(Oct. 5, 2017) Meeting for the first time in six months, the Ocean Pines Association Comprehensive Planning Committee voted on a series of recommendations that would amend its charter and refocus its efforts.

Committee members agreed the “current comprehensive planning model should be eliminated” in favor of a three-year “look ahead document” based on corporate models. The plan would be developed by the general manager and implemented by the board.

Essentially, the members said General Manager John Bailey and his department heads should develop a plan based on community needs, while the committee releases a survey to help gauge what members of the community want.

Three members present during the meeting, Chairman Frank Daly, Ocean City Planning Director Bill Neville and Mike Evans, also voted to recommend changing the committee charter to state, “any future activities should be as a resource/research group focused on supporting the planning and planning review process.”

Neville said Ocean Pines is similar to Ocean City in that both communities “have reached that build-out threshold.”

“The model of a comprehensive plan, which really plans for growth and new development, really doesn’t work as well for built-out communities,” he said. “The decisions that the board of directors have to make are really more maintenance and management of existing facilities, and how to deal with problems as they come up.”

He said the county would probably “love for its largest planned community to have an updated, current comprehensive plan,” as would the state, but that effort should be saved for “when we have a discussion about whether we ought to incorporate as a city.”

“Not that that’s being proposed, but that’s the kind of big-picture item that would generate the need for a land-use plan update,” he said. “If we’re not ready to make that decision – if we’re not going to annex new land into Ocean Pines – then the planning effort should be redirected to the things the community is concerned about [like] maintenance of the facilities and infrastructure.”

General Manager John Bailey was updated during the meeting on a survey created by the committee and presented to the board in February, but never approved or implemented.

Evans, who has decades of experience in municipal government, also addressed the three-year planning model, versus a slightly longer look.

“With the survey-type of questions that we would ask of the community, you could meld what you know as legitimate needs with the wants of the community, and in many cases they’ll be overlapping,” Evans said. “I think that the net effect, if you do a strategic plan and you’re honest about it and you constantly review it … I’ve always found that a five-year plan is done in three years. If it’s not done in three years, something’s wrong.”

Evans said any multi-year plan would likely have a stabilizing effect in Ocean Pines, where yearly elections turnover anywhere from two-to-three of seven board members who govern the association.

“What’s a really great idea is a lousy idea three years from now,” he said. “Having a three-year plan … will outlive you.”

While the committee members did not draft a new charter during the meeting, they mapped out a tentative plan to do so. Daly said the current charter is not effective.

“If we were in a corporate room talking, it would be once the board and Mr. Bailey get together on how to plan for this organization for a multi-year period, what we would need to do to support that as a committee would shake out of that, and that should be our next charter,” he said.