The City of Gulf Shores approved a handful of assembly permits at Monday’s meeting, including one for a wedding at the public beach.

Typically, weddings on the public beach are discouraged, but Recreation and Cultural Affairs director Grant Brown said the application could produce a test case on what the city would allow for beach weddings.

Brown wanted the council to consider smaller, off-season weddings with limited numbers of people and structures on the beach. In the past, those wanting weddings were encouraged to rent a condo or a house on the beach and have events on the beach there.

The event in question is set for Oct. 1 and will have about 40-50 people with an archway for the ceremonies. All other activities would take place elsewhere.

“Basically to go and have the ceremony and then come off the beach,” Brown said.

“You’re going to use this as kind of a guideline for developing the regulations for how we do this in the future?” Mayor Robert Craft asked.

“We can use this as an opportunity to gauge 40 or 50 people setting up on this particular weekend at West Second Street.,” Brown said.

Other permits include a picnic on Sunday for youth from the Church of Christ. During that discussion, Grant revealed that lifeguards will be on duty Friday through Sundays through the Shrimp Festival weekend.

“Typically after Labor Day weekend the lifeguard program stops,” Brown said.

Other events include a half-marathon road race on Jan. 22 that will start and end at LuLu’s Restaurant. Runners will cross the Intracoastal Waterway on the southbound Alabama 59 bridge and eventually run a loop on the roads in Gulf State Park before returning to LuLu’s via the same route.

“It’s a new (run) to our area,” Brown said. “The Gulf Coast Events group of Abita Springs, La., is working with our sports commission. They’d like to do a half-marathon run. We’ve met with them on a couple of different occasions and they had proposed a couple of different routes. With the police department’s help we have identified the current route.”

Brown said the group applied for the permit so far in advance so they can begin advertising for the event.

The council gave approval to all of the permits.