OC Today WWW.OCEANCITYTODAY.NET
NOVEMBER 21, 2014
SERVING NORTHERN WORCESTER COUNTY
DINNER
GOBBLE GOBBLE Ocean City and Berlin churches offer free Thanksgiving meal this holiday – Page 41
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Fifteen-story hotel tower plans unveiled PZ commission sees return of big projects with Quality Inn spire
This conceptual drawing by Becker Morgan architects looks southwest at the front of the proposed tower that would become part of the Quality Inn next door (the gray building in the left corner) on 33rd Street.
By Zack Hoopes Staff Writer (Nov. 21, 2014) Development in Ocean City is building back up – quite literally. Preliminary discussions were held this week on a proposal to construct a 15story tower of hotel rooms on 34th Street as an addition to the existing beachfront Quality Inn. “We’re able to get all the units oceanfront, while leaving the vast majority of the area open so we’ll have more landscaping, light, and air for the neighborhood,” said architect Jack Mumford. “The existing Quality Inn will be supported with this new tower, which will consist of rooms and nothing else.” Plans for the site, reviewed by the Planning and Zoning Commission Tues-
day, are not final, and will have to come back to both the commission and the town council. The project is being pitched as a Planned Overlay District under the city’s zoning code, which allows for consolidation of height and density rights on larger properties with the express approval of both voting bodies. “The process would have to go to the council eventually, with your recommendation,” town Zoning Administrator R. Blaine Smith told the commission. A site must have at least 90,000 square feet of surface area to qualify for a planned overlay application, Smith said, which would be met if the current Quality Inn parcel was merged with the vacant parcel next to it, where the tower is proposed to go. The new building, housing 101 hotel rooms, will be See DESIGN page 6
Bus-ted: OC driver shortage hits ridership
By Zack Hoopes Staff Writer (Nov. 21, 2014) If city buses seemed more crowded this summer, it’s because they were – significantly so. End-of-season data returns from the city’s Transportation Division, requested by Ocean City Today, indicate that the city’s budgetary gamble last spring to raise the bus fare to a mandatory $3 had less of an adverse impact than city officials anticipated.
But not everything is going swimmingly. A sharp decline in the number of buses running, due to an increasing difficulty in finding drivers, has put a huge squeeze on the bus sytem despite the expected slack in ridership. “The drop in bus deployments that you saw this year was directly attributable to the lack of qualified applicants for drivers’ positions,” said city Public Works Director Hal Adkins. “We’re currently looking into how to address the issue.”
According to the city’s data, bus revenue for July 1 to Sept. 13, 2014 — the first 10 full weeks of the 2014-2015 fiscal year — was up 17.64 percent over the same period last year, totaling $1,485,572. Ridership, however, was down 6.78 percent to 1,215,153 trips. More critically, bus availability continued to dip — 6.78 percent fewer riders rode 18.97 percent fewer buses. Last year, 4,602 deployments — each See POOL page 9