HUNTINGTON BEACH: A THIRD UGLY FOURTH : Party Towns Pay Price for Extra Income

To hear city officials in well-known party locations such as Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Lake Havasu City, Ariz., and Palm Springs tell it, having thousands of revelers pour into town seemed, at one time, like a good way to boost to the local economy.

But the annual spring breaks, Memorial Day weekends and other holidays that attracted hordes of young people to vacation hot spots soon became synonymous with unfettered drunkenness and debauchery. Not everyone is unhappy with their revelers: Lake Havasu City officials say their experiences with college students are tame compared to stories from Palm Springs or Fort Lauderdale.

In those cities young women in bikinis would bear their breasts--voluntarily or otherwise--while cruising along main streets. Students destroyed hotel rooms and routinely engaged in drunken brawls.

Soon, some communities learned that persuading people to stay away takes as much work as tempting them to come. But it can be done. Fort Lauderdale, for example, has put the word out that having fun there during spring break is practically illegal. If you want to have it, go somewhere else.

Just hearing that hundreds of people have begun to make a ritual of thrill-seeking in Huntington Beach on the Fourth of July was enough to make a police spokeswoman in Fort Lauderdale shudder.

“Oh no, I know what’s coming,” said Detective Sonya Friedman. “In the ‘60s and ‘70s, it was an Annette Funicello-type of event and it was OK.

“But in the ‘80s, college kids who were probably relatively civilized human beings during the school year began to think they had license to become barbaric animals in spring break.

“They would do simulated sex acts on stages . . . and I know we had at least one kid die every year or so from falling off a hotel balcony, drunk.”

Palm Springs officials have similar stories.

At the height of its popularity, Palm Springs would attract 100,000 people for Easter weekend. Thousands also would visit on Memorial Day weekend to cruise up and down Palm Canyon Boulevard.

Water balloons would fly into and out of the cars, as would beer bottles and bikini tops. Police would arrest hundreds of students, keeping them in the parking garage when the jail filled up, releasing them after they sobered up.

Palm Springs tried everything, including beefing up the police presence, asking other cities for help and stiffening public nuisance ordinances. But nothing seemed to work.

Finally, three years ago, the City Council decided to close Palm Canyon to vehicle traffic during Easter and Memorial Day weekends, eliminating the main source of entertainment for revelers.

“This year we had next to no arrests,” said Officer John Booth, spokesman for the Palm Springs Police Department. “We had a village fest there and now we’re trying to attract family crowds.”

But not everyone is pleased with the measure that pulled the plug on the Palm Springs party.

“Some of the merchants are not very happy about closing down the street,” Booth said. “They saw Easter and other holidays as a period of time to make a lot of money.”

Indeed, the ritual springtime return of college students to Lake Havasu has translated into an influx of thousands of dollars for that city. The local Chamber of Commerce estimates that about 20,000 people come to the resort city during a five-week period and that each person probably spends between $80 and $100 a day--adding up to between $1.6 million to $2 million.

Spring break in the Arizona border city has been an event for six or seven years. While the city did not experience the unruly hordes of students, local police nonetheless typically arrest hundreds for alcohol violations.

Recognizing the event’s increasing popularity, two years ago Lake Havasu City formed a Spring Break Task Force to coordinate tourist events. This year the committee worked with MTV, which televised the spring break events.

Ann Sayne, Lake Havasu city clerk and a member of the Spring Break Task Force, said the MTV event went smoothly, but city officials and residents are uneasy about promoting the city as a party town for college students.

Lake Havasu already is a destination for wintering tourists as well as summer vacationers. Filling in the “shoulder season” with college students could turn out to be more trouble than it’s worth, Sayne said.

“The MTV people were very professional and their compound was very well secured,” Sayne said. “But there were still problems with students who were not interested in the drug-free and alcohol-free events that MTV enforced in their complex.”