During Bob Thompson’s town hall meeting this week in Ocean Pines, he touched on a subject the board of directors is going to have to start taking seriously before too long — the association’s use of its share of the slot funding.

Thompson said he was wary of using the funds generated through local impact grants to work on the roads, reasoning that should the state or county ever start funding roadwork again, the OPA would remain unfunded since it was already doing the work themselves.

The fact of the matter is that when the law was written, any semblance of a return to significant state funding of local roads was over. We’ll have hover cars first.

Given that the OPA is limited to improving infrastructure and public safety and those are the two departments that also rely most heavily on pass-through funding, parsing the difference between having the means to do it and actually doing it will likely fall on deaf ears in Snow Hill and Annapolis.

As the fund approaches $120,000, it is difficult to believe the association would prefer to let its roads continue to deteriorate in case government decides, sometime in the future, to live up to responsibilities it has continually shirked.

Should the management and directors elect to ignore the roads rather than repair them, it would be advisable to come up with an actual plan for the slots funds beyond having it sit in the bank deterring government support.