The year 2016 was a mess: rough weather, flooding, bomb threats, lawsuits, ugly politics, the loss of good citizens, and business that was OK, but not so wonderful that it overshadowed the year’s difficulties. It was, in many respects, like the year before and the year before that. With the arrival of each new year,… Read more »

Peace on earth and good will toward … Oh, right, that’s out the window these days. How about this then: peace on my patch of the earth and good will toward people who agree with me. For reasons sociologists will spend lifetimes trying to sort out, political and religious differences are no longer just sensitive… Read more »

Charities in this area — and there are plenty of them — get frequent publicity, because it’s necessary to remind the public that all these institutions and organizations can only do their good works if residents do their share as well. As dedicated as the volunteers and leadership of these groups might be, their efforts… Read more »

If nothing else, the Ocean Pines Board of Directors’ consideration of a fiber optics infrastructure project that would involve Director Brett Hill’s company is awkward. No matter how much the Ocean Pines Association and others might want blazing-fast Internet connectivity, no matter how much it might cost Hill’s company, FTS Fiber, to do the job,… Read more »

Even though the historical purpose of Thanksgiving is to acknowledge our good fortune, that has become secondary to many of us, as our comfortable circumstances allow us to look on the holiday as less of a day of thanks and more of a time to eat as much as we can possibly hold. If that… Read more »

Things are happening in Ocean Pines and, as is the case with everything else these days, no one can know with whether these things are fixes or follies until they play out over the next several months, maybe longer. On the surface, the proposals tendered by interim General Manager Brett Hill make sense financially. Reconfiguring… Read more »

Most media outlets, whether print, online or broadcast, have something to say about Veterans Day because, well, it’s expected. It’s a traditional tip of the editorial hat, an obligation of the calendar that must be fulfilled, a noncontroversial topic that’s even more popular today than it was a decade or so ago. Writers try to… Read more »

The giving season is underway, and that’s not referring to specific holidays. As is always the case when summer is over, school is back in session and the calendar moves toward its conclusion, and charities and other benevolent organizations launch their one last fund drive of the year. If there is one thing to be… Read more »

No one would think that Pocomoke and Ocean Pines have much in common, separated as they are by a fair amount of distance, demographics and form of government. But it turns out this week that these two otherwise disparate communities share one thing: they both have had to confront legal problems over unmet financial obligations…. Read more »

The search for a general manager in Ocean Pines is as much about finding the right person for the position as it is determining what kind of operation the Ocean Pines Association wants to be. All in all, the approach the community has followed over the years — a general manager and staff overseen by… Read more »