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OPA Country club: repair or replace?

(Sept. 22, 2016) Plenty of ground was covered during what Ocean Pines Association Board of Directors President Tom Herrick described on Monday as the “resurrection of the working sessions” it had discarded several years ago.
More informal than regular meetings, the sessions were designed to develop ideas and invite public opinion.
During the five-hour meeting in the community center – during which no votes were permitted – the directors discussed 11 topics, including what to do with the much-maligned country club. That subject took up the largest share of time, although no consensus on a solution was reached.
What the directors did agree on, however, was that maintenance of the building had long been ignored and many of the problems there – including pervasive mold, a deteriorated HVAC system and a leaky roof – would likely lead to expensive fixes.
Interim General Manager Brett Hill summed up the results of a recent engineering report that suggested the building was “plagued” with problems.
“The core issues surround a roof that desperately needs to be replaced, HVAC systems that weren’t properly mounted on the roof that have forced the replacement of that sooner and are also nonfunctioning, and [other issues] that occurred inside the building from the problems on the outside,” he said. “The consensus from the report is … we have a lot of maintenance issues there.
“We do not need a replacement, but we do need to invest a lot of money in the building to fix it,” he added.
Facilities Manager Jerry Aveta said recommendations in the report included complete replacement of the electrical, plumbing and HVAC systems.
“The roof needs to be severely maintained or replaced,” he said. “There’s water infiltration. There’s water management issues. The finishes in the interior need to be at least addressed [or] updated. There’s a lot of issues.”
The HVAC system alone, he said, would cost “in the neighborhood of $150,000.”
“It’s just good money after a bad thing,” he said. “And where do you start and where do you stop?”
Aveta said a mold mitigation specialist would look at the building this week, and that Hill had directed that to be the priority – for now.
“We’ll get the mold out, we’ll repair that damage, and then Brett asked me to come up with sort of a laundry list of what’s next,” he said. “We’re working on that laundry list with estimates … everything is in [such] a state of emergency repair that we need to do something. The issue is quantifying how much of a something do we want to spend, because everything needs a lot of work.”
He said the report recommended coming up with a list of requirements for the building and then determining whether renovating or replacing the whole structure would be the better solution.
Hill noted that Director of Golf John Malinowski and his team were “suffering through it every day.”
Malinowski, who was in the audience with Landscapes Unlimited Regional Manager Scott Nissley, said the issues with the building were affecting everything. LU is the management company that runs the golf operation for Ocean Pines.
Nissley said use of the building was essential to live up to the business model developed for golf, but that the operation did not necessarily need a building of that size – if OPA was considering a replacement.
“The building is larger than what it needs to be,” he said. “You wouldn’t design a building like that … in today’s golf [industry].”
Director Dave Stevens said a task force established in 2010 recommended just that – a smaller, more efficient building that held banquet space for golf functions, but did not compete with the banquets hosted at the yacht club.
Replacement could prove a “tough sell” to the association according to Assistant Treasurer Gene Ringsdorf, who underscored declining membership at the course and the fact that the amenity had not turned a profit since about 2002. If Ocean Pines were to replace the building, it would first have to call a referendum of its more than 8,400 homeowners.
One director, Slobodan Trendic, went as far as suggesting having an outside company, such as Landscapes, “take over the whole amenity.”
“They will spend $2 million to build an 8,000-square-foot clubhouse, just hypothetically speaking,” he said, drawing noticeable laughs from several members of the audience – and a few directors.   
“That’s a real long shot in today’s market,” Nissley said.
With most directors perceiving only two viable options – renovate or replace – Hill went on the record saying he was “100 percent against the teardown and rebuild scenario.”
“I’m about maintaining our assets and fixing them,” he said. “My personal position is that we set the path and it’s not [the association] fixing everything tomorrow, but we go through the path of bringing that building back because I personally believe that it is salvageable.”
He added that Ocean Pines has “not had a successful track record of budgeting new and completing new” capital projects that stayed within budget. He said the association would likely have to spend “over a quarter-million dollars in the next quarter to get the building habitable and functional.”
“We already are struggling. We want John and LU to give us better numbers and we’re not giving them anything to work with. I don’t think there’s a question that we have to make the investment. We have to give them a functional building,” Hill said.  
Director Cheryl Jacobs argued “It’s really not responsible for us to start throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars at this building to make it habitable.”
“To call it a country club is a joke,” she said. Jacobs was one of several directors who took to wearing heavy coats and scarves during budget deliberations in the club last winter because of the failing HVAC systems there.
While the golf course itself was in great shape, she said the building was “awful.”
“We really need to make a decision about how we want to proceed overall with this building,” Jacobs said. “We don’t have enough information to know what it would cost to do a complete renovation. When they start tearing this building apart it’s going to be a Pandora’s Box, I’m sure.”
That, she offered, could cost millions of dollars.
“You might be right,” Stevens said, adding that it could also take three or four years to complete.