By JOHN KOZIOL

Staff Writer

LACONIA — The city should have a committee to study the overall — not just the financial — impact of Bike Week, said Mayor Mark Fraser, who on Monday instructed the City Council members to come back next month with suggestions for how to configure the committee.

The six councilors will submit their ideas to Fraser and a determination will be made at the council’s Sept. 9 meeting as to who should sit on the committee.

In his call for a committee, Fraser noted that there was now a momentum to address what some people believe are shortcomings of Bike Week.

Bike Week 2002 was marked by a number of controversies, including criticism that the law enforcement and the media blew "out of proportion" the risk of violence between motorcycle clubs, and a last minute-revocation, but subsequent reinstatement, of several Bike Week beer tent licenses by the state Liquor Commission.

Out of the larger discussion about the problems Bike Week faced this year arose calls to shorten the event from the current nine to four days and also to re-establish a special committee to study it.

Coincidentally, the Greater Laconia-Weirs Beach Chamber of Commerce is now conducting a survey of its members to determine how Bike Week affects them and the Belknap County Economic Development Council (BCEDC) is planning to do a cost/benefit analysis of Bike Week.

Fraser on Monday assigned the BCEDC’s request to put up $10,000 toward the $30,000 cost of the analysis to the council’s Finance Committee for review.

Ward 1 Councilor Paul Bordeau, who back on Aug. 12 had asked that the council put the question of a Bike Week committee on its agenda, said he had no "strong preference" as to whether that committee should be a new or existing one.

The council’s Public Safety Committee, for example, permanently keeps Bike Week on its agenda.

Ward 5 Councilor Rick Judkins, who chairs the Public Safety Committee and who represents the council on the Board of Directors of the Laconia Motorcycle Week Rally and Race Association, which promotes Bike Week, said there were a number of efforts under way now to study Bike Week.

Bordeau replied that the work of the committee he envisioned would not overlap with the BCEDC, but would possibly tackle some of the larger issues surrounding Bike Week, like its increasingly unflattering reputation and the question of "who has ownership of this event."

The BCEDC analysis also may not include the concerns of average citizens, said Bordeau, but Judkins disagreed.

Fraser then quoted a letter he had received from Bob Lawton, general manager of the Funspot arcade and amusement center in The Weirs, that underscored the need to examine some of the basic premises of Bike Week.

In his letter, a copy of which was e-mailed to The Citizen as a press release, Lawton said that Bike Week is "heading off a cliff and dragging the rest of The Weirs area with it. And, unless major changes are made, it will continue to pull the entire area down with it."

Lawton said he regretted his business’s efforts to extend the duration of Bike Week in recent years and bemoaned the fact that beer tents and a party-like atmosphere have become synonymous with the event while hoped-for "substantial improvements" to The Weirs have not materialized.

Fraser added that residents have suggested that a Bike Week committee should include small businessmen from The Weirs who do not profit from Bike Week and that the question before the council was whether the committee should be a subcommittee of the council or independent of it.

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