OCEAN CITY — Resort officials on Wednesday began a three-day strategic plan session with an opening conference focusing on the overall goals and the challenges the town faces as it updates the planning document.
Every three years, the Mayor and Council and key staff gather to update the town’s strategic plan. The last update was completed in 2019, and many of the goals in that version have been or will be accomplished, despite the pandemic.
In advance of Wednesday’s opening session, consultant Lyle Sumek held interviews with elected officials, department heads and key staff to assess if everybody was relatively on the same page, what the perceived challenges are and what the common goals should be. At the outset, of Wednesday’s opening session, City Manager Terry McGean pointed out the importance of the strategic plan update.
“We all know this is very important,” he said. “If you don’t know your destination, you’ll never get there.”
Wednesday’s session only included the Mayor and Council, along with McGean and City Clerk Diana Chavis. Thursday’s session was set to include department heads and other key staffers. By Friday, the Mayor and Council, staff and the consultant are expected to pull all input collected over the first two days into a strategic plan wrap-up session. At the start of Wednesday’s opening session, Sumek said the pre-interviews were helpful in creating a framework for the strategic plan update.
“Thanks for the interview responses, they were very productive,” he said. “They generated 82 ideas of what you want to get done. Today, we’re just going to start with an elevated view.”
Sumek said he carefully reviewed the interviews and polls he collected from the elected officials and key staffers as he prepared for Wednesday’s opening session. He provided a clear mandate to the Mayor and Council.
“I sat up in the middle of the night jotting down ideas that came to me,” he said. “In the morning, most of them were good and some not so good. The key to this is governance is serving the community. Politics is getting elected. Once you get elected, you have to focus on governance Our focus here today is governance. It’s a real challenge today.”
Sumek reiterated McGean’s analogy describing the strategic plan as a roadmap for the future.
“You need to have a destination,” he said. “We need a value-based set of principles to come out of this. The mission is your perspective as the board of directors. If you don’t have a clear mission, you’ll never get to your destination.”
Sumek said one of the challenges the town appears to be facing is the pending retirement of key staff and leadership.
“You have a retirement tsunami coming in the next five years,” he said. “Who is going to replace them? It’s a challenge here and all over the country.”
Sumek said the finished product will not be the end of strategic planning for the town, but rather a jumping-off point.
“Our strategic plan isn’t going to be perfect,” he said. “It’s an ongoing process. We need to constantly evaluate and adjust. It’s not going to be a rigid document.”
The consultant said he has worked with a lot of different towns on strategic planning and the goals are not always the same for the officials in them.
“I’ve worked with towns that I’ve considered losers,” he said. “The elected officials are fighting amongst themselves, the community is fighting with the elected officials and the next thing is, the town has a bad reputation. That is difficult to overcome. Why would someone want to come in and invest in a community like that?”
Sumek said there are competitive communities, where the leadership repeatedly says we’re doing okay, or we’re about as good as we can be. He said there are winners that catch lightning in a bottle sometimes. He said the best category to shoot for is true champion.
“True champions sustain success over a long period of time,” he said. “It’s not just having a goal, but adjusting and adapting and being guided by goals that improve the community. I see a lot of that here in Ocean City.”
Sumek explained public perception as a bell curve. He said there were 20% that were always negative and were never satisfied with what their elected officials do, and another 20% that were always positive and supported the decisions of their leadership. Sumek said there were 10% on either side of the curve that were trending either negatively or positive.
“The middle 40% generally don’t even know who their elected officials are or what you do on a weekly basis,” he said. “They are just content and happy to live in a place like Ocean City.”
Sumek said the challenge is moving more of the negative people toward the center, but it is not always easy.
“If you’re trying to make everybody happy, you’re probably not governing,” he said. “Making people happy all of the time is not an outcome. Your challenge is doing what’s best for the community. It might not make everybody happy all of the time.”
The elected officials were asked by the consultant to identify the town’s successes and point out a few of the shortcomings and rate them on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the best. The Mayor and Council were fairly consistent in their rankings and pointed out what they believed were some of the town’s strong suits. The average score among the elected officials was eight, which was consistent with the ranking Sumek collected from the staff a day earlier.
Among strong suits mentioned by the Mayor and Council were financial stability, strong revenues, record visitor numbers last year and solid visitor numbers through the pandemic. Others includes starting to address the seasonal housing issue, the core values of maintaining a clean and safe resort town, moving forward with significant projects and the great staff and leadership in the departments.
Inevitably, the discussion came around to rebranding Ocean City as a youth sports destination, with a potential sports complex in the north end of the county in the early planning stages. Sumek related a story from a town he worked with in Texas called Round Rock. He said state legislature there recently named Round Rock as the amateur sports capital in Texas.
“They have an amazing complex there and it’s thriving,” he said. “They’re getting ready to build another one, and they’ve been told don’t undersize it.”
When asked if that success could be duplicated in Ocean City and the surrounding area, the consultant gave a firm yes.
“From what I’ve seen, damn yes,” he said. “They can be wildly successful if they are done right. Round Rock in Texas has its own separate sports tourism department. It’s huge.”
Sumek said there were pitfalls to avoid with developing youth sports facilities.
“The ones that haven’t been successful didn’t do market analysis and made decisions based on emotions,” he said. “Do the homework, but you have to move quickly because it’s an exploding market and it’s very competitive.”
Sumek said it appears the Ocean City area is positioned well to be a competitor in the market.
“Having family-friendly, multi-generational activities is the key because you have families with parents, other siblings, grandparents coming for these events,” he said. “You have all of that. The ones that have struggled don’t have that. You have so many built-in amenities and the hospitality facilities. In some communities, the families are saying what are we going to do with these other kids and where are we going to take everybody to eat. You have that built in already.”
Mayor Rick Meehan said the town’s greatest amenity is the beach, and pointed to the ongoing beach replenishment project as a catalyst for that.
“There is nothing more important than beach replenishment,” he said. Maintaining that beach and protecting that property is the key to everything we do. That is our lifeline.”
