OCEAN CITY — City officials expect the Soleil condo-tel project to move forward on the open site across from the Flanders Hotel.
City solicitor Dorothy McCrosson addressed that at Mayor Jay Gillian’s Town Hall meeting Saturday morning at the Ocean City Free Public Library.
McCrosson said the project was started in 2003 and went through various iterations before “many” city councils, with litigation involved throughout the process.
This project, she said, is the final version as a result of compromises with City Council at the time.
It is a six-story, 111-unit condo-tel with 391 parking spaces. McCrosson said protections were put in place to ensure the property operates as a hotel, much like the Flanders on the north side of 11th Street.
“When you hear cond-tel, everybody kind of tenses up,” she told the audience in the Chris Maloney Lecture Hall. “All that is is a hotel in which the rooms are separately owned. It’s still designed and will be required to operate as a hotel to provide transient stays.”
She explained that means there will be a front desk, laundry service, maid service and a limit on occupancy by the owners, who may stay for only 30 days in any given season.
“These folks have pulled a building permit. They needed to do so because they were running out of time,” she said. “Because there was a preconstruction meeting in the last month, we do believe it’s going to be constructed.”
She said the city will be managing the project to ensure parking remains for the Flanders, which is entitled to 152 parking spaces.
McCrosson said there is specific staging the Soleil developers have to follow. That involves first building the parking garage, which developers said would be available for parking next summer.
“Once they’ve got the required parking garage up and they can provide the required parking,” she added, the developers will be able to begin building units along Ocean Avenue and 11th Street.
Akin to Seaspray
McCrosson said the Soleil project went through many years of the redevelopment process, similar to the one that resulted in the “imminent redevelopment of the Seaspray.” The Seaspray Condominiums, which was condemned a few years ago, is in the pre-demolition phase, with crews removing materials from inside the rooms.
In place of the Seaspray, at 34th Street and Bay Avenue, will be a four-story condominium project billed as a multi-family residential development with 43 units. Parking will be under the building and floors two through four will be two- and three-bedroom units. The overall height of that development is 46.5 feet.
In December, City Council approved amending the zoning on that parcel, separating it from the 34th Street Gateway Zone. Two months earlier, the Planning Board declared the parcel “an area in need of rehabilitation.”
Rehabilitation fight
The Soleil project has been brought up by citizens who have been fighting developer and hotelier Eustace Mita’s proposal to build a seven-story hotel atop parking at the former Wonderland Pier amusement park property at Sixth Street and Boardwalk.
Citizens have noted how they fought that proposal more than 20 years ago as evidence they were ready to fight Mita’s plans.
Wonderland Pier closed in mid-October 2024 after amusement park owner Jay Gillian announced it was no longer financially feasible. Gillian sold the property, which operated as an amusement park for just shy of 60 years, to Mita in early 2021. Mita leased it back to him for four more summers, until Gillian made his closing announcement in August 2021.
Since then, there has been a major fight over whether that property qualified as “an area in need of rehabilitation,” a designation Mita wanted as a precursor to building his hotel. The current On-Boardwalk Zone does not allow hotels.
City Council voted in August 2025 against asking the city’s Planning Board to rule on the rehab designation, then reversed itself and sent it to the board in December. In January 2026, planners discussed it, but the designation died in a tie vote.
In June, council voted to give the Wonderland property a rehab designation, but a coterie of citizens groups have sued to block the designation.
Council members said even though they were approving the rehab designation, they would follow recommendations by its Boardwalk Subcommittee, announced just weeks before their June vote, that would support some high-end hotel rooms but nothing to the scale of Mita’s proposal, which was for 252 rooms and 10-12 storefronts.
The issue remains in litigation.
– By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff