OCEAN CITY – A new monster truck event will go before the Mayor and Council with a favorable recommendation from a resort commission.
On Monday, the Ocean City Tourism Commission voted unanimously to advance a new Monsters of Metal Beach Brawl event to the Mayor and Council with a favorable recommendation. Special Events Director Frank Miller said the event will be held Oct. 18-20 of next year on the downtown beach.
“Even with our Sunfest event setting up, this event would take place and would draw a lot of people to town,” he told the commission. “We’re expecting this event to draw up to 5,000 people in its first year. It would be beach based, and it would have an immersive experience, not only for our patrons but also for our businesses.”
As proposed, the town would partner with The Metal Shop, a Delmar-based company featured on the TV show “Metal Monsters: The Righteous Redeemer,” to bring the monster truck event to Ocean City. Miller said the event would also fill an otherwise vacant weekend on the October events calendar.
“It is a financial partnership we want to bring in front of the council to consider,” he said. “The team, the drivers, they will also help significantly to put this out on their social media, to their fan base.”
Miller said Monsters of Metal Beach Brawl would feature family friendly activities including pit parties, autograph sessions, a monster truck parade, monster truck rides and a potential music component. The monster truck competitions, he added, would be held on the downtown beach, near the Inlet parking lot.
“There’s a head-to-head setup too,” Miller added. “So there’s no positive energy coming toward the crowd in the way this is set up.”
Miller told commission members Monday The Metal Shop’s Rick Disharoon would be setting up the beach track and would work with professional drivers to bring Monsters of Metal to Ocean City. He said the event would attract a fan base from states as far away as Michigan and Florida.
“Being on the beach is a unique experience, versus going to an arena or somewhere else,” he said.
When asked if The Metal Shop had participated in the monster truck event at the Wicomico Youth & Civic Center, The Metal Shop’s Jaclyn Disharoon Cooper said it had. She noted, however, that the proposed event in Ocean City would feature professional drivers from the Monster Jam series.
“That’s what I would call a lower tier series of drivers,” Cooper said of the Wicomico event. “They bring ours in only because we’re local and they hope that it drives their sales … But the people we’re going to be pulling from, most of them are on Monster Jam, which is a televised professional monster truck racing series. The qualification of drivers we’re having is professional level.”
After further discussion, the commission voted unanimously to send a favorable recommendation to the Mayor and Council.
“It’s going to be an exciting event,” said Tourism and Business Development Director Tom Perlozzo.
In addition to the Monsters of Metal event, Miller also presented commission members this week with plans to celebrate the town’s 150th anniversary, which will occur in 2025. He said staff members were working to incorporate anniversary events into the fiscal year 2025 budget.
“We do need to start talking about those things …,” he said. “A lot of this will be proposed in our budget, but we’re looking at anything from banners to parades to a gala. There are several things we have submitted early on to the city manager for consideration.”
