Palm Springs Spring Break Becomes a Spring Brake : Holiday: City tries a new set of rules to tone down the partying. So far, the plan appears to be working.

Tory Goben gazed down Palm Canyon Drive and sighed for what he could not see. No thong bikinis. No sidewalk boozing. No women perched on the back ends of convertibles, shrieking for him to come hither.

“Palm Springs used to be really cool for Spring Break, but, man, it is lame this year,” the 23-year-old University of Washington student whined. “That Sonny Bono dude has ruined this place. Next year, I’m going to Daytona Beach.”

The annual bacchanalia during the weeks surrounding Easter opened this weekend in Palm Springs with a new set of rules, the product of this pastel resort community’s latest and broadest attempt to tone down Spring Break.

No G-string bikinis. No “mooning” from cars. No poolside drinking after 11 p.m. And if you are thinking of cruising the city thoroughfares--a Spring Break tradition in this town--do not expect to get around easily.

By late Friday, the city had placed the last of 250 concrete barricades along Palm Canyon and Indian Canyon drives, narrowing the city’s two main boulevards to a paltry two lanes and creating an emergency lane buffer between the young throngs on the sidewalks and their contemporaries behind the wheel.

As if the municipal rules are not enough, there are hotel rules as well. At the most popular Spring Break hotels, guests were greeted with written warnings that kegs and loud parties were not allowed, and issued color-coded armbands so that beefed-up hotel security could weed out freeloaders who were not registered there.

“Every year, this time of year is a nightmare for Palm Springs,” Mayor Sonny Bono said Saturday. “It’s a question of who will control our streets--us or them. This little fiasco costs us $500,000 every year in extra police, hotel damages and lost hotel tax” from other tourists driven away by the excesses of youths partying.

Bono noted that the festivities have just begun, and that trouble could still come during the revelries, which have sometimes gone on for as long as three weeks. For the first time, the annual effort at curbing Spring Break appears to have had its intended effect.

“This year, for the first time, we feel in control,” Bono said.

At issue is the city’s popularity among winter-weary college kids, who have flocked by the thousands for more than 50 years to this warm oasis east of Los Angeles.

Every year, residents say, the crowds get a little thicker, the potential for unruliness a little greater. And every year, it seems, someone ends up getting seriously hurt.

In 1969, a group of “breakers” went on a rampage during a massive rock concert. In 1986, a riot erupted on Palm Canyon Drive after a girl appeased a crowd of young men beseeching female passersby to bare their breasts.

After the 1986 fracas--a violent free-for-all in which youths heaved rocks and bottles and tore clothing off women in the streets--police and city officials began crackdowns that culminated this year in the farthest-reaching set of ordinances and enforcement.

Civic leader Ted Grofer said the new rules are the product of a yearlong study undertaken after last year’s Spring Break, which tripled the city’s 40,000 population, dragged on for three weeks and cost more than $350,000 in extra law enforcement.

Many in the community called for something--anything--that would drive Spring Break out of town for good. However, a pair of surveys by the local newspaper and a downtown business group showed the city to be evenly split between those who welcomed the youths and their tourist dollars and “those who wished the whole thing would just go away,” Grofer said.

A citizen task force was appointed, and came up with 44 suggestions for toning down Spring Break, ranging from giving the event an environmental theme to barricading popular cruising spots to cut down on traffic jams.

At the task force’s behest, city officials began calling the event “Easter Week” instead of Spring Break, “to give it more a feeling of religion and rebirth and the Easter Bunny and all those good things,” Grofer said.

The group also took aim at one of the most popular local Spring Break fads--cruising the city on a souped-up motorcycle known as a “bullet bike,” preferably with a woman in a G-string bikini on the back. The suits, also called thongs, do little, if anything, to cover a woman’s buttocks, and are such a distraction to other drivers that they create a traffic hazard, police say.

To address this, the City Council passed two ordinances this year, one that would temporarily ban motorcycles from the city’s main thoroughfares and another that would outlaw string bikinis.

The motorcycle law was repealed within two weeks, after hundreds of cycle enthusiasts descended on the council, arguing that it was discriminatory.

The bikini ban engendered much smaller protests--a local plumber’s wife lodged her complaint at a City Council meeting by lifting her dress to expose the thong she wore underneath, and showed up again last week outside City Hall in her suit, carrying a picket sign.

The ordinance stayed in force, although it was criticized as unconstitutional by groups ranging from local students to the Southern California Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The bikini citations carry a $100 fine for the first offense, but by Saturday evening, not a single ticket had been issued.

In fact, said Police Sgt. Ron Starrs, only 42 arrests and citations were logged for the first day and a half of Spring Break, the vast majority for drunk driving and public drunkenness. Starrs said the figure was “extremely low--not much higher than a typical busy weekend.”

City spokesman Frank Cullen attributed the subdued atmosphere to the new rules, an early Easter, and the weather, which has been warm in the daytime but chillier than usual at night.

He also noted that recent rains may have inspired students to spend this vacation on the ski slopes instead of by the pool.

All this, despite a layout in this month’s Playboy magazine encouraging youths to spend Spring Break in Palm Springs, and a mayor who--as the male half of the singing duo Sonny and Cher--extolled in his youth the virtues of a freewheeling lifestyle.

“I still consider myself one of the biggest mavericks in the world,” said Bono, who is now 56. “But even in the days when I was wearing a bobcat vest and Eskimo shoes, I believed people’s rights should be protected.

“We’re not trying to make the kids go away. We’re just trying to keep the same town we have for the other 51 weeks of the year. They may not be pleased, but if it gets back in hand, they’ll be more than welcome in Palm Springs.”