Citizen involvement can still continue

The Ocean Pines Association Board of Directors certainly has the courage of its convictions, as it shut down most of the association’s committees despite pleas to spare them.

Rather than take a slower approach that might have been less alarming to the public,  the directors on Saturday ripped off the Band-aid, suggesting they believe acute pain is easier to endure than lingering uncertainty about which committee would go down next.

The directors also helped themselves by packing into one day all the objections to their plan instead of having to address the same arguments over the next few months while they went down the roster of committees one by one.

Regardless, the directors now have a more efficient management model with just three committees reporting to them: the Budget and Finance Committee, the Elections Committee, and the Architectural Review Committee.

Although the work of the budget committee could be handled in-house, the association’s bylaws require its existence, as they do the other two, but for different reasons.

Like boards of elections everywhere else, the Elections Committee’s job is to keep the ruling body’s politics out of the process, while the architectural review committee is similar to a planning and zoning commission.

As for the others, they were as much advocacy groups as they were advisory committees, hence the friction between them and board members when committees got ahead of themselves and the board’s conservative financial approach.

But now, with these committees’ departure, the question is whether this reduction in citizen involvement has made association government less democratic.

No. There is no prohibition against groups organizing according to shared interests or against the right of individuals and group representatives to be heard at public meetings.

In that instance, the only requirement would be that association members who wish to be involved must attend the meetings.