Jim Mathias has lived in Ocean City long enough to remember when the big issue was whether to let a McDonald's or a 7-Eleven or some other intruder into town. The one-time mayor and city councilman also remembers the brouhaha over whether to keep the traffic lights on in the winter when OC returned to its sleepy, small-town self, rather than just during the busy summer tourist season.
Change comes slowly and often with great angst to Maryland's summer playground, where much of the appeal is familiarity - the same hotel you went to as a kid, the same boardwalk, the same Thrasher's fries and Fisher's caramel corn, year after year, generation after generation.
"There's something to be said for tradition," said Mathias, who is now a state delegate and faced with voting on one of the biggest changes the city has ever faced: the introduction of slots to a racetrack just outside the city. "But we have to stay competitive."
As mayor, Mathias opposed slots. As delegate, he is open to them, under certain conditions.
"It's a mess," he said yesterday when I reached him in Annapolis where the special legislative session to consider slots and taxes continued into its third week. "How do I walk the line? I'm really on a tightrope here."
The special session has provided almost a surprise a day - from the landscaping service providers who suddenly were included in the sales tax expansion, but then taken out, only to have the computer services people tossed into the mix. But perhaps nowhere has there been as much turmoil as Ocean City, what with proposals to raise the sales tax from 5 percent to 6 percent, the hotel tax from 5 percent to 7.5 percent and, most of all, to put slots at Ocean Downs Race Track on U.S. 50 just before you get to OC.
"It's been quite a shock," Annemarie Dickerson said of the goings-on in Annapolis. The owner of the family-oriented Francis Scott Key hotel and resort in Ocean City said that she had come to terms with the sales tax increase, but the inclusion of Ocean Downs in the slots proposal and the House's approval of a rise in the hotel tax came as unwelcome surprises.
"I'm OK with sales tax. It's across the board, and it seems fair. And I know we have to fix the deficit," she said. She had even warned her regulars - about 74 percent of her guests are return customers - to expect the extra sales tax expense when they come "downy ocean" next summer.
