OCEAN CITY — For nearly four decades, Ocean City Mayor Richard Meehan has been involved in the beach town’s politics. First elected to City Council in 1985, he became council president in 1990 before stepping into the mayor’s chair in 2006 following the resignation of Jim Mathias Jr.. He’s now the longest-serving mayor in the city’s history.
In a conversation with The Baltimore Sun, the Republican and graduate of the University of Baltimore reflected on the issues facing Ocean City, including the controversial ban on some short-term rentals that was shot down in a referendum, the battle against wind farms for energy and police presence in a town that attracts 8 million visitors annually.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Voters rejected a ban on short-term rental housing in some areas. Where did you stand?
I think that the issue was probably misinterpreted by many. What we wanted to do was restrict short-term rentals in two areas of town — our R1 single-family residential areas and our mobile home areas. These are areas where we have numerous year-round residents.
Our residents should have their right to enjoy the quiet peace and tranquility of those neighborhoods. We realize we’re a resort town, but our residential communities are important. We have about 9,400 licensed short-term rentals. This would have only affected about 350 of those rentals. Those that are on the bayside, in those single-family home communities.
I think a lot of people believed that it was going to affect all the rentals, all the properties throughout Ocean City, and that was never the case. But those in opposition to the ordinance never allowed that message to really be given. We were only restricting short-term rentals in those particular designated areas to a minimum of five days.
Our neighbors were seeing one- and two-night rentals, bachelor parties and different types of things. All of these are great experiences, but maybe they don’t have to take place next to your neighbors, next to single-family homes where people are raising their families, just like they do in any other place within the state of Maryland.
Do you think this issue will be discussed in City Council again?
I think so. It was defeated very narrowly. There was miscommunication. We’re going to let the issue settle for a while. I think it’ll come back before the council to revisit. Our goal is to respect and honor what the voters said but to come back and talk about it to see if, in fact, we can do other things or readdress that in a different manner.
I supported it. I think single-family neighborhoods are important to Ocean City too, our future, and I hope we’re able to come back at some point and regulate that in a way that maybe we’ll be more acceptable to all parties
Ocean City banned most tents on beaches and restricted canopies. How is that going?
We saw that large areas of the beach were being taken up by these tents and canopies, and it seemed like everybody was trying to get the biggest canopy or tent they could. There was competition for space. We want to make sure that our beach is open and everybody can enjoy the beach.
And so we put this new ordinance into effect. We realized it was going to take some time to educate everybody as to what the new rules were and what we expected to take place on our beach.
So we were pretty strict about the tents, about not allowing those and asking people to remove the tents. As far as the canopies are concerned, what we’ve been doing is our beach patrol — not those guards that are on the stands but the lieutenants and the staff so it doesn’t take away from manning the beach — have interaction with people and let them know if they have a canopy or something that doesn’t comply with the new ordinance.
We’ve been doing that all summer long. We’ve had thousands of interactions with people. We haven’t begun to ticket anybody [for tents] to this point. That wasn’t our goal. Our goal was to get the word out. So as we move forward, we can begin to address this.
We have been tagging those [unattended] canopies to let them know that it is a violation. Repeat offenders, if we can identify repeat offenders, are now receiving a ticket for that.
It’s really so that we can offer the best beach experience for everybody and give everybody an opportunity to enjoy that special spot right there by the ocean.
With rip currents and sand hole collapses, how is beach safety being managed?
We have a terrific beach patrol. We are fully staffed on our beach patrol, which you don’t see in many beach areas right now. We increased the pay for our lifeguards and for our surf-rescue technicians.
If you’ve ever been out on our beach and you’ll see how professional our lifeguards all and how they communicate with each other, and I think most importantly, how they communicate with the public. The lifeguards will talk to everybody about the currents of the beach, the rip currents and if there are jellyfish, and let them know what precautions they need to take. It’s all about education. It’s about communication, and it’s making sure that everybody knows what the issues are out there on a beach so they can safely enjoy it while they’re out there with their family and friends.
The city has voiced concerns over offshore wind farms’ impact on tourism and the environment. What’s your stance on balancing clean energy goals with protecting local industries?
I first saw the offshore wind project being proposed over eight years ago, and at that time, I expressed my opposition to the size of the turbines and the location. At that particular point in time, we were only concerned about the visual aspect because it was much more intrusive than we had ever imagined and more than ever been conveyed to us.
But all of our concerns have continuously fallen on deaf ears. And now those turbines that were first introduced to us eight years ago and were 6-megawatt turbines, maybe 350, 450 feet tall, are now 18-megawatt turbines that are 938 feet tall. If on land, they’d be as tallest structures in the state of Maryland.
We’re concerned about them. We’re concerned about our economy, we’re concerned about the viewshed. But over the last eight years, we’ve learned an awful lot about how this affects our entire community, how it affects our ecosystem, how it will affect our commercial fishermen.
I think we’ve wasted a lot of time as a state; there are other means that we should be pursuing. We should be looking at small nuclear facilities, and we should be looking at controlled use of solar energy. We support clean energy but not at the cost of our environment here in Ocean City.
Over Fourth of July weekend, there was a panic over fireworks that people thought were gunfire, then there was a shooting on Pennsylvania Avenue. What has the town done to deter crime?
That’s a challenge. Hiring police officers in this day and age is difficult. For the last 40 years, we’ve had seasonal police officers. That’s no more. The state law changed as to the requirements for hiring provisional officers, and seasonal police officers were considered provisional officers, so we no longer have that program, which has really been a detriment to our police force in a number of ways.
We’ve tried to compensate for that, I think, very well by hiring public safety officers, who are those officers you’ll see on the boardwalk. They don’t have arrest powers; they don’t carry guns, but they are a large presence with radios, and they work very closely with our uniformed officers. So I think we’re covered there.
How have the tourism numbers been this summer?
It was down a little bit early in the year because of the weather. We are weather-dependent, and we had a lot of rain and never had a spring. Some of that does help determine whether people are traveling or not. But overall, we just had a very strong month of June to close out fiscal year 2025, so I think we’re on pace for another excellent year. We met our revenue projections as far as room taxes are concerned for the last fiscal year, and that’s the best barometer we have to gauge what the visitation numbers truly are.
We rebranded our advertising two years ago, and that’s been very helpful; “Somewhere to Smile About” is our new slogan. And I think we’ve taken our advertising in our campaign to a new level. And I think in this day and age, that’s what you need to do. You need to remain relevant. You need to show the initiative and invite people to come visit your venue. And that’s what we’ve continued to do.
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