OPA board tries it all to guarantee Daly win

In one of the more blatant attempts to guarantee an election, the Ocean Pines Association Board of Directors last week declared Rick Farr, who had been running for a board seat, candidatum non grata.

That is to say the directors decided, midway through this year’s election, more than two weeks after ballots were mailed and votes were cast, that Farr was not a candidate after all. And, to those who voted for him in the two weeks preceding this astonishingly self-serving order, the board said sorry, folks, your votes don’t count. Better luck next year.

Farr’s downfall as a candidate was the nefarious business of … estate planning. Because his residence is owned by a family trust set up by his father, now deceased, and because Farr did not become the primary trustee until May, even though he paid the assessments as a successor trustee, he is not a property owner. Or so the board decreed.

In other words, if your Ocean Pines home is owned by a corporation you and your family founded, and the shares are jointly owned, and, for reasons of family harmony you serve as executive vice-president, you are not a property owner, according to the board.

This hair-splitting on the matter of homeownership is bad enough, but the reason for it makes the board’s actions outrageous. The directors — the cabal at the center of this anyway — desperately want incumbent Frank Daly to win reelection so they can continue to hold the majority.

There’s no other way explain it, considering that someone spent considerable time to tweeze through public records to find a way to force out Farr, and then furtively deliver this information as a last-minute tip to the board.

Add to that the poison pen emails that sought to damage the candidacy of Stuart Lakernick and were reportedly sent from administration office computers, and you don’t have a governing body, you have an out-of-control confederacy of self-important individuals, who no longer have the perspective the job demands.