OC Balloon Fest moves out of area due to permitting

from 8/18/2023 Ocean City Today

Total payout for Poor Girls Open at $196K

By Remy Andersen Staff Writer

By Mallory Panuska Managing Editor

(Aug. 18, 2023) Hot air balloons are no longer set to soar across the sky later this month following the cancelation of what was supposed to be the inaugural Ocean City Balloon Festival.

According to a Facebook post from the Ocean City Tourism page updated Monday, the event, which was planned for Aug. 25-27 at the OC Elevate soccer fields in West Ocean City, has been scrapped.

Instead, the Original Chesapeake Bay Balloon Festival, which it is once again called, will move back to the Triple Creek Winery in Cordova. Organizer Alex Spies of the American Farm Foundation has hosted the event at the Talbot County location for years and was planning on moving it to Ocean City this year before running into issues obtaining event permits from the county.

The festival had the support of City Council members and had already sold a few hundred tickets at the time of cancelation.

But because it was set for a venue outside of city limits, the organizers needed to obtain approvals from Worcester County. In the end, according to city officials, that was the event’s demise.

“I think the promoter needed to get some specific, pretty substantial permits from the county,” City Manager Terry McGean said during a Tourism Commission meeting Monday.

McGean addressed the cancelation after Councilman Will Savage, who serves on the commission, brought it up.

Savage said it was “just not a good look” for Ocean City to promote and market an event that ended up getting nixed so close to the scheduled date.

Tom Perlozzo, the city’s director of tourism and business development, said he and Sports Marketing Manager Don Abramson told the promoter what needed to be done at the county level to hold the event. But past that, there was not much they could do.

“We don’t know if it got done or didn’t get done,” Perlozzo said during Monday’s meeting.

In the promoter’s defense, Kim Mueller, the city’s director of sales, pointed out that the process to obtain permits from the county is extensive. She said she experienced it firsthand during the recent taco fest held in the parking lot of the convention center.

“[Promoters] say that once they get to Worcester County, they have to move the event to Ocean City this year at the end of August but they ran into permitting issue with the county and had to move it back. jump through hoops that they don’t have to jump through any place else in the state or the nation,” Mueller said Monday.

At a Worcester County Technical Review Committee meeting last Wednesday, numerous concerns were brought up about the balloon fest, primarily regarding the event’s troubled history with scheduling and obtaining multiple permits from various agencies.

Spies, who initially requested the meeting with the committee, presented blueprints along with a prediction that the festival would attract 3,000 visitors.

He said the production would fea-

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