OCEAN PINES – In an effort to and more layers to their already impressive bureaucracy, the Ocean Pines board of directors voted last week to establish a concerns advisory committee to better address community concerns.

Charlie DiAmonti, the first appointed chair of the committee said the move was late but welcome.

“I’ve been going to the board meetings for years, listening to concerns not getting addressed and lobbied hard for a committee to help with that,” he said.

The 15 person panel will meet bi-weekly to hear community concerns and organize them into real concerns, probable concerns and almost certainly made-up concerns. 

Once of the first concerns the committee will address are those of Janice DuMont-Barrows-Smythe, who has been trying for years to get the board to appoint her to a chairpersonship without result.

“I started trying to get the board to let me chair a community outrage advisory committee with no response at all, and now all of a sudden they feel like they need a concerns committee,” DuMont-Barrows-Smythe said. “You can probably guess what my reaction is.”

DuMont-Barrows-Smythe’s vision for the outrage committee was to re-address concerns that had been brought to the board and the board had dismissed. According to her, dismissed concerns should be recategorized as “board outrages” and revamped by her committee until they had to be addressed but so far, she said, the board has respond cooly to the notion.

DiAmonti admits that DuMont-Barrows-Smythe’s outrage is concerning and promised to look into her concerns over the lack of outrages addressed by the board over the years.

“It is concerning that concerns which have become outrages, or could become outrages have been totally ignored by recent boards,” he said. “But that’s part of our mission, to mitigate concerns so they can’t become outrages.”

Gene Edmonds, chair of the powerful apathy advisory committee, declined comment.

This story appeared in the Sloof Lirpa section of the March 31, 2011 Bayside Gazette