Spotlight Delaware | by Karl Baker
With Matt Meyer ascending to Delaware’s top elected post this month, the state will be getting a governor who has professed support for a string of transparency reforms, including many that would force lawmakers to disclose more information to the public than they do today.
They include calls for expanding the state’s open records laws to the legislature; requiring politicians to publicly disclose business relationships with lobbyists; and mandating that departing elected officials wait two years before taking jobs as lobbyists or in state government, or from entering into state contracts.
The proposed reforms were part of a larger platform presented during Meyer’s campaign for governor that he said would make state government more transparent and efficient.
And it came amid heightened public scrutiny around public transparency, following a corruption scandal at the Delaware Department of Labor, and questions around the accuracy of Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall Long’s campaign finance reports.
Now, with the launch of the 2025 legislative session, some proposals Meyer supports – like the creation of an inspector general’s office – appear to have a wide-range of support.
For others, the prospects are less clear.
Will legislators support reform?
In an emailed statement, Delaware’s Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives said they “look forward to reviewing the governor-elect’s draft proposals.”
A spokeswoman for the Delaware House leadership did not respond to a follow-up question, asking which of Meyer’s individual policies lawmakers may, or may not, support.
In initial emailed statement , the House leaders said they have supported measures in recent years to open up government, pointing specifically to a launch of live-streaming for committee hearings.
Today, all 50 states livestream their legislative hearings, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, with Delaware among the last to do so. The state implemented its system in May 2020, just after the onset of the COVID pandemic.
Separately, in an interview Spotlight Delaware, Delaware Senate Majority Leader Bryan Townsend said he and other legislators have for years been working on, and gaining ground, on several transparency policies that Meyer included in his campaign platform.
Still, he expressed doubts about certain proposals, stating that more details are needed about how they may be crafted.
Specifically, Townsend said that a two-year prohibition on elected officials working as lobbyists could spark constitutional questions.
He also questioned the fiscal wisdom of requiring the state to audit the campaign finance reports for every political candidate.
“How much money do you want to invest in the Department of Elections for staff to go through an audit?” he asked. “You have to just make a balanced decision with regard to how many fiscal resources, how many taxpayer dollars to invest.”
Finally, Townsend suggested one reform that was not put forth by Meyer, expressing concern about the “role of big third-party money coming from outside of Delaware” to elections in the state.
“I don’t know the answer to that right now, but there are people who are really concerned,” he said.
During the previous campaign season, Meyer benefitted the most out of any statewide candidate from large out-of-state donors and political organizations.
Among those was a group funded by executives of the New York company TransPerfect that spent roughly $1 million on ads largely attacking Hall-Long, who was Meyer’s top primary opponent.
Will an Inspector General work in Delaware?
One proposal on Meyer’s transparency platform that appears likely involves the creation of a new state inspector’s office, tasked with investigating fraud, corruption and general mismanagement in state government.
In campaign literature, Meyer said that if lawmakers did not pass a bill creating an Office of Inspector General, he as governor “would authorize and appoint an Inspector General to keep tabs within the executive branch.”
Such a move could spark legal challenges questioning the governor’s constitutional authority to create such a body.
Asked if there will be the votes to pass legislation creating an office of inspector general, Townsend said that was his “hope.”
He said that State Sen. Laura Sturgeon (D-West Brandywine Hundred) has pushed the idea for several years and last year received “pledges from colleagues to prioritize it in this coming budget cycle.”
Townsend further said that the leadership in the Delaware Senate intends to hold robust discussions on it “and make a clear case for its merits.”
Two retired lawmakers from opposite political ideologies were split on whether Delaware needs an inspector general’s office.
Former Republican State Sen. Greg Lavelle said state inspector general reports would likely be ignored by people in government, as he says happens routinely at the federal level.
Lavelle also doubted that an inspector general would be able to avoid becoming corrupted by politics. He noted that Sturgeon’s legislation last year called for the governor to appoint the inspector general following recommendations from a selection committee.
“To suggest there will be no politics in the selection process is, well, a fantasy,” Lavelle said in an email.
In support of the office’s creation is former-Rep. John Kowalko, who for years has been arguing that Delaware needs someone to investigate what he argues are the often-secret economic development deals entered into by the state.
Kowalko said past proposals to create the office didn’t gain traction because lawmakers believed Gov. John Carney, who is leaving the office this month, didn’t support it.
He said Meyer, in contrast, is presenting himself as a transparency advocate, “and I’m going to take that leap of faith that he will be.”
Long an advocate for anti-corruption policies, Kowalko sponsored a bill in 2013 that prohibited departing legislators from serving as lobbyists for one year. The bill was signed into law in 2014.