Vol. 8, No. 7
October 2012
410-641-6029
www.oceanpinesprogress.com
Golf operations continue to roll up the losses THE OCEAN PINES JOURNAL OF NEWS & COMMENTARY COVER STORY
Thompson to propose alternative funding for golf course greens replacement The OPA has collected $254,000 in lifetime memberships, short of the funds needed to complete work on the back nine By TOM STAUSS Publisher ith golf operations deeply in the red and substantially behind budget for the current �scal year, the Ocean Pines Association board of directors will soon be confronted with a number of issues involving the Ocean Pines Robert Trent Jones-designed 18-hole golf course.
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OPA General Manager Bob Thompson told the board during its Sept. 12 monthly meeting that, since there has been a shortfall in the number of lifetime golf memberships sold and the revenue collected, he will have to come up with an alternative funding mechanism to complete the second nine holes of the greens replacement project that he expects to resume later this year.
He said he would have a proposal for the board to consider at its Oct. 28 regular monthly meeting. Options would include taking the money out of the OPA’s major maintenance and replacement reserve – the funding mechanism used to pay for greens replacement on the front nine holes – or borrowing, the funding source for a related capital project on the golf
course, drainage improvements. Another funding mechanism that the OPA has considered in the past in other contexts, without actually doing it, is selling association-owned land assets to generate revenue. Thompson told the board at the September meeting that to date the OPA has collected $254,000 in lifetime memberships, which leaves somewhere between $150,000 and $200,000 that will be needed for the back nine’s greens replacement. Early this year, the board authorized greens replacement at a total cost not to exceed $850,000, with the cost and project spread over two �scal years. The front nine was substantially completed in the Fiscal Year 2012, which ended this To Page 12
YACHT CLUB UPDATE
Parking plan hits permit snag Undeterred, Thompson to seek administrative waiver. Failing that, he will ask for special exception from the Board of Zoning Appeals to allow project to proceed with fewer spaces than code specifies By ROTA L. KNOTT Editor he Ocean Pines Association will have to find an alternative way to prove that it can provide adequate parking for customers at its proposed new 20,303-squarefoot Yacht Club, after the Worcester County Planning Commission on Oct. 4 rejected a joint parking agreement between the OPA – and the OPA. The rejection probably postpones site plan approval of the Yacht Club by at least one month because that review can’t take place until the project adequate-
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See www.oceanpinesprogress.com for update on waiver request. ly addresses parking. The association has another chance during an administrative hearing on Tuesday, Oct. 9, to convince county staff that it needs less parking at the Yacht Club than that required by code. If that bid for a 20 percent exception to the required number of spaces fails, then the OPA can plead its case to the county’s Life in the Pines: Permitting snag may not be such a big deal. Page 38.
Board of Zoning Appeals for the parking reduction. In a 5-2 vote, with just members Wayne Hartman and Rick Wells in favor, the county planning commission shot down the request from the OPA to count parking at the Mumford’s Landing swimming pool as parking for the new Yacht Club. Under the proposal the OPA would have agreed with itself to permit use of the parking spaces at the Mumford’s Landing pool for customers of the Yacht Club. OPA General Manager Bob ThompTo Page 9
While the Ocean Pines golf course has been the beneficiary of major capital expenditures in recent years, and will continue to do so later this year and next, there is no indication that these investments have shown up so far in golf operation’s bottom line with increases in membership or outside play. Indeed, financial results for the month of August and through the first four months of the 2013 fiscal year raise the question of whether the Ocean Pines Association’s two-year experiment in outside management is yielding the dividends its proponents had envisioned./Page 3
Clearing begins for North Gate medical complex Almost a year after receiving site plan approval and a series of waivers for his planned 20,000 square foot medical center on a parcel adjacent to the Ocean Pines North Gate, developer Palmer Gillis has at last begun clearing the parcel for the first phase in what he hopes will become a thriving medical campus in years to come. With recent approval of an ingress-egress configuration from the State Highway Administration – that process included obtaining a small strip of land on Route 589 owned by the Ocean Pines Association for an exit acceleration lane -- Gillis cleared another hurdle needed to begin construction of the 20,000 square foot building./Page 5
Stachurski, O’Hare press for follow-up on Yacht Club Ocean Pines Association directors Dan Stachurski and Sharyn O’Hare have put General Manager Bob Thompson on notice that they are keenly interested in what happens next in the process that will lead to a new Ocean Pines Yacht Club. During the Sept. 12 monthly meeting of the OPA board of directors, Stachurski and O’Hare took differing approaches on what they indicated should be next steps./ Page 9