Myrtle Beach’s downtown merchants’ group sees success in the crowd

The back room of Bumstead’s pub in Myrtle Beach is known as The War Room, but not because more barroom brawls break out there.

It’s because that’s where owner Jonathan Staton and others make their big plans for the year.

They aren’t planning new mixed drinks for Bumstead’s or new menu items for the deli next door, Dagwood’s, which Staton also owns.

They’re working on Staton’s other job, the one he and other downtown business owners have done for free for the past five years.

Staton, president of the Oceanfront Merchants Association, and the other board members -- a handful of downtown merchants, many of whom operate multiple businesses -- work yearround as volunteers for OMA, planning the annual Hot Summer Nights program, which draws hundreds of thousands of visitors to Ocean Boulevard during the peak 100 days of summer, and two festivals, Oktoberfest and St. Patrick’s Day Celebration, which draw thousands more in the shoulder months of October and March.

Yes, those events benefit Staton’s businesses, just as they do for board member Bill Prescott’s Slingshot, Chris Walker’s Mad Myrtle’s Ice Cream parlor and Russ Stalvey’s Oceanfront Bar & Grill.

But they also benefit the 100-plus other downtown businesses -- many of which do not belong to OMA and do not contribute to its success.

At $100 a year and the opportunity to have a say in the plans that affect all downtown businesses, Stalvey said, you’d think business owners would jump at the bargain.

But even if OMA had 100 percent membership, the dues would only amount to a portion of the growing budget OMA manages each year.

There has been talk about forming a municipal improvement district to help fund downtown projects and the OMA, though no one has come up with a specific proposal yet.

Walker and Staton said they understand that no one wants to pay more taxes, but an improvement district would be fairer to all the businesses in the nine linear blocks of OMA’s district, from Seventh Avenue North to 16th Avenue North and from the ocean to King’s Highway.

“We always think it’s more fair when everyone who’s a beneficiary of those activities participates and contributes to them, too,” said David Sebok, executive director of the Downtown Redevelopment Corp.

A sign of success

At the recent Downtown Redevelopment Corp. annual retreat, Staton was quizzed by board members about why OMA’s membership is flat, with about 60 of the 120 businesses having joined.

“I don’t have time to go out and beat the street,” Staton said. “I don’t have time to go back to the same business five times to pick up a check.”

He also knows many of the business or property owners downtown don’t live in the area, and understands others are young entrepreneurs just struggling to make their own businesses succeed.

“When I first started, I was here at 8 a.m. baking the bread and at 9 p.m. mopping the floors,” he said of his early days with Dagwood’s. “I wouldn’t have had time for OMA then.”

Now he owns two Dagwood’s locations, one in Myrtle Beach and one in Surfside Beach, and it’s his, Walker’s, Stalvey’s and others’ success that has enabled them to devote so much time to OMA.

But it has become a dilemma.

The more OMA succeeds, the more downtown businesses prosper. But the more time Staton and other board members spend on OMA, the more their own businesses will suffer.

“If something comes up at one of my businesses, I have to put OMA on the back burner,” Staton said. “That’s just the way it has to be because I have to take care of my business.”

That’s why OMA has decided to hire an executive director -- someone who can work full time on increasing membership, planning events, making presentations and requests to the city and the redevelopment corporation, and taking OMA to the next level.

“We need someone who can captain the ship,” Staton said.

The group hired an assistant, Sherri Loomis, two years ago, and it sees an executive director as the inevitable next step.

Each of the off-season festivals takes about six months to plan, Staton said, because there are a lot of logistics to be worked out. Hot Summer Nights is actually less work, he said, because the activities are set ahead of time for the season.

The festivals require booking new acts each time, and that means pulling together 150 or so people who have never worked together before, Staton said, plus working out where they will stay, what they will need, working with vendors, the city, sponsors and more.

Plus, OMA would like to put on a New Year’s Eve celebration, but that needs to be planned from the ground up -- a feat that takes a lot of time.

Staton, Walker, Stalvey and the others won’t walk away once a director is hired, they said.

“We are all probably insane multitaskers,” Walker said. “I think we all have ADD, and it’s probably good for OMA.”

It’s gratifying to work on OMA projects and to give back to the community they love, they agreed. Staton and Walker vacationed here as children, and when they got the chance to come back, they did, opening their own businesses more than 20 years ago and becoming as much a part of the local landscape as the natives.

But it’s a practical matter, because each board member has his own businesses to run, and, in some cases, families, as well.

“We’re just running out of steam,” Staton said. “I’d like to open another restaurant, but I don’t have time.”

“I’d just like to be able to take a vacation in the summertime,” Walker said, “like other people do.”

The little group that could

There have been many attempts over the years to form a group like OMA, but many fell apart before plans could even begin to gel, Staton said.

After The Pavilion was torn down, business owners began working together in earnest to show people there was more to downtown than the amusement park.

The Oceanfront Merchants Association formed more than five years ago, and, with about $180,000 in funding from accommodations tax revenue, private donors, the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce and the redevelopment agency, and with a core group of six or seven business owners, it took off.

Marvin McHone, who used to own Marvin’s restaurant, was instrumental in starting the beachfront fireworks shows that are offered every summer, and keeping them going for about 20 years. The merchants association went from there, believing free activities every night of the week would give people more reason to visit downtown Myrtle Beach.

“We want people to come down and enjoy the experience,” Walker said. “People come here to make memories, and we want to give them experiences to remember. And if you can give people something for free, it sets you apart.”

Hot Summer Nights started with one night of fireworks and two nights of concerts, and grew from there. For the past two years, the program has run seven nights a week from Memorial Day to Labor Day.

This year, OMA’s budget has grown to $550,000.

Having chosen a mix of family-oriented activities, OMA has set aside one night a week all summer just for children with its free Kids’ Carnival. On other nights there are concerts, strolling musicians, street performers and the fireworks shows McHone worked so hard to sustain. Those shows will probably always be part of the programming, even though they are technically outside OMA’s zone, being set off from the Second Avenue Pier.

And while the city would like to see more members, city manager Tom Leath said, Staton and others reject the idea of increasing OMA’s district, because the needs of the merchants in the core of downtown are quite different from those north or south of the district.

Offering activities to the north, south or west of OMA’s district would cost more money, which the group doesn’t have, and Walker said it would be difficult to get people to walk from the core of downtown to, say Family Kingdom or even the Five Points area.

“Kings Highway might as well be the Intracoastal Waterway,” he said.

Even though they ask questions and offer ideas, no one with the city or the redevelopment agency disparages the work the OMA board does or the positive results, Leath said.

It’s as DRC chairman Jay Bultz said at the recent retreat: They hate seeing so few people bear all the responsibility for the work.

Walker said he doesn’t see OMA’s membership as a measure of success, anyway.

“I measure it by the crowds of people who turn out,” he said.

The St. Patrick’s Day Festival, for example, in its third year now, draws 10,000-plus people, many of whom are locals rediscovering Myrtle Beach’s downtown as a different place than they remember.

“The whole atmosphere has changed down here,” Stalvey said. “It’s a nice, big, well-lit place where you can bring your family, have fun, walk the boardwalk... It’s more of a destination and a hotspot. There’s more to do down here now than there was, even with The Pavilion.”