By Josh Davis, Associate Editor

(Oct. 25, 2018) Several members of the Ocean Pines Association Board of Directors on Saturday initially said they would not support an updated employee handbook, but then backtracked when a compromise was reached.

Included in the board meeting-packet was a six-page breakdown of revisions in the latest edition of the handbook, said to be some 60 pages long.

Director Colette Horn called it “an excellent piece of work,” but directors Slobodan Trendic and Esther Diller said they would not support the update.

Trendic said the current version “requires further thinking on the board’s part,” while Diller said the current version was too complicated.

Diller said she’d encountered problems as a businesswoman because her own handbook was overly complex.

“If [an employee] has a grievance against you and they can prove that [the handbook] was beyond their understanding, we will lose – hands down,” she said. “Is this handbook really going to serve the employee and are the employees truly going to be able to understand it … I have a guess that they’re not, based on, unfortunately, my experience.

“And I lost, by the way, because of my handbook,” she continued. “So, we reduced my company’s [handbook] down to 10 pages.”

Other directors, including Ted Moroney and Association President Doug Parks, said they did not want to squander all the work that’s been done.

Diller then proposed a friendly amendment, which Horn helped to revise, “to commit to the handbook, but add a benefits section later along with and a simplified companion version of the handbook.

The friendly amendment and the revised original motion passed 7-0.