(Jan. 18, 2018) It’s been anything but fun and games at the Ocean Pines Country Club of late, as plans to renovate the two-story building, started more than a year ago, have stalled out several times.

First-floor renovations, which included expanding the Tern Grill restaurant and kitchen and upgrading the bathrooms, finished last year. The second floor, however, is more problematic.

The previous board of directors, in December 2016, approved $840,000 to overhaul the entire club. That included $417,000 for renovations of the second floor that would have created new meeting spaces and expanded the Tern Grill upstairs.

That work, originally to be done by Ocean Pines Public Works, stopped last summer when removal of fire safety systems caused problems with the county fire marshal.

In an attempt to get back on track, the Ocean Pines directors on Friday approved $40,000 to allow Davis, Bowen & Friedel Inc. of Salisbury to amend architectural drawings for the second floor.

Association Vice President Cheryl Jacobs, who made the motion, said there is some urgency to finish the project because of the upcoming golf season and associated tournaments, especially a tournament to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the community scheduled for June 30.

“I feel very passionately that we have to move forward and get this second floor completed,” she said. “As quickly as possible is my goal.”

Christopher Cullen, associate architect, and Andrew Welch, structural engineer at Davis, Bowen and Friedel, showed drawings that would create two new meeting rooms controlled by movable partitions, and a large boardroom capable of seating up to 125 people. Almost all the entire second floor could also be opened to create an even larger space for meetings or banquets.

Men and women’s bathrooms would be remodeled and the outside deck would be restored, and a bar area with additional seating would flank the boardroom.

This, General Manager John Bailey said, would be the first phase, with renovations of the kitchen and the addition of an elevator planned in later phases.

For now, the existing kitchen would remain and serve as a staging ground for buffets for banquets. Bailey said larger, seated dinners would be held at the Ocean Pines Yacht Club.

Cullen admitted the firm had yet to make calculations on whether more parking spaces would be required, an issue the association ran into before when building the new yacht club.

He was also unsure if planned storage space would be enough to hold the 125 chairs assigned for the boardroom.

Director Ted Moroney was worried the plans would not take into account the eventual installation of an elevator.

“When you finish this building, the day you get ready to shut down this … man-lift that’s [currently] in the front there to do it, you have shut the second floor of that building down, because there is no ADA compliance,” he said. “You can’t operate that for anything if you don’t have a way to get the people up there.

“What I would like to have considered in this first phase is to do the design at least on that, so we know where we’re putting it, what it’s size is, the electrical needs – that kind of stuff,” he added. “That way we’re not going back and … ripping out stuff that we did already.”

Cullen said he wasn’t sure the front of the building, where the elevator was slated to go, could be reconfigured economically.

“We’re going to end up doing something there,” Moroney said. “I just want to make sure that … we are sized well enough to go either way, electrically.

“Let’s think about, not so much the aesthetics and architectural part, but the mechanical part and make sure we’ve got that figured in, in this first phase,” he added. “I just don’t want to go back and tear stuff out – we’ve done that in the past.”

Association President Doug Parks added, “Are we doing anything in this particular phase that would preclude us from doing anything else going forward … are we painting ourselves into a corner?”

Cullen said he wasn’t sure where the evaluator would fit in the current plan.

Bailey said he envisioned the elevator roughly adjacent to where the stairwell was, opening on both sides to allow people to enter and exit from separate sides.

Director Colette Horn said she concerned about plans for the upstairs kitchen – or lack thereof – because the association did not yet have a long-term strategy for the yacht club.

Bailey said even if the yacht club was closed during the winter for dining, it could be opened for special events, including weddings and large banquets.

“Do we need another restaurant? The answer is no,” Parks said. “For right now, I don’t want to boil the ocean … we can function in the short term in order to keep this project on task and on time, designated the way [Bailey] said.”

Bailey added plans for the upstairs country club kitchen fit into his vision of how the facility could “be utilized in a reasonable way.”

“Can you go further than that? Sure you can. But I don’t think that that’s what we want to do. It adds a whole other level of difficulty,” he said.

The directors vote 6-0 to approve not to exceed $40,000 for the updated drawings. Director Slobodan Trendic was not present during the meeting.

Bailey said the association should have construction documents and a request for proposals for construction companies in time for the Feb. 25 regular board meeting.