Playboy Spring-Break Issue Has Havasu Feeling Exposed

Being one of the world’s top spring-break destinations is hard enough for Lake Havasu City, which prides itself more on being a vacation stop for winter visitors and home to the transplanted London Bridge.

The latest issue of Playboy magazine has caused added grief for the resort community near the Arizona-California line. A six-page pictorial features spring breakers posing nude around Lake Havasu.

“This is our home. We raise our kids here,” said Dick Elewaut, president of the Lake Havasu Hotel/Motel Assn. and a resident for 11 years. “This is not the type of image we’d like to see.”

Playboy spokeswoman Elizabeth Norris said the pictorial presents an accurate portrayal of one of the world’s top spring-break spots. The layout also includes spring-break scenes from Cancun, Mexico, and Panama City, Fla.

The Travel Channel this month tabbed Lake Havasu as the world’s third-best spring-break hangout behind Panama City and Cancun and ahead of such meccas as Jamaica, Daytona Beach, the Bahamas and Mazatlan, Mexico.

“Of all the places we’ve been to, Lake Havasu was the single most craziest with the most nudity,” Norris told Today’s News-Herald, the Lake Havasu newspaper. “Of course, that’s what we like.”

But it makes city officials cringe.

“We’re well-aware of what happens out there on the lake,” Elewaut said. “Unfortunately, we’re still living with the reputation we had five or six years ago.”

Lake Havasu hosted MTV’s Spring Break series in March 1995, and it brought an estimated $1.1 million to the local economy. It was also a security nightmare as the man-made lake was besieged by rowdy teenagers and college students on houseboats.

MTV decided not to return in 1996 after failed negotiations over insurance and liability at the chosen broadcast site on a high bluff.

“MTV kind of put us on the map as a national and worldwide spring-break destination,” said Bonnie Barsness, executive director of the Lake Havasu Tourism Bureau. “What is ironic is we only have 1,630 hotel rooms in Lake Havasu. No way can we accommodate the large numbers of spring breakers like Panama City and Cancun.

Lake Havasu’s spring-break season runs from early March to the end of April, overlapping the season for winter visitors trying to escape the weather in northern climes.

Barsness said spring break and winter tourism boosts the city’s economy by about $5 million annually if temperatures remain balmy.

“With bad weather, it dies,” she said. “The truth is, we don’t get the large numbers of spring breakers that people may think. In the six- to eight-week period, we’d be lucky to get 20,000. It’s been very manageable.”

One of those roaming Lake Havasu this week is Nick Link, a 21-year-old San Diego native majoring in chemical engineering at the University of Arizona.

“It seems kind of quiet,” Link said from a hotel near the 169-year-old London Bridge. “Maybe because we came on a weekday and not a weekend, there’s not a lot of people. It’s not living up to its reputation. We’re kind of confused.”

“If people come to Lake Havasu looking for that type of behavior, they’re going to be disappointed because they’re not going to find it,” Barsness said. “Our law enforcement on the lake has become very aggressive on cracking down on illicit and illegal behavior.”

Police continue to enforce a zero-tolerance policy on alcohol offenses, although they say alcohol-related arrests are down to normal levels after numbering close to 600 during 1995’s spring break.

Elewaut believes it may take two or three years for Lake Havasu to live down its latest image jolt from Playboy. He said the city has been de-emphasizing spring break ever since the MTV experience.

“Businesses aren’t catering to them anymore, such as hotels putting on events to bring them into town. With the numbers down, vandalism caused by underage drinking and people over the age of 21 has declined dramatically,” Elewaut said. “It looks like they’ve found more exciting places to go.”