Waiting two weeks to ensure Ocean City Council is on board with work at the vacant, blighted 16th Street lots made sense.
Council tabled a resolution last week on a contract to do just over $1 million in work on the area between Simpson and Haven avenues that used to be home to a former Chevrolet dealership. That site has been the cause of legal wrangling for years. The city now owns it all for a final price tag of about $27 million. It recently finished remediation of contamination at the site.
The resolution on the agenda for the council meeting was for a combination of concrete work – curbs and sidewalks – and sod to make it prettier than the ugly-scape that has been an eyesore for neighbors and passers-by for years.
The area also spent a long time as a mobilization place for equipment for other work being done in the resort, leading to a lot of dust and noise. Now it’s just empty. And ugly.
According to city Business Administrator George Savastano, about 80-85 percent of the work would be permanent – the curbs and sidewalks. The rest was temporary. There is less than $200,000 in the contract for sod, seed, irrigation and related matters. (Things to make it green.)
As Mayor Jay Gillian put it, he wanted to do something to benefit the neighbors who have spent a few years at the mostly concrete wasteland.
Council members weren’t convinced that spending the $1 million made sense and decided to wait two weeks to get a better look at the plans. With the tax rate climbing another 7 percent again in this year’s proposed budget, lots of eyes are focused on city spending.
Council President Pete Madden encouraged council members to move forward, believing that delaying the work two weeks – if it is actually approved at the next council meeting – would push construction into the start of the summer tourism season. They weren’t convinced.
The city has invested an incredible amount of money on the resort’s infrastructure over the past 14 years, work that had been put off or ignored for years before that. It is easy to see the value, from redoing the boardwalk – the resort’s most popular pedestrian thoroughfare – to designing and installing multiple pumping stations to cope with flooding and investing in a new police station and substation.
City Council and the administration have worked together on all of that capital construction and have been largely in lockstep.
Given the millions of dollars spent on capital improvements over the years, this latest contract is a comparatively modest amount, but it is worthwhile to have council take the time to ensure it is the right investment. That is especially true given there still aren’t formal and final plans of what to do in the long run with this large swath of city-owned land.