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Contract talks held during Ocean Pines closed session

By Josh Davis, Associate Editor

(Nov. 8, 2018) The Ocean Pines Board reviewed contracts with Mediacom and the Matt Ortt Companies, and discussed “personnel issues regarding the annual review of the general manager,” during a closed session on Saturday.

“We had some general issues that we needed to talk about regarding Matt Ortt [and] we had some general issues that we needed to talk about regarding the Mediacom contract,” Association President Doug Parks said, adding the discussions were both broad and positive.

On Mediacom, Parks said association and corporate attorneys have been negotiating a new deal for some time.

“The contract’s gotten to a point where we wanted to at least get this draft in front of all the directors, show everybody what’s been done to date, highlight all the points that the attorneys went back and forth on … and then get the directors to say if there were any other areas they wanted to look at or had questions about,” he said, adding the current draft was “pretty close to being done.”

Parks said “there was no real negotiation” regarding the Matt Ortt Companies’ first year of running the food and beverage operations.

“They just wanted to present some information for us to consider,” he said. “That’s really the extent of it. We digested it and we’ve still got some commiserating to do.

“There’s no real changes to the contract,” Parks continued. “It’s just a matter of looking at information and deciding what’s best for … Matt Ortt and the whole association.”

The mystery topic was “nothing real controversial,” Parks added.

“When we have a more complete picture and we’ve done our research, that information obviously would be made available,” he said. “But it was very, very positive. Nothing in the conversation was negative.”

On the review of General Manger John Bailey, Parks also said there was “nothing bad” brought up.

“We just wanted to share some thoughts and observations after the first year and to look at the budget, going forward,” he said. “We wanted to make sure we’re providing him with all the support we can in order to make things work OK.

“I think we had a very productive meeting,” Parks continued. “I know the stigma of doing things in a closed session carries bad connotations but, in this case, we were able to … share a lot of information back and forth that probably would’ve been hard to do via email.

“The general sense that I got from the rest of the directors was that it was time well spent,” he said. “I felt like we took a step forward at least in getting a lot more information on those three items.”

Parks said the directors also discussed a legal opinion related to drainage issues. General Manager John Bailey last Thursday said an opinion from attorney Jeremy Tucker was received, but not yet sent to board members.

“Actually, we talked about that at the meeting [Saturday] and J.B. actually did share that information as well,” Parks said.

He said Tucker reviewed the Declarations of Restrictions as they related to maintenance of drainage ditches and found some of the 50-year-old documents to be “a little bit suspect.”

“They probably should be re-looked at to bring them up to date and have more of a sense of practicality,” Parks said. “We’ve still got a couple of decisions to make … and we want to educate the membership as to the interpretations. We’re trying to put all that together and get it out, so people understand what the issue is.”

Parks said more information would be made public during the next few weeks.

“It’s not going to be three months from now,” he said, adding of the opinion, “I didn’t get any sense there was anything radically wrong” with current maintenance procedures.