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The business community was invited to a meeting in council chambers this morning to discuss last month’s Bamboozle music festival and its effect on local merchants.

About two dozen business owners sat in the audience while city manager Terence Reidy, special events coordinator Tom Gilmour and LiveNation employees Scott O’Donnell and Sean Conner sat in the front of the room.

Throughout the meeting, downtown business owners lamented the festival’s unfavorable effect on their businesses, citing losses of 40 to 75 percent compared to the same weekend in previous years. Restaurant owners said they lost food and produce because they over-purchased to prepare for the weekend and were unable to sell it before it spoiled.

Most agreed the main issue was their regular customers being scared away from town because they thought there would be no parking. On the weekend of the festival, parking was abundant in the downtown area because most attendees took public transportation into town. The parking utility made 40 percent less revenue on Bamboozle weekend than it did the following weekend for Memorial Day, Reidy said.

“The lesson for us is the way that LiveNation was able to manage getting people in and out,” Reidy said. “The work they did with transit really freed up parking … Downtown could have had a normal weekend and not gotten hurt.”

Many also said the festival’s no-reentry policy should be reconsidered, although Conner responded that LiveNation draws most of its revenue from ancillary streams like food and beverage vendors inside the festival.

LiveNation invests “multiple millions of dollars in an event like this in an attempt to at least break even,” O’Donnell said. “[The no-reentry policy] is also public safety. It’s an attempt by us to contain and control as best we can. In previous incarnations, [the festival has] been in a parking lot of a stadium. Here, we’re next to neighborhoods, businesses, the senior citizen tower. We took that responsibility seriously.”

Despite the unexpected availability of parking, police still erected barricades and roadblocks near the beachfront. A manager of Paradise, a nightclub located on Ocean Avenue, said his customers were unable to access his business.

“During the original meeting, the police chief said if anybody said they were going to Paradise, they were going to get through [barricades],” he said. “Our actual owner tried to get through the roadblock and they refused him. On Saturday evening, customers were saying, ‘How do we get to Paradise?’ and police were saying, ‘Not tonight.'”

And although headlining band The Foo Fighters was done performing by 9:30 p.m. on Saturday night, “the town was dead by 10:30,” he said.

“That’s a very fair criticism,” Reidy said. Some of the officers in town were from outside security or state and county agencies and may not have been apprised of the plan to let residents and customers through the barricades, he said.

One business owner suggested the city pay for a valet system in the downtown in future years, if the festival happens again, saying many potential customers were scared off by warnings that parking would be impossible in town that weekend.

Another business owner suggested the chamber of commerce and businesses should have pooled all their customers’ email addresses to send out a notice saying there was plenty of parking downtown during the festival.

“Sometimes we have to get a little more creative,” she said.

Some business owners said the festival — especially on Friday night, when dubstep DJ Skrillex headlined — did not attract the right clientele.

“Friday night is appropriate for [former festival site] the Meadowlands parking lot … but that’s not really the type of people we want to attract to Asbury Park,” one business owner said.

“I think the real draw of a city is a diverse city,” Reidy said. “It attracts young people who come to the Saint or the Pony and an older crowd that come to restaurants and antique shops. That’s the strength of Asbury Park. We’re not just one demographic.”

Most people in attendance said the event itself was run well and the logistics were well-thought-out, and some said they have been enjoying residual business from it.

“I think we all benefited from residual good feelings felt around the country” about Asbury Park, said Nancy Sabino, co-owner of the Showroom. “Part of the frustration of the downtown is we were told to gear up and be a part of this and be creative … Bamboozle and the boardwalk ended up with the success.”

Steve Troy, of Robert Legere Design, suggested that if the festival comes back, the empty lots marked for Bamboozle parking downtown should be reserved for people patronizing the businesses, instead.

“Ever single day, those lots were dead empty,” Troy said.

Another business owner suggested having in-town shuttle buses to “help get rid of a lot of the lockdown feeling. If you have a shuttle that runs up Kingsley, people wouldn’t have the fear of leaving the boardwalk,” he said. “Reach out to people so they can plan ahead and see that there is a downtown.”

Ken Roth, of the Asbury Park Chamber of Commerce, said the chamber will be enacting an ambassador program similar to Bamboozle’s use of volunteers with T-shirts reading, “Ask me.”

Jackie Pappas, executive director of the chamber, said she was at the boardwalk all weekend in the chamber’s Visitors’ Center distributing sales materials from the downtown businesses.

“It was a very concerted effort,” she said. “There’s a lot of room to grow here but there were a lot of people who should be commended for working hard to push this whole city.”

Ted Johnson, operator of the train station concession stands, said his biggest concern was communication. He didn’t know until the last minute that his concessions stands would be closed from Thursday until Monday, he said.

“On Wednesday, I talked with Tom [Gilmour] and he said everything would be open,” Johnson said. “Next thing I know, there was a fence around [the businesses]. I didn’t get anything out of Bamboozle.”

“I apologize for that,” Reidy said. “That was not the plan. What we found throughout the weekend was NJTransit police trying to manage their site, and I get it.”

Reidy said the communication breakdown occurred because the NJTransit police may not have understood the train station is owned by Asbury Park, unlike the state’s other stations, which are owned by NJTransit.

Another issue with the NJTransit police arose when Reidy received a call saying the police were funnelling people away from the downtown when they got off the train. This was rectified the next day, and festival-goers were directed to walk down Cookman Avenue toward the concert — although many business owners said the festival patrons seems to have tunnel vision and did not even notice the businesses they were walking past.

Reidy also debunked the rumor that LiveNation has a three- or five-year contract with the city. The company has not yet decided if it will hold Bamboozle in Asbury Park again, he said. LiveNation employee O’Donnell is going to Los Angeles next week to discuss the festival with higher-ups there, Gilmour said.

At the end of the meeting, Gilmour thanked the business owners for attending on short notice, as the public was only notified of the meeting this week.

“I think we’re going to have an amazing summer here and I think Bamboozle is going to generate part of that,” Gilmour said. “We created an event in the city that was seen nationally.”

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