My comments about Sherrie Clifford's use of innuendo in her recent editorial titled "The HOA Clique: When Loyalty to power breeds bullies," sparked some interest.

However, while Clifford's ROC Facebook site and her editorial may be innuendo, perhaps it is important to examine a Facebook site that supported candidates who have represented controlling votes in the OPA Board of Directors for the last three years - Ocean Pines ~ Get Involved.

Get Involved predates ROC. Founded in 2021 by OPA President Stuart Lakernick's wife Esther Diller and Colby Phillips, Get Involved clearly had a goal of getting people it supported elected to the Board of Directors. Their success was amazing. At that time Phillips had just resigned from OPA after a very public dispute with the Board of Directors. Phillips is apparently no longer involved in Get Involved management.

So, how did Get Involved manage to get its selected candidates elected to the board? Frankly, it included a great deal of innuendo, the same sort of innuendo recently used by Clifford of ROC.

A March 12, 2021 article in a local paper began with, "Focused on community issues and civic engagement, a new private Facebook group, Ocean Pines Get Involved, has expanded rapidly with hundreds of members joining in less than two weeks."

The article quoted Diller saying, "The goal is to highlight issues of communitywide concern. What will help our fellow homeowners [and] what will help the board get back on the right track. They’re not on the right track and they’ve been off the track for several months."

And this, "Diller said transparency is needed in light of recent tensions between staff and board members involving closed meetings and the absence of public disclosures, but resulting in Phillips’ departure from her management position with the association."

Back in 2018 Diller ran for the board and was elected. The 2018 OPA board election material contained this from Diller:

"In 2014, I purchased in Ocean Pines with the intention of retiring to Ocean Pines in the next few years. I am the CEO or CFO in eight different businesses, and I know how to manage people. The Board of Directors needs leaders who can provide oversight and let the area experts do their jobs. A board is supposed to provide executive guidance, staff is supposed to provide operational support.

"As an executive, I know how to make this happen, and will bring the leadership OPA needs to create a solid path forward for the next fifty years. This community is a great place, but it needs help. I intend to use my voice on the board to manage assessments (they are over 10% too high), hold staff accountable for our money, and bring in professionals. This can turn struggling portions of our operations around and protect our financial future so we can all afford to live here for the next fifty years, enjoying what has been built in the first fifty."

Diller resigned from the board about six months after her election due to personal reasons.

Diller also used innuendo during a public meeting she held in the Assateague Room prior to her own successful run for a board position in 2018.

She highlighted her own extensive business background then suggested the source of theft of OPA funds going on at the time was likely one or more employees in the OPA accounting department. Eventually OPA was asking employees to take lie detector tests. At least one employee resigned, refusing to be humiliated. A subsequent expensive forensic report noted the thefts were not done by any employee but likely at a bank handling OPA cash deposits.

Diller also said OPA did not have the ability to self-govern, and we can't blame Brett Hill, then acting General Manager

As a bit of a sidebar, Amy Peck, now with ROC was originally with Diller and Get Involved. On March 8, 2021, Peck wrote the following innuendo on Get Involved, "I really do feel like our Board needs to address OP's plan for the future. I am afraid of them repeating past mistakes where they fire a GM and appointment an interim that costs us a million in losses or have to hire an outside person that has a huge learning curve. The plan was to have Colby be our next GM but they have ruined that."

The point of all this is to make clear that the use of innuendo is not limited to supporters and/or owner of the ROC Facebook page, but also to the Get Involved Facebook page.

That said, Get Involved has been virtually Uninvolved in finding candidates for the current election. Why? Their supported folks are on the board and two of those, Stuart Lakernick and Monica Rakowski, are up for re-election. Even if both of them lost re-election, candidates originally supported by Get Involved (Farr, Heavner, Brady, and Latham) would still represent the board majority.

However, reliable sources indicate a number of sitting directors once in Diller's Get Involved camp are now Uninvolved with Get Involved - excluding, of course Diller's husband Stuart Lakernick.  Is that innuendo? You decide.

There is also past commentary about this ongoing "war" between the two Facebook groups:

 Facebook Wars 11/25/2023

 Facebook Wars 2/28/2022