ORANGE BEACH, Ala. —The city is using half of its BP marketing grant to promote events to get people into town and the other half to spruce up the town’s look while they are here.

Officials are looking at buying banners to brighten up roadways, more outdoor lighting for holiday celebrations and even a TV monitor/video system to tout the city once visitors are here. The new promotional tools were discussed at this past Tuesday’s work session and will be voted on at this coming Tuesday’s regular session.

“We want to cross promote city facilities through a video network and build that content as well as enhance Mardi Gras and Coastal Christmas,” City Administrator Ken Grimes said. “In our grant we talked about cross promoting our facilities to a captive audience that we already have coming in. We choose to build up the infrastructure so when they get here they go ‘wow, this is an awesome place’ based on what they see and get to enjoy versus doing ads and marketing outside before they come in.”

Grimes says the outside advertising is already in place and the people are coming.

“Everybody’s already doing that,” he said. “There’s only so many ways you can come to the beach and they are already coming. We’re having record years.”

BP announced the grants in November. The city was awarded two $500,000 grants, one each for 2013 and 2014. The Friends of the Arts Center also received a $500,000 grant.

Gulf Shores and the Alabama Gulf Chamber of Commerce were also each awarded two of the grants. Gulf Shores and Orange Beach Tourism was awarded one of the grants.

There were 350 applicants for the grants and 110 were awarded. The limit for the grants was $500,000. The Hugh S. Branyon Backcountry Trail received a $226,430 grant. The city of Foley also received some grant money.

Orange Beach is taking a two-prong approach to spending the first of its $500,000 grant.

“What the city has done, we’ve divided our grant into two pots of money,” Grimes said. “The first pot of money was $250,000 that we divided into those special events that we sponsored and that was all those events like Gumbo Fest, Bulls on the Beach, the boat show, the car show, those things.

“The second pot of money, the $250,000 we talked about (Tuesday) night, what we tried to do was to buy more Christmas decorations, more Mardi Gras decorations and more colorful Orange Beach, Ala., promotional banners that will go all over town on our light poles. And use the same colorful banners at the Sportsplex.”

The banners will be the first step toward giving the city a more festive feel during the summer season.

“If you remember Christmas we had the red that said Orange Beach with stars on it,” Grimes said. “During patriotic weekends we can throw in the blue background and alternate and we’ll have patriotic colors down the highways.

“It’s going to be the same size banner that we used at Christmas, that has Orange Beach, Ala., and a little boat icon on it. I’m saying we’re talking in the neighborhood, by the time we add those to the Sportsplex fields, the highways and if you add Mardi Gras, we had probably 120 banners.”

The Sportsplex will see a bit of an extra effort to enhance the Orange Beach experience for families coming to town for the many baseball, softball and soccer tournaments.

“The Sports Commission says there have been 64,000 sports room nights,” Grimes said. “That is a documented number of just sporting events that came in last year. That’s between the two cities, but if you take 64,000 room nights and the average family of four, that’s a lot people coming in just for sports alone.

“We’ll have windscreens at the fields because we have so many thousands of players that play on our fields. We’ll have colorful banners and shade structures that will go at the Sportsplex. Most of it is enhancing our promotion.”

In addition to more Christmas lights to line the streets, Orange Beach is planning on buying similar lights with Mardi Gras themes for that time of year. There will be Mardi Gras banners as well.

“As far as Mardi Gras we’re trying to build up because we have such great family parades we’re trying to build up our streets with additional pole lighting that will be lighted at night,” Grimes said. “When people come to town they’ll actually see kind of a Christmas light on the poles but it will be Mardi Gras themed with a mask and beads and those kind of things.”