OCEAN CITY — You might know Greg Shockley as a small business owner and the proprietor of the popular Boardwalk establishment Shenanigans. But, over the past 20 years, Shockley has been one of the most instrumental figures in helping to drive the local business community’s and the town’s interest’s forward.
Shockley sat down with The Dispatch this week to talk about how the town has improved its tourism game and why the tourists and residents shouldn’t be afraid of change when it comes to downtown Ocean City. But we began our conversation with his role in the Boardwalk Task Force, which was formed to find compromise in the debate surrounding the city street performer laws.
Q: This week, the Boardwalk Task Force, which you essentially led and were a big part of, recommended to the town the instillation of a lottery system. Tell me why that was the best option to sort of ease the tension and the controversy surrounding the street performer issue in Ocean City?
A: The original ordinance had a signup and assignment process. The unintended consequence of that were the street performers appearing at the City Hall doors the night before and sleeping out overnight. It created bad optics. The lottery came up in our discussions and the discussions from when we took testimony as being a much cleaner process.
You would show up, you’d sign in. Nine a.m. you’d sign up, and it would be done by lottery at 9:30 a.m. and you pick your spot. It gives everybody pretty much equal access to a spot. The only delineation that was made was for the guys that require the 10×10 spaces. There are two lotteries. There are different acts which require different space: Mark Chase with his spray paint art is one of them, and there’s a magician. Generally they are called ‘rope shows,’ where they rope off a certain area, and then you have other performers who might play a guitar or do the hula-hoop or whatever that don’t require that big of space.
Q: You’ve essentially segmented the buskers into the traditional busker and this newer version that we’ve seen who need a larger space. Will segmenting them in this way ease the tension?
A: I think so because the street performers can enforce their own rules and govern themselves to some extent. It’s not 60 people who show up and perform every day. There are cliques among them. The 10×10 rule will probably be enforced by them, but the city is going to have some role in it, too. They can say, ‘hey if you are playing a guitar, you don’t need a 10×10 space.’ That had to be taken into consideration because that is the true sense of busking: setting up the space and having people gather around you.
Q: There are some in the town who feel that the street performer issue changed when people like (spray-paint artist) Mark Chase came to town and set up an essential market place on the Boardwalk; rent free, and selling his wares while taking up a large footprint. Then, we had the proliferation of costume characters, and of course the pole dancer, which caused the debate to take on a whole new form and tone. Ironically, Mark Chase was sitting right next to you on the Boardwalk Task Force, and some say that he was calculated during the proceedings to ensure that whatever passed helped him. Do you agree with the notion that this issue changed when Mark Chase came to town?
A: I don’t know if Mark was the person who changed it, but what changed was that for years, we had maybe five street performers: Boardwalk Elvis, Roy the kazoo player and a few others. Word started to spread within that community that you could make money in Ocean City. So, we had a proliferation of performers including Mark Chase and the costume characters.
I think it was a function of people finding Ocean City, finding that they could make money here, and then the fact that there was so much of it. If you have a limited variety, you can govern it, but there was such a wide variety of activities happening on the Boardwalk that it created a big blob of entertainment. I can’t point at Mark as being the one who did it, but obviously he sued the city and someone else sued the city in regards to decibels. Give the Mayor and City Council credit for putting a task force, putting business people on it and putting Mark Chase on it. We are all human and we are all going to look out for our interests. Mark did that, but he stepped over no bounds. Mark was in agreement with most of the stuff that we discussed.
Q: Throughout this long process, there was another lawsuit that was filed. A constant during these public comments was the gentleman who is essentially leading the charge with this lawsuit, and that’s Tony Christ. As the public has debated it, has he ‘poisoned the well’, or has he brought to light things that needed to be discussed that otherwise wouldn’t be?
A: I think Tony tries to bring things to light in his own way, but whether or not he poisoned the well, that remains to be seen. That’s the way he operates. Getting the ticket on the Boardwalk last summer, his intent was to create an issue. I don’t know how he is held by the street performers, but he came to all the meetings and made his comments, and that case is still pending, so we’ll see how that goes.
