Cheryl Jacobs

The Ocean Pines Communications Committee is looking at different ways to encourage residents to attend the annual meeting of the Ocean Pines Association in August.

“We have had such poor attendance in the last number of years,” committee chair Cheryl Jacobs said at the committee’s meeting last Thursday. “We’ve learned that (this year) we will be having the annual meeting both (virtually) and in-person. We have to have at least 100 property owners to have a quorum. It makes it much easier to meet that number when you have a hybrid meeting.”

Thus, Jacobs added, there will not be a corresponding Family Fun Day for the meeting.

“We no longer need to have a Family Fun Day,” she said. “Not to say we won’t in the future, because it’s still a good idea. But it won’t be necessary to have in conjunction with the annual meeting.”

The annual meeting of the OPA is held on the second Saturday in August, which this year is Aug. 13.

Jacobs said the committee is looking at other means to reward people for attending. For instance, committee member Diana Snyder runs a fundraiser every year for the Worcester County Humane Society that incorporates a raffle where people can buy chances from limited number tickets.

“We’re going to do something similar to that with some kind of gifts for the first 100 people who attend and remain in attendance at the annual meeting,” Jacobs said. “We haven’t figured out all the logistics yet. They’ll either be assigned a number as they attend or allowed to select one. In any case, there will be prizes and that’ll be a perk of attendance.”

The committee also discussed electronic signs that would be used to display community news and information. The committee had hit some snags in the plan’s implementation that they’ve now worked out.

At one point, Jacobs said, a representative from the sign company insinuated that all other signs would have to be removed as soon as the first electronic sign went up. With help from Worcester County Commissioner Chip Bertino, who represents Ocean Pines, they were able to resolve that issue and prevent that sign removal from happening.

The signs will be used “for safety perspective and things associated with amenities and Ocean Pines in general, nothing commercial,” Jacobs said.

The committee is also continuing to request and collect contact information for chairpersons of other social committees in Ocean Pines “as a way of having a mechanism to get more information out, which is one of the missions of our committee,” Jacobs said.

There has been confusion with what the committee is asking, Jacobs said, and they’re in the process of ironing it out.

The board is also looking at ways to motivate residents to vote in the upcoming Ocean Pines Board of Directors elections next month.

“Last year we had signs printed up to encourage people to not only vote but also attend the annual (OPA) meeting,” Jacobs said. “(But those signs) were date-specific and we (discussed) whether a tape or sticker of some sort could be created with new dates so signs could be re-used.”

“It is so hard to get people to participate in things. It seems like it’s always the same small number of people. But that’s the way it goes.”

The Ocean Pines Communications Committee next meets on June 16.

This story appears in the print version of Bayside Gazette on May 26, 2022.