[media-credit name=’BEN CLASSON/Herald photo’ align=’alignright’ width=’336′][/media-credit]City officials and members of the student community met Tuesday night to discuss the success of last year's Halloween festivities on State Street.

Representatives from the Madison Police Department, Fire Department, Parks Department, City Engineering Department and Associated Students of Madison discussed the effectiveness of the new ticketing and gate policies.

"Compared to other years, we didn't get as many complaints about vandalism, noise and some of those kinds of things," MPD Central District Capt. Mary Schauf said. "So that's all positives."

2006 was the first year the city charged admission to the State Street Halloween party, which the newly formed Halloween Action Committee marketed as "Freakfest."

The new plan was designed to limit the number of people allowed in the street — previous years saw large crowds that led to rioting and violence.

"We wanted to see no serious injuries, and in that nature I think we were successful," said Mario Mendoza, business and legislative liaison to Mayor Dave Cieslewicz. "No serious injuries were reported to us."

Mendoza said another sign of success was that the MPD did not need to use mass deployment of tear gas, and no police officers had to get into protective riot gear.

Tom Wangard, a founder of the HAC, represented ASM at the meeting. Wangard said he thought the plan was mostly a success.

"Most students that I talked to after the event said that they enjoyed Freakfest, but they were feeling that the event is not at the same grand scale that people thought it was in years past," Wangard said.

The HAC, Wangard said, started as a Facebook group that wanted to move any overflow from the mayor's 50,000-person limit to Langdon Street.

But the main problem Wangard and the HAC saw with the Freakfest event was the musical performances.

"With time limits and lack of funding that we had, it proved very difficult to see the type of headliner that we wanted for entertainment," Wangard said, adding that he was still pleased with the local talents who performed.

Ald. Mike Verveer, District 4, who represents much of the State Street area, thanked many city officials and student groups who made the event a success.

"In a really unprecedented way, all aspects of city government were involved in this Halloween tradition last year," Verveer said.

Despite the overall success of last year's Halloween events, the MPD still had to deal with some of the holiday's usual dangerous activity.

"Saturday night, there were some tense moments," Schauf said. "At the end of the event, we did have some people coming down to the 500 block (of State Street) and starting to get aggressive."

Schauf said the 2006 Halloween festivities presented the MPD with a unique situation of having to police both a University of Wisconsin home football game and the Halloween event.

Next year's Halloween festivities will also be held on the same day as a UW home football game Oct. 27.