As Gulf Shores considers the future of a major music festival, residents and business owners in Gulf Shores have made it very clear that the country-oriented Sand in My Boots fest held in May was a much, much bigger hit with them than recent editions of the Hangout Music Fest.

In fact, a community meeting held Thursday night at times seemed like a good-humored roast of the younger crowd for which the pop-oriented, multi-genre Hangout Fest has become known.

“My analogy has been, my own personal thoughts, [that] in the past, we had young kids with their daddy’s credit card here and not a whole lot for them to worry about,” Gulf Shores Mayor Robert Craft said in his introductory remarks. “They were on a free leash. So this year we had an older group that had their own credit card. And you could certainly see that they were more disciplined. There were less problems. … Really it was a much better behaving crowd.”

“A lot more clothing, dramatically less issues,” said Anthony Gallo, owner of the Ice House Taproom, located within walking distance of the festival site. One of more than 22 people who spoke at Thursday’s meeting, Gallo said his business saw a night and day difference between the 2024 Hangout Fest and the 2025 Sand in My Boots fest, both in behavior and finances: “Last year there were a lot of declined cards on the last day. This year there were not,” he said. “From a business standpoint, our revenue definitely increased … This was a remarkably better experience this year than last year, hands down.”

RELATED: Morgan Wallen’s Gulf Shores music festival ends with far fewer arrests than 2024’s Hangout Fest

The theme that the young Hangout crowd wasn’t big on covering up drew repeated laughter during the meeting. Said Brenda Stone, co-owner of a Gulf Shores boutique clothing store: “I have to tell you, years before, like they said, they didn’t wear no clothes, we didn’t sell any clothes.”

Humor aside, the stakes for the discussion in Gulf Shores are high. A 10-year franchise agreement between Hangout Fest organizers and the city has expired and must be renegotiated if the event is to continue. With that process looming, the 2025 Hangout Fest became something different: Sand in My Boots, a country-oriented event trading heavily on the popularity of country megastar Morgan Wallen. While it still featured some rock, rap and pop, the lineup skewed heavily to country, with top acts including Post Malone (a pop artist with a blockbuster country album), Brooks & Dunn, Ella Langley and Riley Green.

After the event ended May 18, the city conducted an online survey or residents and business owners. At Thursday’s meeting, the results of that survey were revealed – and they were striking. Some key points:

Out of 1,431 residents, 76% supported or strongly supported an extension of the festival contract, while about 20% were opposed or strongly opposed.

Among that group of residents, 53% said the festival had a positive effect on their daily life, while 28% said the impact was negative. More than 75% said they were satisfied or very satisfied with the fest’s overall impact on the community, while 17% were somewhat or very dissatisfied.

Out of 403 responses from business owners and operators, 86% supported the extension of the festival contract, while 9% opposed it.

Among the responding businesses, 76% said they’d seen an increase in business, while 8% reported a decrease.

City officials also presented some information on the Sand in My Boots audience and the economic impact it brought to town. Their figures showed the crowd was two-thirds female and 51% married. The age breakdown was 31% ages 25-34, 28% 35-44, and 20% 45-54. Nearly half had an average household income of $100,000 or more.

As for where they came from, the top five points of origin were southwest Alabama and Pensacola, New Orleans, Nashville, Atlanta and Dallas-Fort Worth, with the Birmingham area weighing in at No. 9. The Top 10 also included attendees from Tampa-St. Petersburg, Los Angeles, Chicago and Orlando-Daytona Beach.

Gulf Shores Director of Economic Development and Public Affairs Blake Phelps, who presented the statistics, described the latter group as “markets that we don’t typically see.” He added, “This is indicative of people coming here for this event and giving us opportunity to introduce our community in our area to a group of people that may not have come here or ever heard of us before and may have never come here otherwise if not for the festival.”

Phelps’ figures credited the festival production team alone with spending $2.1 million on lodging and $1.9 million on goods and services. Other benefits included almost $2 million in taxes and fees paid to the city by the fest and a weekend lodging occupancy rate of 85% to 90%, compared to the 25% to 30% that might otherwise have been expected in the last weekend before Memorial Day signaled the start of summer.

