Garbage collection (or the lack thereof) was one complaint at Fiesta DC.

Yesterday’s 40th anniversary celebration of Fiesta DC in Mt. Pleasant was either a raucous and colorful celebration of the District’s Latino heritage or a complete breakdown of the neighborhood’s otherwise peaceful veneer. It just depends on who you ask.

For Terry Lynch, a 30-year neighborhood resident and head of the Downtown Cluster of Congregations, the whole thing was a mess. Whether it was the official lack of notice that the festival was happening or the public drunkenness that he witnessed, Lynch wasn’t feeling particularly festive by the end of the day, when he fired off a letter to Mayor Vincent Gray listing his complaints.

“It may have been a Fiesta, but certainly not for me,” he said.

ANC Commissioner Jack McKay, once a strong proponent of the festival, agreed with Lynch, saying that a lack of communication between organizers and the community led to many a neighborhood headache the day of the festival.

“It’s just too awful for residents. Too many people coming in cars and expecting to park on our streets. Too much confounding of traffic simply passing through Mount Pleasant. Too many vendor’s trucks parked on our streets. The Fiesta is just too much for this neighborhood to deal with,” he wrote Monday morning on a Mt. Pleasant listserv.

Other residents similarly complained about traffic in the neighborhood, with a number of streets shut down from 5 a.m. until 11 p.m.

Some of these complaints aren’t new, though, nor are they limited to Mt. Pleasant. There’s always going to be someone that has a gripe when it comes to day-long street festivals, whether because of noise or traffic. (They’re often accused of being NIMBYs, fairly or not.) Bill Duggan, owner of Madam’s Organ in Adams Morgan, has had a historic beef with the organizers of the neighborhood’s annual street festival; in 2009, he covered the entrance to the bar in black plastic bags and posted signs explaining his displeasure with the Adams Morgan Mainstreet Group, while in 2010 he handed it over to then D.C. Council Chair Vince Gray’s mayoral campaign as a way to express his displeasure with Mayor Adrian Fenty.

What may most have provoked Lynch, McKay and others, though, is the lack of communication between Fiesta DC organizers and neighborhood groups. According to McKay, organizers only came to ANC 1D once, and didn’t present detailed plans for the festival. Additionally, he said, they seemed to ignore a June 2010 resolution passed by the ANC that laid out in detail the steps they wanted organizers to take to minimize impact on the neighborhood. McKay blamed the fact that a new management team took over organizing the festival, missing out on important elements of organizing such an undertaking.

According to the D.C. Department of Public Works, organizers didn’t ask the city to help with clean-up, contracting only a small cadre of sanitation workers to deal with what ended up being mounds of garbage. DPW sent in a crew after the festival ended to help gather garbage and clean the streets.

No one at Fiesta DC headquarters answered the phone today, and the voicemail was full.

Anwar Saleem, executive director of H Street Main Street and an organizer of the recent H Street Festival, told us that community input is key to the successful street festivals that often take place throughout the District in September. “I never want to lose sight of what people are feeling,” he said, adding that organizers of the H Street Festival went “above and beyond” to remain engaged with ANCs and community groups. Saleem hopes to see more street festivals throughout the city, though he admits they have to grow incrementally — and only as much as the neighborhoods around can sustain them.

[Full disclosure: I live in Mt. Pleasant.]