OCEAN CITY — The day after City Council voted to designate 600 Boardwalk as “an area in need of rehabilitation,” advocacy group Ocean City 2050 said it will join other groups to sue the city.
The group believes the decision was wrong “strategically, procedurally, ethically, logically and morally,” according to a news release it issued Friday.
The release elaborated on each point.
Strategically: “The vote surrendered the city’s strongest bargaining chip to the developer and got nothing in return. No competent negotiator does that.”
Procedurally: Councilmen Jody Levchuk and Dave Winslow, who served on the Boardwalk Subcommittee, did not explain their “abrupt about-face” on supporting the rehab designation after the subcommittee said traditional planning tools should be used to address the site.
Ethically: “The council was presented with several unresolved conflicts of interest questions concerning council members, as well as clear evidence of Mayor Jay Gillian’s financial ties to the developer,” what the group called “confirmation the mayor was wrongfully involved in this rehabilitation process.” The group said council should have agreed with members Sean Barnes and Keith Hartzell’s delay, but not doing so puts them into the ethical conflict.
Logically: Ocean City 2050 criticized the need “to get this moving” rationale, that there was no “legitimate reason” to move forward “and ample reasons not to.”
Morally: Council was repudiating voters who elected a new councilman by not waiting to vote until he was seated July 1. The group questioned Levchuk verbally attacking a constituent for questioning his boardwalk interests and Councilman Tony Polcini for claiming only opponents of the vote had been making harsh remarks.
“It was a bad night for City Council. It was a sad night for the city. And it was a terrible night for good governance. It was a good night for those who wagered that cultivating financial ties to government officials would deliver rich rewards,” according to the release, which concluded “a number of groups” including Ocean City 2050 would sue the city to challenge the rehab designation. The advocacy group cited council’s “arbitrary” decision-making, “willful disregard of known financial conflicts,” breach of fiduciary duty to citizens and failure to meet the statutory rehab designation.
Ocean City 2050 spokesman Bill Merritt, who sent the release, was among a group of five citizens who joined together to speak out against the rehab designation during public comment at the June 25 City Council meeting at the Music Pier.
John Cracovaner introduced the others — Merritt, Susan Cracovaner, Dave Breeden and Howie Atkinson — and laid out their overall context. He argued for withholding the designation so it can be leverage in negotiations; using the subcommittee recommendations as the framework and not undercutting them with a rehab vote; and consequences including opening the city to litigation.
Merritt himself spoke of the subcommittee findings.
“The report was unambiguous in its findings — that the issue on the boardwalk is not the absence of a hotel, it is a lack of entertainment,” he told council.
The solution, he said, could include modest residential or hotel use, but conditioning all uses on “real entertainment benefits” and maintaining the iconic look of the boardwalk while not overwhelming neighborhoods.
He also cautioned that the goodwill created by the subcommittee would be put at risk by voting on a rehab declaration, saying it sends the message “the subcommittee process was not what it appeared to be. That it was theater. That the community’s input was sought but not actually heard. And that all the other recommendations in the report — on height, on culture, on design sensitivity — will simply be ignored.”
– By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
