LIFE IN THE PINES

An excursion through the curious by-ways and cul-de-sacs of Worcester County’s most densely populated community

By TOM STAUSS/Publisher

sumably in a dedicated room in the OPA’s Admin building.

At least one member of the Board of Directors and another OPA staffer will be in the room during the document inspection, according to Viola.

Notes OPA Director Rick Farr: Clifford will not be allowed to photograph any documents and will have to fly solo; she can’t bring anyone else into the room with her as she conducts her review.

And he believes that she will be assessed not only the administrative time spend on facilitating the review by OPA staff. Also to be billed is time spent by legal counsel dealing with the request. Lawyers generally don’t come cheap.

Soon enough we’ll know if this sojourn down a rabbit hole will yield anything substantive about last summer’s flawed election, or whether it will yield any relevant information on how OPA elections can be improved in the future.

This just in: In a June 23 phone call, Clifford said she had not yet been informed of the four possible review dates. Frustrated that her request seems to drag on forever, she nontheless in this instance said it’s possible her own lawyer had not gotten back to her.

Viola in an email to the Progress suggested that Clifford needed to get in touch with her lawyer and commit to any of the proferred dates.

Wouldn’t it be nice if this matter could be put to bed? With a new election season upon us, it’s hard to get too excited about new details of what might have happened last summer. We already have a good idea, and remedies are in place.

• Details are sketchy, understandably, but there is guarded optimism among some members of Viola’s working group on the Southside firehouse rebuild that a substantial federal grant will be forthcoming to help pay for the building.

If that grant comes through, it’s probably true that a more elaborate version of a firehouse will be built.

If it doesn’t, then a less costly, more streamlined version will emerge.

One way or the other, Ocean Pines is going to step up and do right by its fire department.

• With Frank Daly’s recent resignation and subsequent decision by the Board to add the vacancy created by his departure to this summer’s ballot, the odds of electoral success by any of the four candidates running have improved.

With three slots to be filled, only one of the four will go away on election day disappointed.

It will probably come down, as OPA elections often do, to which candidates do the most to work for the position, going door-to-door or holding campaign events expounding on issues of importance to members.

There literally are no bad choices. All could serve with distinction. All would work well with the current Board, both the majority and minority bloc.

A word about the minority bloc: It might not even exist after this summer’s election. Daly’s already gone and Colette Horn is about to be. Who’s left? Steve Jacobs perhaps, but he’s not going to want to spend the last two years of his term tilting at windmills.

• OPA finances are getting off ters considered by the Board in executive session will leak out to the media, with directors choosing their favored conduits for ensuring that important information is shared with the membership in a timely fashion. to another robust start in 2023-24, with a $150,000 positive variance to budget for May, the first month of the new fiscal year.

According to the just release amenity membership report, memberships are doing very well so far.

They indicate what Viola likes to call organic growth, revenue increases resulting not from higher rates but actual net new members.

May financials also show that the worst case scenario of the Aquatics Department descending into deficit this year is not likely to materialize.

Some pearl-clutchers at the Board level during the budget process this past winter complained about the prospect of a return to deficits in Aquatics.

The budget assumed a full complement of lifeguards this summer, but that didn’t come to pass. It never was likely, but concerted effort was attempted anyway to make it happen.

When hiring doesn’t occur at the level anticipated in the budget, a wonderful thing happens. Payroll savings.

Combined with organic growth in membership, this one-two punch can wipe out a projected operating deficit. Early signs are that this will happen this year in aquatics.

Meanwhile, golf operations continue to hit it out of the park. Just ask Viola. He’s more than willing to share.

The Ocean Pines Progress is a journal of news and commentary published monthly throughout the year. It is circulated in Ocean Pines and Captain’s Cove, Va.

In the matter of perceived and actual conflicts of interests, which rarely if ever have surfaced at the Board level, directors don’t need a resolution of this nature to tell them what not to do.

As for the confidentiality of Board deliberations, and dialog in closed session, it is likely to be honored in the breach consistent with long-standing tradition in Ocean Pines. It’s a given that some “confidential” mat-

Having some words in a document that can’t and won’t be enforced might make some directors feel better about themselves, that they still have some pull and that their service on the Board has relevance.

So perhaps the Board will adopt this revised resolution on second reading in the next month or two.

Or perhaps it will spend its time more productively, on something that actually matters. -

Tom Stauss