Tyson project process needs to be efficient

Palmer Gillis’ company, Coastal Ventures Properties, has a few ideas for the redevelopment of the Tyson Foods properties on Old Ocean City Boulevard in Berlin. Now all he needs is permission to implement them.

Well, not exactly. He will need a great deal more than that to turn his concepts, as represented in the illustrations he presented to the Berlin Planning Commission last Wednesday, into concrete propositions.

Understandably, Gillis wants to know how the commission feels about the direction he intends to go before he begins converting his vision into a real set of plans.

He and the project itself are already somewhat limited in the directions they can go, as he needs to maintain some competitive distance between his project’s tenants and the enterprises that are wary of commercial growth beyond the immediate downtown area.

Since small business generally operates on small margins, that caution is understandable.

At the same time, however, if there is one business where the expression “time is money” is painfully true, it is real estate development, where the longer it takes to complete a project, the more it costs and the less the developer will make.

As Gillis told commission members, his company’s goal is to make the transformation of this scar of a property into a town attraction financially feasible.

As much as town officials might wish to guide this process with their own thoughts and opinions, they also need to bear in mind that the success of this project depends on an efficient and responsible approval process.

That means there should be no cutting corners but also no erecting unnecessary obstacles.

With the Tyson property not getting any prettier, we’d say time is of the essence.