To avoid further intimidation of Council members who supported expanding residency boundaries, the Mayor will allow the residency ordinance to become law; he issues a statement regarding the facts about the residency issue

Mayor Mike Purzycki announced today that he will allow an ordinance requiring new employees to live in the City for at least five years, approved by City Council on November 16, to become law effective today, but without his signature. Mayors have the option of signing, vetoing, or allowing Council legislation to become law ten days after passage without Mayoral approval.
 
The Mayor said that, during recent public sessions of City Council regarding residency reform, some members of Council allowed and encouraged angry crowds to speak for hours in order to suppress the discussion about why a residency requirement reduces the effectiveness of City government. Mayor Purzycki also said the concerted effort by members of Council to intimidate and badger fellow Council members who supported reform was an embarrassment to City government.
 
The Mayor said his Administration preferred that Council lift residency altogether or support a compromise that would have expanded the residency boundary to all of New Castle County. Such expansion is needed, said the Mayor, to improve the efficiency of City government, provide essential services, and increase the pool of applicants for City jobs that have gone unfilled, sometimes for a year or more.
 
Mayor Purzycki today issued the following statement.

“City Council on November 16 passed an ordinance affirming its support for requiring new City employees to live in the City at time of hire for five years. I choose not to veto the ordinance to spare members of Council who supported changing the law the intimidation they were subjected to from members of the public and the backlash they received from their fellow Council members during the recent hearings. The Administration is on record opposing the ordinance. It is important to explain why and also what has transpired regarding this issue.
 
This Administration has always believed that requiring appointed hires to move into the City is asking too much given their lack of employment protections enjoyed by merit system employees. Appointed employees serve at will, subject to dismissal at any time. It makes no sense for a quality prospect to relocate to the City, with all the expenses involved in such a move, and then be subjected to summary dismissal.
 
It was only when Council President Trippi Congo expressed his desire to eliminate the residency requirement altogether that my Administration chose to wade into this inevitable controversy. The Administration’s position was straightforward and not at all political. Our goal in hiring is always to secure the best talent to enhance operational excellence, and insisting on residency has made it increasingly difficult to fill positions with local candidates, especially those in specialized roles and in public safety. Moreover, we have to compete with other governments that have no such residency requirements.   
 
The list of our current vacancies is troubling. We do not seem to have any water quality lab chemists in our City, or any that want to move to Wilmington. Same for GIS technicians (we need two), or traffic engineers. We have been unsuccessful in recruiting City residents who are qualified to be planners, tree climbers and arborists. We recently had three unfilled Law Department vacancies for the better part of a year.  We have five 911 emergency call taker vacancies. When we fail to pick up trash on schedule it is because of the current vacancies among our sanitation workers. Most alarmingly, our current police academy has only seven recruits instead of the usual 25. Measured against the 64 officers currently eligible to retire, and the additional ten in July of 2024, Wilmington has a potential public safety crisis looming.
 
In large measure our vacancies exist because of a difficult post-pandemic job market, a difficult housing market, and the impediment to recruiting that our residency law presents. Notably, in 2020 the Administration and 11 members of City Council together asked the Delaware General Assembly to change the City Charter to allow City government to decide residency policy without General Assembly approval. The reason we did this was clearly our collective desire to change the residency requirement for City employees.
 
Earlier this year President Congo, after being the primary sponsor and advocate of removing residency, curiously withdrew his support. But because other members of Council had been willing to support his ordinance, the push to eliminate residency persisted among Council members, with five members actually co-sponsoring an amended ordinance to eliminate residency and three other members pledging to support it. In the meantime, my Administration took the position that after the City Charter was changed and the Council delayed acting on the matter, there was no residency law in place to enforce.
 
And so, the political battle lines were drawn. Two competing ordinances were offered. One to expand residency to include New Castle County, and one to affirm the previously existing law maintaining City boundaries. Opponents of expanding the definition of residency summoned members of the community to attend committee meetings and Council meetings. They appealed to a lingering fear that county residents would displace City residents for City jobs. Sadly, some speakers injected the issue of race into this discussion arguing that Black employees would be disadvantaged. Nowhere during the mob-controlled meetings was there recognition of the increased marketing and outreach efforts by the City’s Human Resources Department to recruit City residents for local government jobs.  Also conveniently omitted during hours of discussion was the fact that Wilmington’s hiring process has, and always will, give preference to applicants who live in the City.
 
Opponents argued, with crowd-pleasing indignation, that there was no need to leave the City to fill vacant positions because Wilmington already had the talent. And while I agree that Wilmington residents have plenty of talent, we are still left with crucial, unfilled positions, some requiring a specialized set of skills and years of experience. The legislative process that unfolded was an embarrassment to this government. There was never a sober debate about the merits of retaining residency. It was just grandstanding, catcalling, badgering, and political bullying. The compromise ordinance that included New Castle County boundaries never even made it to the floor for a vote when one cowed member of Council failed to vote the ordinance out of committee. The intimidating and uncontrolled mob that was encouraged to show up at the committee meeting and Council meetings literally scared members of Council into changing their votes.
 
Wilmington’s residency requirement is just for five years (or really four years counting the one year that new hires are given to come into compliance), at which point any employee can move anywhere he or she desires. Of 296 Wilmington police officers, for example, 188 already live outside the City. Of the 108 who live in the City, only 39 have five years or more on the force, meaning the balance of the officers are only temporarily required to live in Wilmington. Almost one third of our civilian or non-uniform work force lives outside the City’s boundaries.
 
In other words, requiring employees to live in the City for five years is not a serious policy decision, but rather a feel-good symbolic political gesture. It is, in fact, a significant impediment to hiring with no long-term benefit to the public. During their first five years, some uniformed officers nominally lived together in City apartments while their families lived in Middletown. When we challenged this practice as not complying with the law, the unions appealed, and the courts ruled that the definition of residency is a matter for collective bargaining.
 
The chorus we hear from our opponents on this issue resonates with those who are least secure about the future of the City. The prospect that we are going to hire only people from outside the City is threatening in the abstract. A former member of Council and former State Representative reflected this very insecurity in a social media post stating that removing residency “will lead to metropolitan government and taking jobs”—as preposterous as that is. He writes that removing residency will “put us back 100 years.” Really? I wonder who he was talking to. What will really put the City back 100 years is not being able to pick up the trash on time, or not properly testing the quality of our drinking water, or not getting a police officer when we need one.
 
Opponents of the effort to reform residency should look deep inside for the real motivation for their opposition. It is a lack of confidence in Wilmington as a place where people want to live rather than one where people are required to live. It is in not facing the uncomfortable recognition that some of our unemployed residents don’t even want these jobs. We believe deeply in our City residents and their ability to compete, but we also know that we need certain hard-to-find skilled personnel to run our City government.
 
It is a shame that some members of the City Council, blinded by petty politics, do not see efficient governance as a worthwhile priority. The public can be assured that, in spite of the lack of understanding on the part of some members of Council as to how government functions, my administration will continue to make this government operate as efficiently as possible.”

Paul Ford Jr.
Director of Communications 
City of Wilmington, Office of the Mayor
Mobile: (302) 530-2171
Email: plford@WilmingtonDE.gov