Ocean Pines Maryland - Worcester County News

Ocean Pines residents and property owners are well represented in upcoming primary elections in September and general election in November.

Challengers are looking to take out both Worcester County Commissioners who represent Ocean Pines during the Sept. 14 primary election.

District 5 Commissioner Judy Boggs of Ocean Pines and District 6 Commissioner Linda Busick of River Run will each face stiff competition in the Republican primary.

Bob Thompson, a Pines resident and a current member of the Ocean Pines Association board of directors, will take on Boggs in the primary in the all-Ocean Pines district.

The winner of that race will go head to head with the lone Democrat filing in District 5, John Bodnar, in the November general election.

In District 6, which includes part of Ocean Pines, there will be a Republican contest only. Busick is going up against challenger Madison “Jim” Bunting, Jr., a retired surveyor and former member of the Worcester County Planning Commission and Board of Zoning Appeals. Busick hails from River Run and Bunting lives in Bishopville. Bunting also is an Ocean Pines homeowner who serves on the community’s Comprehensive Plan Committee.

Dan Stachurski, former Ocean Pines Association president and six-year member of the OPA board of directors, is not too keen on the reconstruction of the North Gate bridge that has been proposed by local builder/developer Palmer Gillis as part of his plan to build a medical campus adjacent to Ocean Pines’ north entrance.

In fact, Stachurski, who served on the board from 2001 through the summer of 2007, isn’t too keen on very much that recent boards of directors have done or are in the process of trying to do on a host of issues, from the proposed rebuilding of the Yacht Club to the proposed outsourcing of the OPA’s food and beverage operations, and what he regards as defects in the new Community Center in White Horse Park. He’s also no fan of the ongoing five-year plan to raise assessments about $30 per year to finance a variety of capital items, some of which haven’t even yet been approved by the OPA board of directors.

Stachurski’s critique of the proposed North Gate bridge reconstruction project appeared in a recent post on oceanpinesforum.com, but that was just the tip of an iceberg of objections that the former OPA president has to certain board actions since his departure from the board.

Perh

Lower Shore developer Palmer Gillis is taking steps to develop his 22-acre parcel adjacent to the Ocean Pines North Gate as a medical campus, even before the Ocean Pines Association board of directors has acted on options and inducements he offered to help him provide direct access to his site from within Ocean Pines. Those options include a rebuilt North Gate entrance and a road connecting his parcel with Ocean Parkway near Dawn Isle.

Gillis’ company, Coastal Venture Properties LLC, is requesting a special exception that would make it possible for him to build the first phase of the medical campus, a 20,000 square foot building in the parcel’s C-1 (neighborhood commercial) district.

Gillis’ request for a special exception is scheduled for review by the Worcester County Board of Zoning Appeals on Thursday, Aug. 12, at 6:40 p.m. in the county’s government center in Snow Hill.

Neighbors of the property received notice of the scheduled hearing in a July 19 letter from county development review and planning specialist John Azzolini. His letter’s confusing wording set off alarms among residents, some of whom contacted OPA officials, who also were concerned because the letter seemed to indicate that Gillis was planning to develop four neighborhood “retail and service establishments” on his property, up to 5,000 square feet each in size.

When Gillis went before the OPA board recently to explain his concept for a medical campus, he made no mention of four “retail and service establishments” in addition to or in lieu of his first medical building, which he told OPA directors would be 20,000 square foot in size.

He also made no mention of the fact that his project would require a special exception.

Gillis told the Progress that wording in the county’s notice was “unfortunate” and needs clarification.

He said there is no change is his intentions to proceed with the first, 20,000 square foot building in his medical campus, as previously disclosed. Under the county’s zoning code, he said he would be able to build four separate buildings up to 5,000 square feet on his parcel without needing a special exception.

What he wants to do instead is “to combine” the square footage of four separate buildings into a single building totaling 20,000 square feet. That, he said, requires a special exception. From his perspective, he said it’s unfortunate that the county notice failed to indicate he wants to combine or cluster four, smaller buildings that would not require a special exception into one, larger building, which does.

He also emphasized that he has no intentions to add retail to his medical building.

“The notice simply picked up language that’s in the code. I’m not planning to do that,” Gillis said of retail uses.

By in effect combining the square footage allowed in four, 5,000 square foot buildings into one 20,000 square foot building, the developer said he would be able to retain more green space.

Gillis said he is in the process of getting in touch with neighbors who live on Dawn Isle and others who adjoin his parcel of his plans to develop a medical campus. According to Azzolini’s letter, there are 34 such adjoining property owners.

OPA General Manager Tom Olson said in late July that he was aware of the notice and was circulating it to board members, who are scheduled to hold a special meeting Aug. 4 on another topic. Olson said he wasn’t sure the board would take any position on the special exception request. In mid-June, the directors had agreed that they wouldn’t take any action on the proposal until October at the earlier, when a new board will be in place.

At a meeting of the board on June 16, Gillis announced that he could proceed with a 20,000 square foot, single-story medical building on his property even if he doesn’t reach an agreement with Ocean Pines for the new road and the rebuilt North Gate bridge, and other issues.

