Issue 4 covered Governor Meyer's expansion of Delaware's Downtown Development District Rebate Program from 12 to 15 districts, with June 15 applications and designations to follow after an August Cabinet Committee meeting. The Cabinet Committee on State Planning Issues met in August to develop recommendations for the governor, who designates the three new districts after that meeting. As of this issue's research, no announcement has been published. The designation is imminent, and the question is which three towns will be named.

Selbyville is a named, on-the-record applicant. The town ran a bilingual community survey through May 27, and its Economic Development Committee met publicly to shape the application. That gives Plat Street's readers a specific, documented example of what a small-town DDD application campaign actually looks like on the ground, beyond the state's own process description. A town that runs a bilingual survey and holds public committee meetings to shape a DDD application is a town that is treating the designation as a community decision, not a staff submission. That level of engagement is not required by the program, but it is the kind of thing that makes an application stand out in a competitive field.

The program's track record justifies the attention the applicant towns are paying to the process. Since 2014, DDD rebates have leveraged more than $693 million in private investment for $47 million in state rebate spending, a roughly 14:1 leverage ratio. That is exactly the kind of concrete number Right of Way and Metes & Bounds readers elsewhere should be citing when they pitch a similar rebate structure to their own state legislatures. A rebate program that returns $14 of private investment for every $1 of state spending is a program with a story to tell, and the story is more persuasive than the program description.

The watch line is the designation announcement itself. Which three towns get named, and whether Selbyville is among them, will tell the field something about what the Cabinet Committee values in an application. If Selbyville's public engagement process is rewarded, it validates the model. If it is not, the field learns that the committee's criteria weight other factors more heavily than community process. Either way, the announcement is the data point.

Source: WBOC, May 26, 2026; State of Delaware OSPC; Delaware State Housing Authority.