Council didn’t want to appear indifferent to business fears
Some in the audience at the Dec. 4 City Council meeting were surprised by the reversal of the August vote on the Wonderland Pier property that is home to a defunct amusement park. Others were shocked.
We weren’t shocked.
We didn’t know exactly how it was going to play out, but we saw the immense pressure building from the business community over the past few months.
Merchants have been lobbying council to refer the former amusement park property to the Planning Board as “an area in need of rehabilitation.” Most were in support of property owner Eustace Mita’s plan to build a luxury hotel on the site. The referral is an inaugural step Mita requested to move his plan forward, but planners’ decision on the property does not automatically give him a green light.
Individual merchants and property owners, along with the city’s merchant associations – downtown, boardwalk, chamber, restaurants – have steadily increased their pressure since council members decided against the referral at their Aug. 21 meeting. Those groups upped the ante, holding a press conference Dec. 3, the day before, inviting local and out-of-town media so they could publicly plead their case. (Four different TV stations showed up.)
Two councilmen, Jody Levchuk and Tony Polcini, were clear weeks earlier that they were changing their views. Pete Madden did not change his; he was the only one of the seven members to vote for the referral in the first place.
That meant just one more voted was needed Dec. 4.
Three councilmen – Dave Winslow, Sean Barnes and Keith Hartzell – held to their view that the fastest and best course was not referral to planners, but to let a subcommittee finish its work looking at overall boardwalk zoning, not just the Wonderland property.
Giving their own position a boost, and to allay fears that results were a long way off, the council meeting started with an update from the subcommittee to show their results would be forthcoming in the spring rather than some unknown distant point in the future.
Those councilmen, however, were up against a compelling narrative from merchants: livelihoods at stake. The organizations and individuals, including owners of well known and longstanding businesses, talked about significant drops on the north end of the boardwalk that lost the amusement park in 2025 as a means to draw customers there.
It isn’t easy for people in elected office to be thought of as anti-business or at the least, not sympathetic to the tourism economy. That was obvious from the painstaking way Winslow, Barnes and Hartzell talked at length about their own justifications for not changing their views.
That’s why when council President Terry Crowley Jr. became that swing vote in favor of referral, it wasn’t a shock. The business argument won out.
We assume it wasn’t easy voting against the slew of merchants painting a picture of a devastated boardwalk.
We want to credit the immediate reaction of some of the most ardent opponents of the referral and of the hotel project itself, a group that threatened litigation and has added to the hyperbole, going so far as to claim Madden “betrayed” the city by trying to revive the referral vote back in September. (The group lumped in the city attorney as well for preparing the ordinance as per her duty.)
Representatives of Ocean City 2050, which hasn’t held its punches over the past year, actually said they came away with some positives from the meeting.
While disappointed in the outcome, they were buoyed by the fact that the subcommittee’s work would be ready in the spring, which could be soon after the Planning Board finishes its own deliberations about the boardwalk property.
Litigation isn’t off the table if the organization believes the Planning Board doesn’t follow procedure, but if the planners’ work is combined with that of the subcommittee, they offered hope there could be an agreeable redevelopment concept at Wonderland.
What isn’t lost on them or anyone else is that something needs to be done in the interim. Even of the hotel project was on the fast track, it would take more than two years to open.
If all the merchants’ assertions are true about the drop-off that is closing or threatening businesses after one summer season without the amusement park in operation, what’s going to save them in 2026 and 2027?
Unfair to Hartzell
Second Ward Councilman Keith Hartzell is long-winded. He acknowledges that, often with a bit of humor. He can try the patience of his peers and those in the audience when he becomes loquacious during meetings. That said, it was inappropriate what happened to him at the council meeting Thursday.
Well into his explanation about how he was going to vote on the Wonderland referral, he was on a bit of a tangent about landlords and tenants when a citizen yelled out for him to get to the point. That pretty much derailed his explanation.
Part of the reason for the outburst from the audience is because at that point it was more than three and a half hours into the meeting and three other councilmen – Sean Barnes, Dave Winslow and Jody Levchuk – had just taken up a lot of time with their own lengthy explanations.
Still, it was disrespectful. If ever all the councilmen deserved time to explain their votes, that was it.
