Atlantic Beach adds amendment options to Bikefest ordinance (with video)

ATLANTIC BEACH -- The Atlantic Beach Town Council on Monday evening delayed second reading on amendments related to its annual Memorial Day weekend Bikefest.

New amendments were added to those that already had passed first reading, and council members felt they needed additional time to study them before voting. Councilman Donnell Thompson said he thought the new amendments were significant enough to start the process all over, but three other council members disagreed.

No one spoke at a public hearing on the amendments. One audience member said she couldn't comment because she had just received a copy of the additional amendments.

That was Thompson's point, too, who said early in a short discussion of the new amendments that he felt he wouldn't be giving his constituents the care they deserve if he had voted on them after having just received them.

"I'd hate to be asked to approve something that I just got 10 minutes ago," he said.

The original amendment sets the days and hours for the Bikefest, provides for vendors and parking space sales and sets the fees that vendors and others shall pay for permits. The new amendments resolve differences with existing town ordinances and those for the rally that apply to the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages, the noise generated by vendors and entertainment and parking areas for campers, passenger vans, buses, trailers, industrial-type vehicles and the like. The new amendments suspend during Bikefest the town's ordinances on drinking in public and acceptable levels of noise.

The festival is scheduled to start at 2 p.m. on May 28 and run through 3 p.m. May 31. The ordinance states that the festival shall not operate between 2 a.m. and 9 a.m. on May 29 and 30.

Town manager William Booker said after Monday's meeting that he and town attorney John Zilinsky added the new amendments so that the festival could operate legally. The town is setting the rules for the festival by ordinance for the first time.

Prior to this year, the rules had been set by resolution, but a lawsuit challenging the legality of the resolution as being in violation of ordinances forced the change, Booker said.

Thompson said he would be more comfortable starting the process again with a first reading. But Zinlinsky said he didn't feel that the new amendments were substantial enough to make that necessary.

Thompson was not convinced.

"That you're asking me to do this," he told Zilinsky, "offends me deeply."