Officials Cool About Spring Break : Tourism: Newport Beach, Huntington Beach and Palm Springs aren’t trying to attract students during school holidays.

The resort community of Palm Springs is not necessarily slamming its door on young spring-break vacationers, as some recent news reports have indicated, city spokesman Frank Cullen said Monday.

Nor are the cities of Huntington Beach and Newport Beach trying to snatch the desert vacationers away, officials said.

“I don’t know how these reports got started,” said Huntington Beach Mayor Thomas J. Mays. “There’s a picture in one newspaper of Sonny Bono riding his motorcycle, so maybe they want one of me on my surfboard. But seriously, we are not recruiting the college kids.”

Newport Beach City Manager Robert L. Wynn quipped, “I think those reports about Newport Beach were started by (Palm Springs Mayor) Sonny Bono, but I’m saying that the kids really ought to go see Sonny since he’s a big star. Newport Beach is generally booked to capacity for Easter weekend.”

Bono could not be reached for comment, but Cullen said Palm Springs has no official stand on

youthful spring-break visitors, who in years past have become unruly and even rioted.

“We’re certainly not saying, ‘Get out of Dodge,’ ” Cullen said. But he added that the desert community also is doing nothing to encourage young visitors to come during this year’s Spring break.

“We’re not having spring games this year as we did last year,” Cullen said. “While this city is not doing anything to promote spring break, we also realize it is an event that has a life of its own. Young people will come here and if they come and spend money and don’t cause problems, the community is not slamming the door.”

Huntington Beach and Newport Beach likewise are doing nothing special to attract the high school and college-age set during spring break.

Officials of visitors’ bureaus for both Huntington Beach and Newport Beach said on Monday that they are generally urging tourists to visit their communities. But the officials said the emphasis is on family business--not the college and high school crowd.

“Basically I’d say we’re encouraging whole families to come to Huntington Beach and visit,” said Terri Vickers, administrative assistant of the Huntington Beach Conference and Visitors Bureau.

Richard Gartrell, president of the Newport Beach Conference and Visitors Bureau, said, “We’re not going for the cruisers and the spring-break crowd. We don’t need that.”

Gartrell and Mays both said that an ad in the national newspaper USA Today on Monday may have contributed to the misunderstanding. That ad, paid for by British Petroleum, noted that the beaches are now clean from the 394,000-gallon oil spill that occurred on Feb. 7. The ad urged people to visit the two communities.

But Mays and Gartrell noted that the ad was not aimed at college students or the spring-break crowd. The timing was just coincidental, Mays said. “British Petroleum offered to run an ad, and we were delighted,” Mays said. British Petroleum is the company that owned the oil that spilled off Huntington Beach from the tanker American Trader.

Mays said the city welcomes law-abiding young visitors in general, but he added: “Our laws, including our prohibition against drinking on the beaches, will be strictly enforced. We’ll have mounted patrols on the beaches.”

Sgt. Andy Gonis, spokesman for the Newport Beach Police Department, said, “We’ll have maximum deployment of officers during the next two weeks but we don’t expect any unusual crowd this year. We haven’t had trouble with young visitors for several years.”

Palm Springs, which had a near-riot by spring break visitors in 1986, has also beefed up its police for the next two weeks.