BERLIN – Ocean Pines voters elected residents Tom Herrick and Cheryl Jacobs to three-year terms on the homeowners association’s board of directors.

At the annual meeting of the Ocean Pines Association Aug. 8, Herrick and Jacobs were named the top vote getters in this summer’s election. They will replace Marty Clarke and Sharyn O’Hare on the Ocean Pines Association Board of Directors.

“I’m going in with an open mind,” Herrick said. “Hopefully we’ll get together and do what’s best for the entire community.”

He said he’d been hoping he and Jacobs would be elected, as they’d both campaigned as independent thinkers not aligned with a particular board faction.

Jacobs, a longtime prosecutor, said she’d been cautiously optimistic leading up to the announcement of the election results.

“A number of people worked very hard on my behalf and I only hoped that our efforts would prove to be fruitful,” she said.

Herrick, a retired New York State Police officer, received 1,669 votes while Jacobs received 1,480 votes. Vote counts for the other five candidates were as follows: Slobodan Trendic, 1,195, Terri Mohr, 873, Carol Ludwig 651, Bill Zawacki, 620, Ray Unger 219.

Jacobs said she was a bit surprised by the results.

“I believe the outcome indicates the community is looking for fresh faces,” she said, “which is how I characterized my campaign, so that message definitely resonated with the voters.”

Bill Wentworth, chairman of the association’s election committee, said the summer’s voting went smoothly. Thanks to a change approved by the board of directors, proxy envelopes were not included with the ballots sent to homeowners. That, Wentworth said, eliminated the increasingly high number of ballots that were being rejected in recent years because they were returned in the proxy envelope instead of the ballot envelope.

“Everything went very well,” Wentworth said.

The new board is expected to hold an organizational meeting within two weeks of the annual meeting—as mandated by the association’s bylaws—to elect officers.

Dave Stevens, who has served as president of the board of directors this past year, provided Saturday’s crowd of more than 100 property owners with updates on a number of key community topics before election results were announced.

“I decided I’d focus on a few of the things that preoccupied the board and the press during the past year,” Stevens said.

Regarding the community’s conversion to natural gas, he said Ocean Pines Association General Manager Bob Thompson was still working to reach an agreement with Sandpiper Energy.

“At no time during past two years did this board walk away from the table or refuse to continue discussion,” Stevens said.

Stevens said this spring’s replacement of Billy Casper Golf with Landscapes Unlimited at the association’s course was due to the declining membership and growing financial losses it was experiencing. Though Casper’s focus of increasing revenue through package play had some success, the course continued to lose money. The board opted to begin soliciting bids for new management.

“Landscapes offered a different approach,” he said. “They say a community the size of Ocean Pines should be able to support its own golf course. They are focusing on bringing back not just members of the course but members of association who live or vacation here in Ocean Pines.”

Stevens commented briefly on the poor financial performance of the new Yacht Club, attributing it to growing pains.

“I’m not going to say too much about this,” Stevens said. “We had first year growing pains and losses. Looking back, that should have been expected. The GM has initiated some management changes as a result of lessons learned during the first year. All I want to say is so far looking at first two months financials the results are very encouraging.”