By Jack Chavez, Staff Writer

The Ocean Pines Strategic Planning Advisory Committee held a lengthy talk about updating the vision statement and the use of “residential” versus “resort” with the majority saying that “resort” needs to stay in the statement during their meeting on June 23.

“My personal opinion, you could just say resort-style community,” committee chair Bernie McGorry said after the meeting. “You’re not saying resort and you’re not saying residential. But the committee recommended something like resort and residential — ‘premier resort and residential community.’”

The committee also zeroed in on the wording of Ocean Pines’s stated goals, particularly the fourth goal and the term “value-driven.” They came up with “to foster a sustainable and engaged community driven by our core values.”

“Who wouldn’t agree with (our first three goals)?” McGorry said. “They drive assessments down, makes them competitive. People want to see improvement and infrastructure and appearance in our current amenities.”

“The fourth one is new stuff. We talk about sustainability but nowhere does it mention in current documents, in a big way, sustainability, really continues to drive better engagement of the community. Implementing core values will be critical. Accountability, transparency, those are probably the biggest issues in the Pines and we need to focus on developing them and making sure people are living the core values.”

Another description for the recommended goals could be guiding principles or strategic imperatives, according to McGorry.

The next move for the committee will be to discuss and recommend a revised vision statement for the board of directors to review.

Also coming up will be action planning, which McGorry described as objectives to be written that are measurable and time-specific.

“These are just broad-based goals moving to objectives,” McGorry said. “Action planning is how you get things done — how will you sustain long-standing high performance? How will you measure it?”

McGorry estimated that 30-45 days would be spent working with the various committee chairs to figure out what actions should be for each of them. He’s targeting September or October for having the action planning finalized.

The Strategic Planning and Advisory Committee is scheduled to meet next on July 28.

This story appears in the print version of the Bayside Gazette on June 30, 2022.