While most speakers at Thursday’s meeting expressed support for the festival, that view was by no means unanimous. Resident George Sinak said the city was making a fundamental mistake by letting a private event lock up the main public beach in May.

“May is the best month here and we’re being robbed,” he said. “We don’t mind sharing it, but no venue should ever be allowed to block public access to the public beach. The boulevard, the water that we swim in, [should] never be blocked.”

Sinak said that after working hard to build Gulf Shores’ reputation as a family-friendly destination, welcoming a festival crowd with an inevitable measure of noise, intoxication and vulgarity seemed “a little hypocritical.” He added, “I understand that money’s good, but there’s no reason to sell our soul and our principles down the road.”

Concerns cited by Sinak and others included traffic, the strain on emergency services. Suggestions included potentially taking a year off to gauge how much the community really would miss the event; potentially moving it to beaches farther west, near Gulf State Park; or putting the question of the festival’s future on the ballot in upcoming municipal elections. One speaker suggested re-orienting the main stages so that they face the water, potentially cutting down on the noise that bleeds over into nearby residential areas.

The discussion was remarkably civil, with speakers from all points of view receiving applause. Overall, it seemed to reflect a sincere discussion among residents weighing the costs and benefits of such an event, mindful that tourism was the lifeblood of their economy.

Business owners such as Gallo repeatedly described the event as a godsend for employees. What seemed like just one weekend of revenue was a lifeline for many, he said. “It’s not getting less expensive to live here,” he said.

“If you’re in the tourism business, you realize that in tourism, down here, you actually have 75 days to make money,” said Jack Fisher, owner of Top Tier Watersports. “The other days you’re just here, trying to get by, trying to make payroll, trying to do this. So this extra three or four or five days from the festival, it’s a lot. It really does help.”

Mayor Craft bookended the meeting with remarks indicating that, at least in his mind, the Hangout Fest had gotten to a point where it was on thin ice.

“To be honest with you … I had assumed it was over,” he said at the start of the session. “What we’ve had in the last couple of years with low attendance and issues that were not conducive to a great community aspect in that area down there, I’d made up my mind that it was probably going to end.”

Sand in My Boots represented a chance to put a different spin on things, he said, and he was impressed with the results. But he said at the meeting that the question of going forward was “still a big if” in his mind.

No one representing festival production company AEG spoke at the meeting. Craft said the discussion of a new franchise agreement will take place at upcoming council meetings, and soon.

“It won’t be long,” he said. “The Hangout folks are desperate to go ahead and get started with having to rent the stages and sign the acts and do all the things they have to do. They normally like to start that about two or three months before the current festival, planning for the next festival.”

Producers have described Sand in My Boots as a one-year takeover of the Hangout Fest. But Sand in My Boots sold out 40,000 tickets almost instantly, something Hangout hasn’t accomplished in a long time. Craft’s remarks strongly suggested that the city will press for future events to attract the older, more affluent crowd that Sand in My Boots brought.

“Obviously, if we decide ‘yes,’ there’s going to be a lot of conditions applied,” he said. “And those conditions are going to be along the lines of, create the same group that we had this year. … So we’re going to have to get comfortable that they’re going to be able to recreate that group of people we had on the beach, because it was dramatically different.”

“If you say you think we need to continue, we then will have to negotiate with them and get comfortable, [but] we’re not going back to what we’ve had in the past,” Craft said. “So, a lot of variables, but the most important variable is, we said we weren’t going to do this again unless we got input from you as to [whether] this is something we want to do.”

In his remarks at the meeting, Craft also made comments as to whether Wallen might be available to return in the future or not, but producers indicated that was simply not known at this point.

“The specific acts and genres will likely fluctuate year to year based upon artist availability and wanting to keep things fresh for the fans,” Reeves Price, vice president of festivals for AEG Events and producer of Hangout Fest, said Friday. “But we agree that this year’s event was a great representation of the audience we wish to attract to future festivals in Gulf Shores.”