Boardwalk performer regulations still need work

This summer the town of Ocean City placed new regulations against boardwalk performers that limited them to registered spots. The move resulted in numerous protests from performers. Now in the aftermath, the first public hearing by the Boardwalk task force Monday night since those controversial regulations were implemented.

Greg Shockely is chariman of the Ocean City’s five member taskforce. He says performers and business owners complied with the new regulations this past summer.

“There’s a working relationship now prior to this there was no working relationship, it was broken an dysfucntional,” Shockley said.

The hot button now from what was said during the public hearing portion of the meeting, is the registration part of the regulation.

It’s first come first serve, which has required some performers to spend the night outside of city hall to get a good spot.

Mark Chase is on the task force, but he himself is also a performer.

He says if the town can fix the registration process, there won’t be much backlash from performers.

“Without the sign ups about 90 percent of the ordinance works, it just needs a few tweaks here and there. It’s just those signups that is the main thing about street performers that we hate,” Chase said.

Ocean City Police testified at the hearing, saying the new regulations led to relations being peaceful between performers on the boardwalk.

Chase says things were peaceful on the boardwalk, but it was the signups that brought the issue. He says performers fighting sleep deprivation and hunger while waiting to signup brought problems and often conflict.

Chase says he believes the if the sign up process were to be done away with, but the registered spots were kept, the performers could self regulate.

Right now though the task force says they’ll take the comments they received, process them and then hold a meeting at a date yet to be determined before they submit more recommendations to the mayor and council.