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The Bamboozle festival didn’t only bring tens of thousands of people to the city this weekend. It also brought jobs to 150 local citizens.

With the help of Interfaith Neighbors, Advantage Contracting hired 150 Asbury Park citizens on behalf of festival organizer LiveNation to help out with manning the parking lots and cleaning up after the three-day event, said Advantage owner Allan Nau. Advantage, an Edison-based firm, handled “pretty much everything except the stage work,” Nau added.

General contractor and Asbury Park resident Duanne Small [pictured above, left] got a call from Interfaith Neighbors requesting some employees on behalf of Advantage. Small gathered some of his people [including Justice Greene, Kalief Greene, and Christopher Green, above], all of whom live in the area, to help clean up this morning.

“I’m glad to see someone was concerned about people in the city making money this weekend,” Small said. “Bamboozle wasn’t just for the east side. It was for the whole city.”

Small owns the Asbury-based Kingz Group, which provides plumbing, masonry, painting and other contracting services to customers. He employs city residents and encourages young people, like 18-year-old Kalief, to work with him.

Nau was “very pleased” with the local workforce, he said, especially with Small, who “stayed on top of his people the whole time.”

Although Nau didn’t employ only local residents, he will be using many more Asbury Park citizens if his firm is hired again next year, he said.

“I had a lot of people I brought in from out of town because I wasn’t sure how people were going to work in town,” he said. “I didn’t have any experience with them, but [after this weekend], my experience was great. Next year there will be a lot more jobs for locals because I saw the people here are willing to do a day’s work and do a good job.”

The cooperation between the local workers and his company was “unbelievable,” he said. “The people were willing to work. You could hear them talking and this one was going to get his electric bill paid, this one was going to get his phone bill paid, this one was going to get his car fixed.”

Nau also hired local union contractors to construct the wooden stairs that led from the boardwalk to the beach throughout the festival, he said. Those stairs were dismantled over the past few days and will be put in storage to be used again next year.

All of the waste produced by the festival filled up 18 30-cubic-yard Dumpsters, he said. That garbage will be separated for recycling by Waste Management.

Nau instructed his workers to keep the festival “Disney clean,” he said. There were 30 people on cleanup duty at all times combing the festival grounds and picking up garbage, as well as 12 people outside on the street. The company also placed 400 additional garbage cans throughout the festival grounds — which will also be saved for next year — and employed a street sweeper.

“I’m very impressed with the town,” he said. “If we were here full time, I’d be using all local people.”

 

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