Tomorrow, Governor Jack Markell (D-DE) will sit down for a "Blogger's Roundtable" with the staff of Delaware Liberal and few other Delaware blogs to discuss his proposed budget, the Delaware economy, and a host of other pressing issues.
We must really give Governor Markell and his wonderful staff all the credit for being open and willing to engage the blogosphere. It is wonderful to have a Governor that views the blogosphere for what it really is: an opportunity to connect to and answers the questions of constituents that he might not otherwise reach.
His engagement with bloggers is nothing new, for he sat down for an extended interview at a diner in Smyrna, Delaware with my colleagues and I during the campaign. But what happens during the campaign isn't often indicative of what will happen once in office. Access then does not always equal access now. So before I open the floor to the questions you want asked of the Governor tomorrow, I do wish to thank him and his staff for keeping the dialogue going.
Governor Markell has made national news on two fronts of late that may be of interest nationally. First, to help close the budget deficit, he proposed legalizing sports betting in Delaware, and has since pushed back against threats of retaliation from the NCAA (which threatens to remove all college playoff games from the state, even though a bowl game is played in Las Vegas, called the Las Vegas Bowl no less) and from NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. He has made news with his appointment of Collin O'Mara -- a nationally recognized climate prosperity expert, who is actually younger than I am -- to be Delaware’s Secretary of Natural Resources and Environmental Control.
O'Mara was the chief environmental officer for the city of San Jose and was responsible for implementing San Jose’s Green Vision program, an ambitious plan to combine environmental sustainability with economic development in the epicenter of Silicon Valley. O'Mara's stewardship of the program is credited with attracting more than 50 clean technology companies to the area and creating more than 3,000 jobs. Delaware has become a new energy of late, with its decision last year to build wind mills off the Delaware coast to replace coal-fired power plants.
And with that, if you are a Delaware resident, or have an interest in asking our Governor a question, then have at it.
Below you will find a previous interview that Delaware Liberal conducted with then candidate Markell.