From today’s Asbury Park Press story Has the Seafood Festival outgrown Belmar? :
The mayor said the warm weather on Sunday coupled with the beach and festival created the “perfect storm.”
“We had a lot of people coming just to go to the beach and at the same time we did have the Seafood Festival,” Doherty said. “When you combine those two it just led to a tremendous amount of people in a small area.”
Unmentioned in any of the interviews Doherty has given since Sunday is that this didn’t just happen by accident. We hired a marketing company, Spark Market Solutions of Red Bank, to promote the festival. They specialize in crowds.
BTW, I had invited a colleague from my office and his girlfriend to visit me Sunday. They had never been to Belmar before. I had to call them while they were already en route and tell them not to come. I live here and pay taxes here. We had planned this visit for a long time. Closing the town was not no big deal for us. It ruined our plans for Sunday.
4 Comments
Please fire Spark. Let them spark a near riot somewhere else.
Just checked out the Spark’s website and checked the Events (http://www.sparkmybiz.com/events/). They are also listing other events for town….the sandcastle contest, Surf contest, San Gennero, Oktoberfest….I really hope that we are not going to have a repeat of this past weekend.
(I also saw the mention of the movies on the beach on their “sponsor” page – which lists Belmar.)
Dear Spark: Go foster chaos elsewhere!
Belmar is too small a town for a major festival. The residents need to have streets that are passable and not have the worry that if there’s a crisis, first aid will not be able to get through. Very, very dangerous
The Seafood festival town shutdown was mentioned in a British newspaper:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3123880/Mayor-says-town-temporarily-closed-outsiders.html
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