At that meeting, he said the project could involve a complete rebuilding of the community’s North Gate entrance, including the replacement of the bridge across the pond, at his expense. The existing configuration of one entrance lane and left- and right-turn exit lanes would be replaced with five lanes total, two lanes coming in from Route 589 and three exit lanes, two left turns and one right turn.

To accommodate the additional ingress and egress lanes, Gillis is also prepared to widen portions of Route 589 in the vicinity of the North Gate. Together, the various components of the reconfigured North Gate would be designed to improve traffic flow on summer weekends, when traffic back-ups, especially in the exit lanes, are common. The bridge itself is a bottleneck, limited to one ingress and one egress lane, bisected by the old guardhouse that hasn’t been used to control access into Ocean Pines for more than 35 years.

In addition, Gillis is proposing, again at his expense, to build a road that would arc around the eastern and southern edges of the North Gate pond from his property to a new intersection on Ocean Parkway.

The new road would be close to the back yards of three homes in the Dawn Isle neighborhood, and Gillis is suggesting that an eight-foot berm could be added as a buffer between the new road and those properties. He promised to contact the affected neighbors to discuss his road proposal with them.

Otherwise, there would remain a substantial wooded buffer between the first building planned for the site and the residential neighborhoods due east of the property.

Without the new road, access to his site directly off Route 589 would be somewhat limited, right-turn only, similar to the traffic pattern at the Pavilions commercial complex further north on Route 589. Right-hand turns into the parcel from Route 589 would be allowed from the northbound lane only – no cross-traffic left hand turns would be permitted from the southbound lane. Exiting from the site would be right-turn only onto the northbound lane.

Gillis said his plan is to sell units in his buildings to doctors or other medical professionals, and that, in other medical centers he’s built in nearby Berlin and Salisbury, he does not mix doctors from competing hospitals.

Gillis told the directors that his first-phase building could be accommodated by surplus water and sewer “equivalent dwelling unit” capacity controlled by Worcester County through the Ocean Pines Service Area. He said he had discussed the issue with the county’s Environmental Programs director, Bob Mitchell, and others, and has been advised that the county could make available to him ten or 15 EDUs for the first building.

Gillis’ land planner Bob Hand told the board that, ultimately, the campus might need as many as 30 or 40 EDUs at build-out.

For additional buildings that might be constructed in the future, Gillis said he would probably need to acquire surplus EDUs currently controlled by the OPA. Although he did not explicitly offer to purchase OPA-controlled EDUs, there is a precedent for EDU sales elsewhere in the county, notably in West Ocean City. It is not clear whether the OPA has a sufficient number of EDUs under its control that could be used for that purpose, or whether the OPA would be willing to sell them or reserve them for its future use.

Ocean Pines Director Bob Thompson said in late July that if the Ten year Facilities Task Force recommends that the board of directors proceed with a bid process for a new, two-story Yacht Club to replace the existing facility, he will vote against it, at least until such time as the board adopts a business plan for the amenity that would justify the expense.

Thompson previously has linked a Yacht Club rebuild to a sound business plan for its future operation, but this is the first time he has expressly said he would vote to slow down the process if his concerns about solidifying plans for future operations are not addressed by the board.

The task force has scheduled its second meeting in July on the Yacht Club project on July 30, with OPA President Bill Rakow, a task force member, indicating that he would schedule a special board meeting on Aug. 4 to consider any recommendations from the task force. There was late word that the Aug. 4 special meeting might be postponed until the following week.

“I will be a no vote if the task force recommends we proceed with plans to solicit bids for a two-story rebuild,” Thompson said, since it appears that the board isn’t ready yet to decide on any number of issues that relate to Yacht Club operations. “You don’t retool the factory without knowing what the product will be” or who will be running the factory, he said.

One such issue is whether to retain present in-house management or outsource management, either by renting out the Yacht Club or hiring a fee-based company to run it for the OPA.

Another issue is whether to hire an outside fee-based company to run all of the OPA’s food and beverage operations, and whether that company would be the same one that would hired to manage the Ocean Pines 18-hole golf course.

He said it’s important to decide these issues first, because a tenant or fee-based management company might have ideas about specific features in a rebuild or even whether the OPA should build a new facility.

Thompson said another concern is what kind of food and beverage operation the board wants for the Yacht Club, “casual design, fine dining, Tahitian dining, whatever.”

Thompson, the current OPA vice-president, said that until these issues are resolved, “we (the board) shouldn’t be rushing into anything,” a position he said some of his colleagues might have a problem with.

He has at least one ally on the board on whether to proceed with planning for a new two-story building. Director Marty Clarke, who’s retiring from the board after three-years in mid-August, has supported making basic repairs rather than a rebuild, that he said shouldn’t cost more than $1 million.

One candidate running for the board this summer, Ray Unger, has more or less adopted Clarke’s position.

There are four current directors who are also members of the task force – Rakow, who is retiring from the board this August; Pete Gomsak, the OPA treasurer; Les Purcell; and Dave Stevens, who is running for reelection to the board this summer.

At a meeting of the task force in mid-July, Stevens said he had problems with several options developed by Rakow and task force member Ted Moroney for dealing with the Yacht Club in tandem with dealing in the longer-term with the Country Club. He was given the task for fleshing out the options by the task force’s next scheduled meeting July 31.