Let me be clear about what I’m not saying. This is not a fast lane for major rezonings, and it never will be. Big development gets more scrutiny, not less, and I’ll always cast a clear yes or no so you know exactly where I stood.

Three questions, every time

Before county government spends a dollar that belongs to somebody else, I ask:

Will it work?
Do we need it?
Can we afford it?

If any answer is no, we think twice. That’s not a political philosophy. That’s how your household already runs.

“Government should be audited like every business. Eliminate the waste before asking taxpayers to pay more.” Jamie Collins

How we got here How to vote