Children squealed with joy as they shot basketballs into a hoop outside the Children’s Beach House in Lewes. Their camp counselors watched as one by one these children with special needs practiced a new skill. Inside the building, however, there was little joy. State budget cuts have left the nonprofit struggling to make ends meet. [...]

The Markell administration’s aggressive use of the Strategic Fund over the last year and a half has given a number of small businesses a financial shot in the arm. Newark-based SentryLight, Inc., received a $300,000 loan from the fund. The company, founded in 2007, manufactures a new emergency light system that’s lower to the ground [...]

With Delaware ranked dead last in the nation in a 2007 state-by-state comparison of entrepreneurial activity, Delaware is looking for creative ways to become a seedbed for entrepreneurship. Along with the state’s multimillion-dollar Strategic Fund, which gives grants and loans to businesses, Delaware has created a new, more modest program it hopes will coax existing [...]

As a candidate for governor, Jack Markell campaigned against the idea that Delaware could afford to be a player in the high-roller nationwide bidding war to lure businesses here with princely financial incentives. “Delaware should not be in the business of picking new industries to bet on,” instead focusing on making existing businesses stronger, he [...]

A total of $41.5 million from Delaware’s Strategic Fund sweetened the deals that lured Fisker Automotive here to build electric cars at the former General Motors site in Newark and persuaded PBF Energy to buy the troubled Delaware City refinery, potentially restoring hundreds of jobs that were lost when the two plants closed down. The [...]

How can Delaware attract next-generation Delaware businesses? Alan Levin, director of the Delaware Office of Economic Development, explains how the state tries to pick winners through the use of DEDO’s Strategic Fund. Share this:

Strategic Fund: by the numbers The Strategic Fund awards loans and grants to support existing Delaware businesses and attract new ones. Since January 2009, the bulk of the fund went to two recipients, Fisker Automotive and PBF Energy, to rescue jobs from devastating plant closures. How much went to support smaller businesses? Of the 59 [...]

The manner in which our laws in Delaware have treated those convicted of crimes against the state and public have progressed from uncaring and punitive to an increasing understanding there is merit in encouraging redemptive changes within the individual who commits a crime. Thus it becomes suitable for the judicial system that punishes to be [...]

During the nationwide get-tough-on-crime mood of the 1980s, Delaware legislators reined in judges’ sentencing authority on certain drug crimes, perceiving judges’ rulings to be often arbitrary, inconsistent, or too soft. Two decades later, the mood and the policy priorities have changed—in Delaware and around the country. Share this:

“I just see miracles all the time,” Dagsboro psychotherapist Lee Dogoloff says about his work with drug offenders in rehabilitation. “Not everybody makes it, but more make it than don’t make it.” If the Delaware legislature passes a bill giving judges more discretion in drug sentencing, more offenders could wind up in court-ordered drug treatment [...]