Association to address community services and needs. A destructive nor'easter known as the Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962 struck the area from March 6 to 8, 1962. Delaware's Atlantic coast experienced severe damage from very high tides and waves more than high breaking on its beaches. In South Bethany, the storm destroyed 37 oceanfront homes. The 1962 storm gave a new impetus to incorporation, because as an unincorporated community South Bethany could not receive federal funding to recover from the disaster. The Delaware General Assembly rebuffed the initial efforts to incorporate the community after the storm, claiming that its tiny year-round population disqualified it from incorporation. The assembly eventually did pass an incorporation bill, which the governor of Delaware, Charles L. Terry, Jr., signed in December 1965. In the first public referendum in South Bethany on incorporation, held in June 1966, voters decisively rejected it. But in 1969 another referendum on the matter won, and on June 18, 1969, Governor Russell W. Peterson signed a bill providing for incorporation of the community as the Town of South Bethany. Elections for town offices soon took place, and James "Jim" Cleveland was elected as the town's first mayor. At the time, South Bethany had 240 houses and 496 property owners, although its year-round population consisted of just 15 families. Plans for a beach and tennis community, Sea Colony, centered on nine high-rise condominiums situated on a private beach between South Bethany and Bethany Beach, began in 1969; these buildings, the area's first and only high-rises, opened in the early 1970s. The 1,200-townhome Sea Colony West low-rise beach and tennis resort development later was added just inland. Plans for Sea Colony met bitter opposition from longtime South Bethany and Bethany Beach residents, who were dismayed at the thought of high-rises and large crowds in the area. Opponents of Sea Colony marched in protest and engaged in protracted legal efforts to block construction of the resort, but the property lay outside the town limits of both South Bethany and Bethany Beach, and their efforts to block the construction of Sea Colony failed. Sea Colony went on to become a very successful resort. In 1971, South Bethany hired its first police officer. On June 18, 1971, its first lifeguards went to work to ensure safety on the town's Atlantic beach. In 1972, South Bethany expanded southward, annexing the York Beach community – a plot of