Q: Let’s turn to tourism. Most people know you as the owner of Shenanigan’s for the past 20 years, but you’ve also been instrumental for tourism as a whole in the small business community over the years. You are a former chair of the Maryland Tourism Development Board and you’re currently on the Tourism Commission and the Tourism Advisory Board. What do you think has been the biggest game changer when it comes to the promotion of tourism in Ocean City?
A: I think its three things. Several years ago when we got the additional funding off the room tax it doubled our budget overnight and the budget has continued to grow. So, if you have more funds and you can spend those funds in the right place, you move to the front of mind with people and they’ll think of Ocean City when they take their vacation. Whether that’s a week, or a few days, the extra funding has definitely helped.
We have great people involved. We are all business people and we all understand business and we’ve come together with the Mayor and City Council in Ocean City, the county level and the state level. Everything changes so quickly and advertising and marketing has changed dramatically. It used to be all in print and you printed in magazines and newspapers to today, the city has one of the best social and digital programs around. The only thing is, you always could use more money. The budget has stayed here, so there’s big steps that could be made to expand our market, but the budget has remained the same. The dollars have not increased.
Q: I know during your time working in tourism at the state level, you worked alongside and became an acquaintance with former Governor Martin O’Malley. He was a big supporter and pushed to increase that funding for tourism. Do you get the sense that Governor Larry Hogan will do the same thing?
A: From what we’ve seen, yes. This year’s budget had a very small increase in the (tourism) budget of about $110,000. If you look at the state budget this year, anyone who got an increase, that was rare. He held the line, and there were very small increases. It’s up to all of us to show him what tourism does for the state. We talk numbers all the time, and I think tourism brings in roughly $20 billion in revenue, $2 billion in taxes, and that’s sales tax, payroll tax, etc.
The new one that we’ve been using is if you take tourism out of the picture completely, each household in Maryland would pay $1,100 more in taxes each year to make up for tourism. So, it’s an engine at the state level, and clearly it’s an engine in Ocean City and Worcester County.
Last year, the city hired a consultant to come in and give them a strategic plan. I worked with a strategic plan at the state the whole time. It helped us navigate 2008-2009 when our (tourism) budget was cut in half. It’s been about a year now in the city, and you can see the Mayor and Council sticking to the goals outlined in the strategic plan. The tendency is to fly off at every opportunity, but to their credit, they have stayed focused on their strategic plan, which, as you said earlier, they are getting better at doing tourism and that’s part of it.
Q: Let’s turn to the downtown region for a moment. There are a lot of eyes focused on the changing nature of this town. There are new hotels being built, and some of the older ones are starting to come down. You are a former president of the Ocean City Development Corporation (OCDC), which is the local non-profit that is focused on improving the look and feel of our old infrastructure downtown. The fact of the matter is that much of the downtown and many of the buildings are aging, and it’s natural that we are going to see some turnover and things are going to change aesthetically and structurally. How do we prepare people to welcome those necessary changes, even if it gets away from that old look and feel of the town?
A: I think OCDC has done that since the beginning. One of their most important tools is their design guidelines. Those guidelines allow people to rehab old buildings but it also took into account new construction. I think that was the sign that change was coming and that they were prepared for change. They saw the condition and they knew some of it could be rehabbed and get 20 or 30 more years out of it, and other things would have to come down. But, armed with the design guidelines, I think the city and the downtown are in good stead because they have a road map for the future. I mean, you aren’t going to see a square building downtown that’s sand colored with metal all over it. You are going to see a building that is designed from the start with the elements that OCDC has put into the design guidelines. So, you’ll be able to keep that sense of place downtown and, while it may be new, it will still feel like the seaside village that it started as in the late 1800’s.
(Editor’s Note: To listen to the entire conversation, check out The Dispatch Download podcast at https://mdcoastdispatch.com/?p=63862