The Town of Ocean City is doing a U-turn on its recently announced $100,000 gas giveaway promotion.
Last week, the promo was good to go. This week, it's a real no-go. As in not going to happen.
"After reflection, the council established that gas giveaway promotions in place throughout the local business community are effective and a town-sponsored giveaway would only be of benefit to a small number of visitors," town officials said in a news release today.
It was just two weeks ago that OC officials excitedly announced that the resort town was "gearing up for a $100,000 free gas promotion, making it the first resort in the country to do so. Details ... will be announced in the coming weeks."
But as we know the devil is always in the details. So what happened?
As usual, politics. Now, I know we go to the beach to relax. And this blog wants to give you that relaxing feeling, so we don't want to get mired in the mud of disagreements. But I figured folks deserved some explanation, so I spoke with two Ocean City council members on opposite sides of the promotion debacle.
Councilman Brent Ashley came up with the plan for the promotion and it's fair to say he's disappointed at how things turned out.
"Totally shocked. This is terrible, terrible, negative statement for OC. It just destroys our credibility," Ashley said, explaining that the idea had originally passed by a narrow 4-3 vote.
Ashley said the swing vote was fellow councilman Doug Cymek, who had agreed to vote for the gas giveaway in exchange for receiving Ashley's support for an additional $60,000 in marketing funds to promote bookings at Eagle Landings, the town's golf course.
So the duo hatched a plan and passed a sort of golf and gas promotion. Great.
But then Cymek, who said he had reservations about the idea even when he voted for it, began to reconsider.
"I was not in favor of putting gas into people's tanks up in Baltimore or any kind of promotion that had to do with gas. I want it to be created with the idea that it would bring people here, to put them in our beds and put them in our restaurants," he told The Coastal Dispatch.
And then he began hearing from constituents who did not favor giving away gas at all.
"Not one person was in favor of the promotion," Cymek said in a phone interview. He heard a variety of reasons from his constituents, including that the price of gas was going down, business people didn't think it was right for government to do and instead believed it was for the private sector to do and so on.
Ashley said the $100,000 for the gas giveaway would have come from the existing advertising budget of $4.5 million and that most of the budget is from money the town receives from hotel and tourism taxes.
"Our advertising money is not tax money. It comes from our room taxes – paid for by our visitors, not taxpayers," said Ashley. "This promotion would have cost them $0."
He also said the amount of the promotion was paltry in comparison to other advertising expenditures.
"We spend more than that on a last-minute radio spot," Ashley said.
Cymek said another problem he had with the giveaway was that it was going to be very difficult to get the gas cards into the hands of the people who should have them.
"If you have a website with a sweepstakes, you have no assurances that the cards would be used by people coming to Ocean City," he said.
To that end, Cymek said there may be another type of promotion in the works.
But that likely won't be met with the same level of enthusiasm, according to Ashley.
"We've had worldwide attention for this," he said, citing Baltimore and Philadelphia TV coverage and interest from as far away as India and Ireland.
"I think we would have gotten millions of dollars in promotions. ... It's very disappointing."