A tough summer?

With the Beltway region about to go into a DOGE-infused recession, something's got to go - and it might be their vacation.

Bayside sunsets like this one at the pricey aLoft hotel in Ocean City may be out of reach for erstwhile federal workers this summer.

A Saturday when people’s thoughts turn to summer and vacation season is a good time to run this.

Where I live, the economy runs on two things: agriculture and tourism.

Generally the agriculture takes care of itself because the corn and soybeans we grow around here go to feed the chickens, whose “by-product” turns right around and fertilizes the fields for the next summer season. We also grow a crapton of watermelons, some of which are processed and packaged just down the road from me, making these melon busses a common late-summer sight along with refrigerated tractor-trailers on my rural road.

Definitely not the best picture, but looking out the window I happened to notice a crew of pickers loading up a melon bus last year in the field across the road. I doubt it will be a watermelon field this year, as they tend to rotate around and this is the time they prepare them.

Tourism, on the other hand, is a different story. While there is some degree of “low-impact” tourism from those interested in hiking, biking, and photography of the natural areas along Chesapeake and Delaware Bays or checking out the “coolest small town in America” in Berlin, Maryland (as voted a decade back), most people who come here are interested in staying oceanside by the beach. That’s what makes the area from Lewes, Delaware southward to Ocean City, Maryland so popular. You’ve heard of “flyover” country, well, we live in “flythrough” country as speeding drivers play cat and mouse with the MSP cars frequently hiding in the medians along U.S. 50 heading toward the Ocean City beach.

A lot of those cars I see on summer weekends have D.C. or Virginia plates, or else they have some identifying information on their Maryland-tagged cars which tells me they live “across the bridge” on the Western Shore. Add in the fact that the Hyatt resort in Cambridge is generally packed on those holiday weekends during the winter with federal employees and others who get the three-day weekend, and it’s apparent that a significant percentage of our tourist dollars flow from those who are either on the federal dole or one step removed, like contractors. A rare recession in Washington, D.C. - which only seems to happen when a reformer like Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump comes to town - is not great news for our little tourist trap.

But Ocean City has changed its marketing as well. Once billing itself as a family resort where Mom, Dad, and the kids can hang around the beach for a week during the summer and play mini-golf or go to a movie when the crumb-crunchers get bored or it rained, their strategy now seems to be a weekend-based and event-driven one: Springfest in late April, Sunfest in October, cruise-in weekends during the spring and fall for those with classic cars, Delmarva Bike Week in September, weekend-long music festivals (Boardwalk Rock in May, Oceans Calling for alternative bands and Country Calling on consecutive weekends in September and October), the White Marlin Open fishing tournament in August, and so on and so forth. On an average summer weekend, Ocean City is the second-largest city in Maryland with 200,000 or so nestling within its borders, and its onetime status as opening up on Memorial Day weekend and rolling up the boardwalk after Labor Day has blossomed into the shoulder seasons before and beyond those calendar dates. It’s a town that’s now just about as happening in mid-October during what we locals call “second season” as it is in mid-August.

With an event-based, sort of optional schedule like that, the fear is that those federal employees who are now out of a job won’t be bringing their ‘68 Camaro down on the trailer just to cruise their classic up and down Coastal Highway, or may decide a weekend to see Green Day, Noah Kahan, Weezer, and Fall Out Boy is something they have to pass on this year. (They don’t seem like a Country Calling crowd, so that should do okay.)

Moreover, the scuttlebutt among the naysayers may be true: it could be cheaper to head down to the Caribbean or Mexico for a week than stay in Ocean City for that time. And with the town cracking down on the AirBnB industry in certain areas (because they don’t make tax money from it) the fear is that Ocean City may be delivering a Chevrolet weekend at a Rolls-Royce price.

Nor are other resorts exempt from increased prices: up in Delaware Rehoboth Beach is raising parking rates and their rental tax, while Bethany Beach raised their parking rate to keep up with the Joneses instead of giving people a bit of a break.

These beach towns may realize too late that they are an extra and a frill, and pricing themselves out of the market won’t do any of us any good. We locals already know that the time to be at the beach is after Labor Day, when the weather and water are still warm and the kids are back in school, but they’re already on the verge of ruining second season for us.

Luckily for my wife and I, we’ve found a couple nice little hideaways away from that part of the world (and the tourons) for when we decide to go back.

In the meantime, though, you can Buy Me a Coffee, since I have a page there now.