S.C. high court hears lawsuits over rally rules

COLUMBIA -- South Carolina's highest court heard arguments Wednesday over whether a city can require motorcycle riders to wear helmets, despite the lack of a state law requiring the practice.

State law doesn't require riders 21 and older to wear helmets. But, in an effort to get rid of two bike rallies held there each year, officials in Myrtle Beach have approved a passel of laws including a requirement that all motorcycle riders wear helmets.

Biker rallies have been going on in Myrtle Beach since it first became a tourist destination 70 years ago, but the events have grown rapidly in the past two decades.

After years of complaints from residents about noise, lewd behavior and congestion along the 60-mile Grand Strand, the city decided to get rid of the rallies, raising property taxes to help fund the effort. In September 2008, the Myrtle Beach City Council voted unanimously to pass 15 ordinances intended to crack down on the rallies, including the helmet requirement and restrictions on where bikers could park and strengthened loitering rules.

Violators of the helmet law face a $100 fine but no jail time, but the civil ordinance had an almost immediate effect: During the city's first test of the new policies, both rallies noted double-digit percentage drops in attendance last spring.

Justices peppered an attorney for the city with questions over what they seemed to view as the intent of the ordinance -- not to make Myrtle Beach's roads safer for bikers, as had been argued, but to drive the festivals away from the Grand Strand.

"So it was targeted toward the two bike weeks?" Chief Justice Jean Toal asked attorney Mike Battle. "Was that just so they'd get so mad with all the helmet-wearing and the goggle-wearing that they wouldn't come? ... It looks to me that that really was the target."

Battle responded that the city has had little problem enforcing the ordinance, which he said has led to fewer catastrophes.

Representing his brother, who leads a pro-bike rally group of business-owners and is challenging a ticket he received for not wearing a helmet, state Rep. Thad Viers argued that a state law governing traffic ordinances spells out what local governments are allowed to do regarding traffic laws.

Efforts to pass tougher statewide motorcycle helmet laws have gone nowhere in the Legislature.