Whenever a yellow sign signaling a forthcoming development plan pops up in Hockessin, chances are Mark Blake already knows about it.
The longtime land use vice president of the Greater Hockessin Area Development Association was recently elected GHADA president and promoting responsible development is his number one priority.
“I don’t think developers by nature are evil,” Blake said. “It’s just that their job is to take a piece of land and get the most money out of it. That doesn’t make them bad, it just makes them businesspeople.”
The role of GHADA isn’t to stop development, he said, but to bring developers and residents together to find a middle ground that everybody can live with.
At the end of the day, leading GHADA is about dealing with people and for Blake, a sales and marketing consultant in the energy industry by trade, people have always kept things interesting.
After moving several times for his career, Blake and his wife, Kelly, settled in Hockessin nearly seven years ago to take advantage of a career opportunity for her and to be closer to their parents in New England.
They bought a home in Hockessin Hunt and Blake soon found himself leading the community’s maintenance organization in a stormwater dispute with the owners of Lantana Square.
That dispute introduced Blake to GHADA, where he quickly realized that he knew just as much about land use as anybody on the board, he said.
“Next thing you know I’m on the GHADA land use committee,” he said.
He served as land use vice president for about six years and helped make GHADA a more proactive body, he said.
As president, he wants to keep that proactive streak going, make the civic umbrella group an even stronger voice for the community and make sure people understand the total impact of proposed developments, he said.
“You’re never going to please everybody,” he said. “It’s trying to find how we best balance the community, the residents and the development with one another.”
More and more developers are coming to GHADA before they’ve reached the point of no return with their projects, he said, but he expects the biggest challenge to be getting involvement from residents.
Getting people to be more proactive will spur community interest, Blake said, and he’s hopeful GHADA can accomplish that by bringing residents, business owners and developers to the same table.
