The start of the Atlantic Beach Memorial bike fest is just one day away.
And while people are getting ready for that rally, local business owners said it is going to take a long time for them to recover the money lost from last week's Harley-Davidson motorcycle rally.
Horry County Council Chairman Liz Gilland said without a doubt there were fewer bikers on the Grand Strand for the spring Harley-Davidson motorcycle rally, compared to last year.
Gilland said she spent one night on the south end during the rally and the rumble from the motorcycles was not as loud as in year's past.
"I don't think any of us knew how many were coming and how many were not coming, we were simply trying to tweak the whole bike week so that quality of life would be a little bit more in the forefront." Gilland said the low turnout was likely the result of the struggling economy, Myrtle Beach's new laws, and the county's changes when it came to vendors.
But she said the impact of what Myrtle Beach council did when it passed new laws in February, designed to curtail the rallies, hurt the beach economically and people in the county.
"People that come here don't know where the lines are, they don't know when, where one municipality begins and another ends and where the county is, so it's all Myrtle Beach to them, and so there is an impact simply from what Myrtle Beach did, but certainly what the county did sort of just stirred it a little more with some of the bikers, I think.”
Gilland said it will take a while to recover the money businesses lost, but with new sources of revenue coming to the area like the ACC baseball tournament in 2011, 2012, and 2013 and Myrtle Beach's Military Appreciation Days, the money will come back.
"We will find other ways to bring the crowd back that used to come before the bike rallies got so large and they left us because the bike rallies were too large for their comfort.” Gilland said the county does not have any intentions of raising taxes like Myrtle Beach did. Gilland also said if the county council and Myrtle Beach council had done nothing to scale back the rally, attendance would probably still have been down because of the economy.
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