Thursday, Feb. 18, 2010

Bike Week or Bust

There have been boycotts, public forums, petitions, protests, organizations formed, and lawsuits filed. When Myrtle Beach mayor John Rhodes was re-elected I washed my hands of the whole thing. I wasn't going to continue to beat the dead horse that had begun to dominate my columns. I won't say we lost because we are still riding when, where, and how we want to, but the blue-haired, blueblood Dunes-dwellers got their wish. We don't want to ride in Myrtle Beach anymore.

After more than a year of commenting on the Myrtle Beach Bike Week fiasco, watching the mayor and city council of Myrtle Beach do their best to outlaw it altogether with a series of ordinances designed to run off motorcycle tourism; followed by the Surfside Beach town council banning Bike Week vendors for two years; and even Horry and Georgetown county governments trying to rein things in with stricter vendor rules; then seeing the apathy inside the city limits that allowed the mayor to get re-elected...well, frankly I was over the whole thing; but, I'm still looking forward to Bike Week in 2010.

If all goes well I will be saddling up March 4 and heading to Bike Week 2010... in Daytona Beach, Fla. Off and on, for probably 20 years now, my dad has hosted a reunion with my three brothers and me. Some years my mom and sister have been along for the ride. There have been times when one of my brothers brought his wife and/or kids, and I still owe my wife Sissy a trip to Daytona, so it isn't always just the guys, but this year it will be.

We are like most Bike Week visitors in most cities that host them. We don't belong to a club or gang. We don't ride recklessly because we want to make it home in one piece. We aren't going to walk out on our check or assault your families. I own a family restaurant. My dad is a career Army veteran and has been the VP or President of a number of white collar companies, as have my two older brothers, and my younger brother is following the same path. All are family men, golfers, and just looking to get away from the work-a-day world for a few days. We'll spend money on lodging, we'll go to restaurants, we will go to the Daytona International Speedway for motorcycle races, we'll shop the vendors, and then we'll go home. In the beginning, our annual trips even used to include at least one round of golf. We are the same people who Myrtle Beach has run off.

Meanwhile, the Feb. 10 edition of The Sun News reported that "For the first time in many years, hospitality revenue didn't grow in Myrtle Beach in 2009, leaving the city with a larger-than-normal financial gap to overcome to balance its budget." Serves you right, Myrtle Beach.

In the long history of Daytona's Bike Week there have been times when city officials dealt with the same complaints of congestion and noise that officials heard here. Instead of pulling the plug on millions of tourist dollars though, the elected officials, heads of law enforcement, and Chamber of Commerce actually did their jobs and addressed the issues. I can remember the big "No Wake Zone" campaign urging bikers to stay off residential streets and to not rev their engines. I have watched as Daytona Beach police sat at the foot of one of the main bridges entering the beachfront handing out tickets like they were candy at Halloween to anyone going over the speed limit. The city of Daytona Beach set their boundaries and the bikers respected them. Those who didn't got ticketed or locked up. In the late '80s, Daytona Beach police chief Paul Crow created a successful task force to deal with a rise in Bike Week-related crime and fixed what was broken. Our local officials claimed that the crowds (which are smaller than those in Daytona Beach by more than a hundred thousand people) had become unmanageable and just threw in the towel. Daytona's officials and police did their jobs and preserved both order and tourist revenues.

I know it may seem like a novel idea to the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce, but in Daytona, their city's Chamber of Commerce embraces the, well... commerce, generated by the motorcycle rallies and actually plays a key role in promoting them. In a 2009 CNN.com article Kevin Kilian, senior vice president of the Daytona Beach/Halifax Area Chamber of Commerce, indicated that their spring and fall motorcycle rallies generate $650 million dollars a year. The same could have been true here, but for the egos of people like Mayor Rhodes, now infamous for his, "If you don't like it, then move" quote to one of his own residents.