Horry County ABATE group unhappy about change to Harley rally

Horry County ABATE has decided to stage a boycott, not of the spring bike rally, but of the Myrtle Beach Harley-Davidson store and its owner Phil Schoonover unless he retreats from his plan to hold the Harley-Davidson Spring Cruisin’ the Coast rally from May 18-28.

Schoonover’s plan to hold biker rally events later in May than other Harley-related rally activities and to blend his rally with Atlantic Beach Bike Fest has angered the ABATE group because, Coordinator Gary Balcom said, it’s a bad idea and was not discussed with anyone else.

“The dust just got settled with Horry County, and now this has upset the county council all over again,” Balcom said, recalling Councilman Gary Loftus’s recent comments.

When Loftus heard about Schoonover’s plan to hold his rally later in the month -- leaving other Spring Bike Rally events to be held earlier and, in effect, adding 10 more days of Harley-related rally events -- he recommended council members discuss yanking vendor permits in the month of May.

“They just don’t seem to want to play by whatever rules we set,” Loftus said at a meeting two weeks ago.

But ‘there’s no ‘they’ in this,” Balcom said. “This was a one-man decision.”

Schoonover is in Las Vegas this week at a Harley-Davidson expo and could not be reached for comment.

In 2008, following the city of Myrtle Beach’s efforts to push the May rallies outside city limits, the county restricted the number of vending permits for May and limited the length of time for any one permit to seven days. The effect was to make the rally shorter and less impactful on the area, a move that angered motorcycle riders and their supporters.

The city and county efforts, including Myrtle Beach’s now-defunct helmet law, stirred up a lot of controversy, and the first year after the changes, Spring Bike Rally attendance was noticeably lower than in previous years.

But Balcom said the attendance was better last year and the controversy had died down.

“We definitely don’t want to step on anyone’s toes,” Balcom said. “We had already hashed it out, battled it out, and it was fine.”

Plus, he said, it’s too late in the game to change plans for this year, especially because other venues have already announced plans for the Spring Bike Rally.

“I wish we could have all sat down together and talked about this,” Balcom said.

The dates announced by the dealership carry the Spring Cruisin’ the Coast rally right into Memorial Day weekend, which has, for more than 30 years, been the weekend of sport-bike rider oriented Atlantic Beach Bike Fest. That weekend is also now shared with the culmination of the city of Myrtle Beach’s Military Appreciation Days, which draws military members and their families from several states.

From the perspective of some residents and officials, that makes three whole weeks of rallies, because organizers of other non-sport-bike related rallies have plans for May 10-20.

“Two bike rallies, Memorial Day events and the regular tourists who just like to come in May? That’s too many people in one place at one time,” Balcom said. “That’s what got this whole thing started in the first place.”

Denise Medlin, marketing manager for Myrtle Beach Harley-Davidson, the dealership just south of Myrtle Beach city limits, wanted to set the record straight:

“We are not trying to run over anyone’s event,” she said. “We are trying to give tourists more options. It just happens that another event is going on, but the more the merrier.”

The whole issue has become confused, she said, because people are thinking of this as an “extension” of “the rally.”

As far as MBHD is concerned, the Cruisin’ the Coast rally is “the rally,” and all the other events that are organized by other merchants earlier in May do not have Harley-Davidson’s sponsorship. But Cruisin’ the Coast began in the mid-1990s, long after what was known simply as the Spring Bike Rally began 71 years ago.

Myrtle Beach Harley-Davidson dealership owner Phil Schoonover branded the event Cruisin’ the Coast in the early 2000s, but the event overlapped with the spring rally. The first third of May included all the Harley-related “bike week” events that had blended into one large, if not centrally organized, rally that always ended the week before Bike Fest began.

Many people say that when the dealership got involved is when the rally began to grow to the huge proportions that eventually riled residents and community leaders enough to spark new rules in 2008 and a ban on May vendors in Myrtle Beach proper.

This year, Medlin said, Schoonover decided to change the dates for Cruisin’ the Coast, in part to “conserve resources for the county,” a goal she said county leaders had discussed with Schoonover for years, saying it would be less demanding on the county if Cruisin’ the Coast and Atlantic Beach Bike Fest were closer together.

County spokeswoman Lisa Bourcier said to her knowledge, there has not been any discussion about the bike rallies since the county changed the rules for vendor permits.

“Yes, we’d like to see the rally go back to the length it was (before the new regulations, there were nearly three straight weeks of Harley-related events and gatherings on the Grand Strand), but he should use the earlier part of the month. Give the county a break in between the rallies,” Balcom said.

There have already been discussions on social media outlets over which is the “real” rally.

“We hadn’t even announced the dates yet,” Medlin said. “Some people just jumped the gun.”

Some businesses, like SBB, have said on social media outlets that they are not involved with the dealership, that the rally is independent of the dealership’s plans, and that it doesn’t matter what the dealership plans to do, they are still going to hold their events when they want.

All this has raised questions of vendor permits, which the county limits to no longer than seven days, and says must be affiliated with an event.

The county considers the rally, no matter what it is called, to be the one that takes place between May 14 and 20, and it will issue vendor permits for that week starting in April, Bourcier said.

Harley-Davidson can apply for its vendor permits in conjunction with Bike Fest later in the month, she said.

But there are other concerns, too, Balcom said.

The large crowd would overwhelm local law enforcement resources, he wrote in an ABATE statement sent out Thursday.

“The last thing we want to see is any event getting out of hand,” Balcom wrote.

The statement encourages bikers to boycott “all the dealerships and clothing outlets that are owned by Phil Schoonover, and we hope that the biker community as a whole will come together with us on this boycott until such time as Mr. Schoonover retracts his plan of the overlapping dates he has proposed for this year.”

The statement calls Schoonover’s decision a “slap in the face to the county council,” and says it is not in keeping with the wishes of the larger part of the biker community.

Balcom and many others hope the county will not pull the vendor permits all together, because that, they said would really damage many of the mom-and-pop businesses that cater to the motorcycle community.

The county intends to discuss Schoonover’s plans, vendor permits and other rally-related issues at its committee of the whole meeting, 9 a.m. Feb. 14 at the Horry County Government and Justice Center in Conway.