By Donald Wittkowski
Culminating months of debate and intense public opposition, the Planning Board rejected a proposed condo-hotel project that was seen as a competitive threat to one of Ocean City’s most iconic businesses.
The board’s 7-1 vote against the Soleil Resort, coming at the end of a nearly five-hour meeting Wednesday night, brought threats of a lawsuit by the development group.
“I’m sure they know what is coming,” Joe Ernst, one of the principals of the project, responded when asked whether he will file litigation against the city.
Ernst, clearly angered by the vote, accused the board of failing to fulfill its legal mandate.
“My professional opinion is, they didn’t do what they were supposed to do,” he said.
His company, Ernst Brothers Designers and Builders, had teamed up with Select Properties Inc. of Colmar, Pa., to propose a 111-unit condo-hotel at the corner of Ocean Avenue and 11th Street.
The project aroused fierce opposition from the adjacent Flanders Hotel, which operates as a condo-hotel. Soleil was regarded as a potential formidable competitor for the Flanders, one of the city’s most historic and best-known businesses.
Condo owners at the Flanders, as they did in two previous Planning Board meetings on the Soleil, turned out in force Wednesday night to criticize the project and urge its rejection. Twenty out of the 21 public speakers who addressed the board expressed opposition.
John Coulter, a Flanders condo owner and dean of engineering at Pennsylvania’s Lehigh University, argued that Soleil was simply too big for the surrounding area and would “fundamentally change” the character of Ocean City.
“I believe this is trying to cram too much into that space,” Coulter told the board members.
Representatives of the business community joined with the Flanders condo owners to attack the project. They predicted Soleil would create gridlock on local streets that are already congested during the peak summer tourist season.
Mark Raab, part of a family partnership that owns the Golden Galleon retail center on the Boardwalk, said 11th Street in particular would become an “absolute nightmare” if Soleil is built.
Other opponents argued that Soleil was a poorly disguised condominium complex, not the condo-hotel that the developers had insisted they wanted to build.
“This is not a hotel. It’s a condominium,” said Ocean City resident John Stauffer.
The Soleil is proposed for a city redevelopment zone that envisions a first-class, resort-style hotel operating year-round. The developers said the project would comply with those requirements.
“It’s a hotel. It meets the definition,” Soleil’s attorney, Nicholas Talvacchia, told the board in his closing statement.
Planning Board members, though, were skeptical. They doubted whether the project would comply with the redevelopment zone’s requirements for a hotel.
“This, in my opinion, doesn’t even come close to a resort hotel,” board member Gary Jessel said.
John Loeper, the board chairman, asserted that Soleil would not operate as a hotel in “any shape or form.”
Dean Adams was the only board member to vote yes on the Soleil group’s request for preliminary site plan approval. However, Adams said he believed the project barely met the standards for the type of resort hotel that the city wants.
“It’s a beautiful building. It could be a lot better,” Adams said.
Wednesday night’s vote followed two stormy board meetings in January and February on the project. The board delayed a vote in January and February while it collected public feedback and expert testimony from consultants representing both the Soleil and the Flanders.
In response to concerns from the public and the board, the project was revised in February. Changes to Soleil included more directional signs, a new circulation pattern to handle traffic, parking revisions, a more functional hotel lobby, more storage and housekeeping space and public bathrooms for a rooftop pool.
The developers also eliminated a proposed porte-cochere from the building’s 11th Street frontage. In addition, they had planned to erect a new marquee for the garage and more wayfinding signs to help with traffic flow.
The developers changed the project to a condo-hotel complex after the Planning Board last year rejected the original plans for a straight condominium. The board stressed that it wanted a resort-style hotel as the centerpiece of the redevelopment zone.
Select Properties and Ernst Brothers have not disclosed the project’s development cost. The companies intended to build Soleil in three stages, starting with a condo tower on Ocean Avenue, followed by the parking garage and ending with another condo tower on 11th Street.
Condo owners in Soleil would fall under a 120-day stay limit throughout the year to ensure that their units would be available to hotel guests most of the time. That means the owners would have been limited to 30 days in each season, preventing them from monopolizing their units during the peak summer tourist period.
