Since 2010, the annual Hangout Music Fest has turned a small Southern beach town into a big stage for a weekend. With the 2023 event coming up fast, Gulf Shores Mayor Robert Craft took time to answer a few questions about the city’s relationship with the event.

Major takeaways: Craft says the event has been good for the city but thinks the real payoff comes in the long term. The city still doesn’t want patrons sleeping in their cars or intruding on private property. And partiers who are paranoid about bringing drugs to the event have good reason to be.

The 2023 festival takes place May 19-21 on the city’s main public beach, around the Hangout Restaurant. Top acts include the Red Hot Chili Peppers, SZA, Calvin Harris, Paramore and Lil Nas X. Tickets remain available, with prices starting at $349 plus fees for General Admission. Full festival information can be found at www.hangoutmusicfest.com. For ongoing coverage, visit www.AL.com/hangout.

As Craft spoke, he as looking forward to the 2023 NCAA Beach Volleyball Championship taking place May 5-7, another major event that brings national exposure to Gulf Shores. The following is lightly edited for clarity.

Last year was the first year for a “Hangout Ambassadors” program, in which the festival put trained people out in the neighborhoods around the site to mitigate nuisance-level problems such as people parking on private property. I was watching Gulf Shores City Council deliberations earlier this year, and city leaders seemed to think that the program really worked well to ease aggravation for residents close to the festival site. Is that your sense of it?

Gulf Shores Mayor Robert Craft: That is true. It’s done a pretty good job of patrolling the areas within our residential area adjacent to our beach district, where we’ve had problems of spillovers and sleeping in cars in the past. Their presence out there seemed to have diminished that quite a bit. Which is really good.

Is there anything more you’d like to see?

I think as long as they continue doing what they’ve been doing and pay attention to that, I get more complaints outside of the beach area about noise, and the noise coming from the festival, than I do from people sleeping in cars outside of that tight area. The area that we’re really worried about is fairly small. And so they’ve been able to cover those and we haven’t had that grief much farther north than two blocks there, two-three blocks just north of the beach. As long as they keep doing the same things, that’s all I’m looking for.

Producers also said they were making some adjustments to mitigate the volume level of noise heard away from the site. Did that work?

I think it must have paid off some. They redirected some of their speakers toward the Gulf, to the south, and that seemed to help a little bit. Last year we had very few complaints from a noise situation, from anything. But a lot of it was, too, a smaller crowd last year than we’ve typically seen, and we’re expecting that again this year, smaller crowds, and the less impact it has outside the area, they’re able to stay there and take care of themselves.

[Note: The festival attendance cap remains unchanged at 40,000. Festival organizers said via social media on Wednesday that the event was 90% of the way to a sellout.]

The biggest concerns I have, and always will have with this, is weather. When you get bad weather, inclement stuff, particularly lightning, and you’ve got to vacate that area and get people everywhere to safety, it’s a real challenge. That’s when we need those folks a lot, to direct people where they can go and not go. Nothing is more concerning to me than that. I think we’ve put safety measures in place, hopefully, knock on wood, to be prepared to deal with any bad guys that show up, with appropriate positioning of police officers, in case we ever had some of those disasters with an active shooter situation. Those are concerns we’ve always had. But we’ve really done a lot of things I’m not going to talk about in detail, but we’ve done a lot of things to have people in position to react to that.

It’s an interesting point. There are some unofficial online forums where people talk about the fest, and one of the topics that come up is whether bringing drugs is a good idea. There tend to be a lot of cautionary tales suggesting that it isn’t. In some cases there’s this raging paranoia, with people saying you even put spotters on rooftops to catch people smoking weed. Now, in past conversations with you and Grant Brown, the city’s director of recreation and cultural affairs, have said that’s more about lessons that law enforcement learned from a mass shooting at a 2017 concert in Las Vegas where, a guy opened fire on the crowd from a hotel room.

That is exactly what they’re there for. But you’ve got the guy on the weapon and you’ve got a spotter with him, with binoculars. The spotter does way more than the shooter does, thank goodness. But the spotter is seeing people, we’ve had them recognize folks sliding packages under the fence before they get to where the amnesty bin and where the shakedown is, where they’d get caught. They’ll let the cops know, watch, this is where it is, and so the folks will be hiding behind that area, waiting for somebody to come get it. And they end up going directly, they get them, and going directly to jail. The spotters do a good job for us.

I assume that people sleeping in cars continues to be something local officials won’t tolerate?

That is something we do not want them to do. And they have, in the past, they will find a home down there that is not occupied and they will, we’ve had folks kind of break into a home there to get in out of the weather or do whatever they want to do, or be underneath the home hanging out, which fortunately the neighbors have let us know in the past. Now we’ve got folks watching for that, and if you see somebody up under a house that is clearly not where they’re supposed to be, we don’t know who’s renting them and who really isn’t, but you can pretty well tell when you’ve got folks who are not supposed to be there.

Let’s talk economic benefits. Is there anything you specifically associate with a “Hangout bump?”

Not so much as a financial bump, but in reality everything positive pretty well happens for the lodging industry and [for businesses] within the couple of blocks right around the Hangout. … But the whole purpose, one of the benefits of the Hangout from the very beginning, was to create a younger generation awareness of who we are and what we have. These are not teenagers that we’re getting, these are college students or fresh out of college students and we’ve always felt like having them stay here for three days or a week, like they typically do, we are introducing them to Gulf Shores in a broader sense. And hopefully when they have families, this is a place they’ll want to come back to. We have so many visitors that were here as youngsters with their family that fell in love with Gulf Shores and they come back when they have kids and share with their kids the same thing they went through. So every time we can introduce our world to somebody like that, it pays long-term dividends.

The 2022 fest really doubled down on a shift to newer artists with a younger audience. What do you think of this year’s lineup?

I think as the music changed, you have less things that older folks want to go to. I mean, for a long period of time we had bands that I enjoyed, and my kids enjoyed. Now my kids are in their 40s, I’m in my 70s. They’re not playing anything – Now, Red Hot Chili Peppers, I’m excited, I’m going to look forward to that one. But I don’t know that I know another band on there. I’m sure there’s some I will enjoy once I listen to them, but they’re not things I listen to on a regular basis.

Are there any other thoughts on the festival that you’d like to share?

This is our 11th year. We missed two COVID years. It started in 2010 and I believe it has done a lot when you look at the full impact on the city, I believe it’s done a lot, of introducing us to the world. The fact that they were here after the [Deepwater Horizon] oil spill, we were able to have three concerts that basically filled our community back up, and BP paid for all three of them.

[Note: The inaugural Hangout Fest, held May 14-16, showed the world that Alabama’s beaches hadn’t been blanketed in sludge from the ongoing Deepwater Horizon disaster. It also showed that major entertainment events could be held on the beach in Gulf Shores. Jimmy Buffett played one in June, the first in a series of shows intended to counteract the disaster’s impact on the local tourism economy. Bon Jovi and Brad Paisley played beach shows that October.]

Anything that — like the volleyball, all three days are broadcast on the ESPN network and then the last day, the Sunday finals, are on the main, the big one — We’re showing our beaches to the world, and it looks good on TV.