On Monday, May 20, City of Gulf Shores officials gathered for a work session meeting that included dialogue to recap Hangout Music Festival 2024 and its future on the Gulf Coast, which will soon hang in the balance.

The city reported it was still in the cleanup process from the May 17-19 festival and will provide more information and data once they get through Memorial Day weekend. Public Information Officer Grant Brown, director of Recreation & Cultural Affairs, touched on the benefits that events like this bring through forcing departments to work in unison and developing citywide relationships between officials that could be critical in the event of potential emergencies.

"It was a very successful event regarding the cooperation between our city staff and city departments," Brown said. "It truly does take all of us working together to be able to provide the support for not only just the festival goers and festival production crew, but for the remaining residents that are within the city. At any one time while the festival is going on, there's still a city to run and operate. I can proudly stand here before you and say that all of that was done with an excellent collection of workers."

Fire Chief Mark Sealy said the hospital tent had 179 contacts through the festival weekend. The fire rescue's Strike Teams, which are the firefighters who patrol on UTVs, had 231 contacts, of which 126 were taken to medical tents. The first aid tent, manned by nursing students able to provide basic first aid, saw roughly 1,900 people (often providing festival goers with water and bandages) and transferred around 50 people via wheelchair and UTV to the hospital tent. Only 10 people over three days were transferred from the hospital tent to the ER, with total patient contacts overall coming in at 2,219, according to Sealy.

"(Our staff) had the idea and took it upon themselves to set up rehab tents outside of each of the main stages," Sealy added. "That's something we're going to develop going forward to where we have better logistics for those two areas, so we can reduce the impact on the first-aid tents to get people out of the crowd and cooled down."

Chief of Police Edward Delmore expressed gratitude for the Baldwin County Sheriff's Office, Foley Police Department, Orange Beach Police Department and other both regional and federal partners who all worked together in the interest of ensuring public safety.

"Normally when you have an event like this, it's in a much bigger place," Delmore said. "We've gone to see Lollapalooza in Chicago. We've gone to see Coachella and how it's handled in California. We've met with and consulted with officer from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Some of the event staff are on the the way to events in New York following this. We're a medium-sized city with a medium-sized police department and a medium-sized fire department. NYPD has more police officers than we have permanent residents. The fact is that we're able to do what we do and keep everyone safe, which is really the primary goal of something like this."

Gulf Shores Police Department released arrest totals for the festival, indicating numbers dropped this year for the second in a row, with this year's 94 lower than the 107 arrests made in 2023 and 133 in 2022. The department there were no serious incidents.

Gulf Shores' current 10-year agreement with Hangout Music Festival runs through 2025, and Mayor Robert Craft says the city will be having conversations internally and with the public on whether the festival should remain on our Alabama beaches.

"We've tried to do as much as we can to isolate our citizens that don't want to be involved in it," Craft stated. "We can't completely contain everything on the site, but we continue to do the best we can do. Hopefully, we're making progress every year. The main message that I'm giving is that we've got one more year to consider for sure, and after that we'll have more conversations. We'll gauge the public and get some feedback as to what's the best path going forward from here."