Sour Notes Heard in Blues Festival Aftermath : Entertainment: City gets noise complaints, many say they have gone unpaid for services, and promoters are arguing.

Two months after the guitars were unplugged at the first Orange County Blues Festival, the feedback from the three-day event is still reverberating around this beachside community.

What at first appeared to be a successful event and a boon to the community has deteriorated into a chorus of accusations. Neighbors of the event have complained to the City Council about noise and crowds. Local business owners say they have not been paid for their services, and infighting among festival organizers has left the event’s future in serious jeopardy.

Only the performers, who were all paid and moved on, appear to be satisfied.

“It’s a big shame,” said John Christian, one of the festival’s five principal backers. “By all appearances the festival was very successful. When the event ended, we looked at the numbers and thought we were in good shape. But there were a lot of hidden costs, and now we are fighting it out in court.”

A city analysis of income from the festival showed it took in between $250,000 and $300,000, but that includes money the vendors made, Christian said.

The cost to the promoters was more than $200,000, plus time spent. Their budget before the festival had underestimated costs by $90,000, Christian said. “Nobody made a nickel. We all took big losses.”

No one seems to agree on what lies in store for next year.

“We won’t be doing the festival again in Dana Point,” Eric Jensen, a promoter and another of the event’s backers, said Wednesday.

Countered another backer, Dana Point accountant Jim Oakes, after issuing a press release that heralded a second festival to be held next September: “The business people here want, and I want, the event in Dana Point. But there’s some subversive stuff going on.”

All seemed well immediately after the Sept. 24-26 event at Heritage Park near Dana Point Harbor. The initial reviews were glowing, even from the Sheriff’s Department: no arrests, no major incidents and a diverse, enthusiastic crowd of 30,000 people.

But in the days after the festival, people living near Heritage Park--in gate-guarded Lantern Bay Estates and the bluff-top homes along Santa Clara Avenue and El Camino Capistrano--began complaining to the City Council and Planning Commission. Keep the event in Dana Point, but not next door to their homes, the residents said as they submitted petitions with 96 signatures.

“This was too large an event for our back yard,” Jim Besaw of Lantern Bay Estates told the council. “It was clearly an awful lot of people and an awful lot of noise for those of us who live there.”

Prompted by those complaints, the council ordered the city staff to restudy the city’s permit process for special events and to write a new, stricter policy by the end of December.

Meanwhile, local business owners hired to support the festival began to have concerns about being paid.

“They stiffed me for everything for about a month, saying tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow,” said Joe Gaspar, 32, of San Clemente, owner of Western Maintenance Corp., which was hired to clean up after the festival for $2,700. “It took about a month, but they eventually paid me enough to pay my 10 laborers ($1,200). For a while we figured we wouldn’t get any money.”

Christian acknowledged that the creditors have been pounding at the door.

“That’s true; I’m not going to deny it,” he said. “We took the total debt and divided it up into what we had, then wrote a note for the balance to be paid next year.”

In all, between 30 and 35 creditors--including the city, which paid for extra Sheriff’s Department deputies--are out “around $50,000,” according to Oakes, who said he has called a meeting for next week to talk to all of them. At least two-thirds of the creditors, including Gaspar, have agreed to some sort of arrangement for at least partial payment of the debts, Christian said.

In the meantime, the bank account of the Orange County Blues Festival Inc. has been frozen by the U.S. marshal’s office, Christian said.

“We hope to get some sort of judgment this week . . . and get this all resolved,” he said.

Perhaps the final blow to any further Dana Point festivals is the infighting among the promoters. There are charges of mismanagement among the five, and lawsuits are pending.

While Christian said the partnership is now “fighting it out in court,” Jensen said he wants to continue a South County blues concert somewhere in the area. He and Christian did not expect to make any money the first year, he said.

“There are no hard feelings on our part,” Jensen said. “It just didn’t work out to our benefit.”