OCEAN CITY — While the Adopt Your Beach program initiated in the resort last fall continues to thrive, the same cannot be said yet for the sister Adopt Your Street program, resort officials learned this week.
Last spring, the Ocean City Surf Club, under the auspices of the Coastal Resources Legislative Committee, or “Green Team,” initiated an Adopt Your Beach program, which, as the name implies, is a grassroots effort to have the private sector supplement the town’s beach cleaning efforts. Under the program, a group or organization literally adopts a section of the beach in Ocean City, in some cases a single block where their business or condo association is located, or even a group of two or three blocks.
From the onset, the program has been wildly successful with all but a handful of sections of beach still not adopted. Councilman and Green Team liaison Tony DeLuca briefed the Mayor and Council on the progress of the program this week.
“This program has exploded with a ton of activity,” he said. “All but eight streets have been adopted and most of those are in the area of 115th Street.”
While the Adopt Your Beach program has been wildly successful, the same cannot be said of the sister Adopt Your Street program. Loosely following the same model, the Maryland Coastal Bays Program initiated the Adopt Your Street program in the hopes the same enthusiasm would spill over from the beach to the streets. DeLuca said on Monday that hasn’t happened yet for a variety of reasons.
“Adopt Your Street is off to a rather slow start,” he said. “There are a lot of businesses interested, but they are really looking for recognition. They want the same kind of signs you see around the highways, but we have made our position on too much signage pretty clear. Having a lot of sign clutter kind of defeats the purpose of cleaning up the streets in the first place.”
DeLuca also said the timing of the Adopt Your Street launch could also be a contributing factor. While the Adopt Your Beach program was launched in the spring, the similar street program came out in the early summer when most businesses and residents were already in seasonal mode.
“It was probably bad timing to haul this out in the summertime,” he said. “We’re going to really target it for this fall and hopefully we get a good response.”
