WMDT sits down with both candidates in race for Delaware Senate District 6
DELAWARE – Delaware’s 6th senate district seat will be on the ballot for voters this Tuesday.
The district represents eastern Sussex County, including towns like Rehoboth Beach, Dewey Beach, Lewes, and Milton.
I’ve worked as an educator, I worked as a journalist. I’ve worked, you know, on an international scale even. And locally, I’m from here. I grew up on a small farm.
Kim Hoey Stevenson is the Republican candidate for Delaware’s Sixth Senate District. She feels the her background has uniquely prepared her to represent eastern Sussex County, especially with her time on the county’s planning and zoning commission.
“I’ve worked as an educator, I worked as a journalist. I’ve worked, you know, on an international scale even. And locally, I’m from here, I grew up on a small farm…As a member of the planning commission, I kept saying, ‘Hey, what about our roads? What about our infrastructure? Our health care systems? Our fire companies? Our police?’ and they said, ‘All those are state issues,’ and so I realized that if we were going to get the state and the county to work together, somebody needed to be at the state saying, ‘Hey, let’s work together,'” Hoey Stevenson said.
Incumbent State Senator Russ Huxtable has held the seat since 2022. He said his record shows he’s been able to foster state investment on the county level: “We are investing a record amount in our roads over the next four years, $1.3 billion worth. So we are bringing the resources and the attention that we need here in Eastern Sussex as we grow as rapidly as we are.”
Senator Huxtable cited affordable housing and health care as two of his priorities as the county continues to grow. He said there’s overlap between the two issues. “I think housing and housing policy does play an impact in [health care]. Maybe a doctor can afford to live around here, but, you know, the five, six, seven, eight other staff members that have to work for that doctor, they may not be able to live around here.”
Hoey Stevenson shares some of the same goals as Senator Huxtable, but she believes their respective approaches are where they diverge. “Schools, roads, health care. I mean, those are the big three right now…I’m a limited government person, and I believe that we can handle our own finances and we can make decisions.”
Hoey Stevenson added that, if elected, she would be able to get to work immediately with the local and state relationships she’s forged over the years.
Senator Huxtable said he’s already established himself as an approachable bipartisan legislator: “Most of my bills that I did this past year were either all bipartisan or all unanimous. The housing package bills that we sent the last year, most all of them were passed on a unanimous basis because they’re issues of community…It’s not a left or right issue, it’s not a Democrat issue or Republican issue. It’s an issue of the community, and how do we develop as a community.”
