Matt Meyer - County Executive

In 2016, Matt Meyer was a sixth and seventh grade Math teacher when he first ran for public office, defeating a heavily-favored three-term incumbent in a grassroots campaign to serve as the Chief Executive of Delaware’s largest county.

In 2020, when COVID-19 threatened the health and safety of Delawareans, Meyer led the county government in taking unprecedented and innovative actions to keep residents safe from the virus, to protect the most vulnerable in our community and to plant the seeds for a strong and fast economic recovery. Meyer led efforts that resulted in Delaware being the first state in the country to offer open, free COVID-19 saliva tests, having provided nearly 300,000 tests to date. New Castle County monitored sewers to identify COVID-19 hotspots quickly and implemented programs to get high speed wifi access to the hardest to reach communities. In two weeks, New Castle County created the largest full-service homeless shelter in state history, converting a 192 room three star hotel into the NCC Hope Center. The Hope Center today provides dignity and comprehensive services to the most vulnerable Delawareans. In collaboration with New Castle County, entrepreneurs established the Delaware Data Innovation Lab to provide quality data analysis to the state’s most urgent COVID-related problems and Delaware State University established a state-of-the-art next generation lab to do COVID testing faster and at a fraction of the cost of most existing providers.

Upon assuming office four years ago, Meyer immediately took historic steps to deliver honest, transparent and efficient governance to the over 560,000 New Castle County residents. The Meyer Administration eliminated wasteful spending and streamlined government expenditures, creating a rapid response JobsNow program that facilitated development projects with over 12,000 jobs. He launched NCC innovates, the most extensive effort to start and grow small business in county history and created GreeNCC, an ambitious agenda to address climate change, preserve open space, bikeable-walkable trails and clean water. His Vacant Spaces to Livable Places initiative rapidly reduced the number of vacant delinquent residential properties by more than 30% while generating millions of dollars of new revenue for schools.

Meyer and his staff also created a high school course on local democracy and public leadership that Meyer and his team taught at two New Castle County high schools, Freire and Newark High School.

Meyer has the most ethnically diverse senior staff of any government in state history, including the first African American woman to be Chief Administrative Officer in county history and the first African American Police Chief.