Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
The Gulfport City Council held its first meeting of 2026 on January 6. Agenda items included presentations on the holiday decoration contest, the Senior Citizens’ Advisory Committee’s walking trail, and the final Vulnerability Study. The council took action on consent items, discussed storm recovery permit fees, debated zoning density changes, and addressed long-term resilience planning.
Good evening. Good evening and welcome. Let's see. This is the January 6th, the first meeting of 2026. I'm sure we'll say it wrong a couple times tonight. And we are going to start tonight with an invocation by Councilmember Jackson, and then that will be followed by the Pledge of Allegiance. So please stand if you will. Hi everyone. So we're in the new year, so I thought I'd do a funny kind of light, light hearted invocation with a quote from Dave Beard. Many years ago, I resolved never to bother with New Year's resolutions, and I've stuck with it ever since. Councilmember Jackson. Here. Councilmember Early, present. Vice Mayor Thanos? Here. Councilmember Shaw, present. Mayor Love? Here. City Attorney Salzman. Here. City Manager O'Reilly. Here. City Clerk Carico is present. All righty. And I don't see Mayor Bell in the room, so you want me to proceed? All right. So today it's my pleasure to announce the winners from the decoration uh holiday decor decoration contest. I understand that the judges are the team council, but they're not here, and Meravelle wasn't able to make it either. So we have two categories that we do each year. One is called the general theme, and one is called the commercial theme. So I will start with our commercial winner, which is Mr. Gary King. If you saw it, he's had a beautiful display on 49th. But I said, wow, that's really pretty. So if you'll come up, I'll give you your little plaque. It's a contest between 20,000 Christmas lights and 770 happiness lines. All right. Thank you so much for um making our city beautiful. It was my honor, believe me. My pleasure. I actually left some of them up too on the power polls. They're staying up all year. Thank you very much. Thank you. And when you talked about 700,000 lights, uh I think my friends who won the second category, which is Eddie Smith and Patrick Mortimer, um, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say they probably had somewhere between 700,000 and a million lights. Um not uh not an exaggeration, the front yard, the backyard, way up high in the trees. He's got the flying pigs, the whole thing. So um, and Eddie's the one that does most of it, so I'm disappointed they're not here because I wanted to uh have my picture taken with them acknowledging and also to acknowledge at the same time that they do all this.