GULF SHORES, Ala. – Municipal elections set for Tuesday were postponed because of concerns over Hurricane Isaac. The storm is expected became a hurricane Tuesday evening and will threaten the Gulf Coast as early as midnight Tuesday.

Gulf Shores took the action at an emergency meeting Sunday afternoon. The council also declared a state of emergency and expected to follow Baldwin County by issuing voluntary evacuation orders Monday morning.

“If we’re going to do that it seems to me we need to postpone,” Mayor Robert Craft. “We don’t want to do it, but I think if folks are going to be asked to leave, they’re not going to get a chance to vote. It would seem to me we would want to postpone.”

City Clerk Wanda Parris said in her conversations with other clerks in the county, the makeup date for the election being considered is Sept. 11.

Orange Beach met at 10 a.m. Monday and took essentially the same actions, Mayor Tony Kennon and Councilman Jeff Silvers said Sunday afternoon. Silvers and Councilwoman Pattisue Simpson attended the Gulf Shores session. Kennon and Building Official Lanny Smith attended a countywide EMA meeting in Robertsdale at 1 p.m. Sunday afternoon.

Gulf Shores passed a resolution to OK the postponement, but also had to pass an ordinance for the rescheduling. The council passed both Sunday afternoon.

“We cannot reschedule it because that’s a Department of Justice deal,” Craft said. “We’ll have to deal with that in an additional ordinance. This is just making the statement to postpone it.

“This is an ordinance rescheduling the general election and this will be petitioning the Department of Justice to allow us to hold this election on Sept. 11. We’ll be submitting this to the Department of Justice Monday morning.”

Gulf Shores took the action after hearing the National Weather Service’s forecast for the area.

“We are under a hurricane watch and the National Weather Service does predict we will go under a warning either sometime tonight or in the morning when we wake up,” the city’s Emergency Management Director, Brandan Franklin, said. “The projected path, there’s still a lot of uncertainty there but right now it does show coming in on the Mississippi coast.

“Tuesday at noon that is when they expect that the wind will be a sustained 35 to 45 mph. Generally throughout the county and the state that is when your emergency personnel suspend operations.”

Craft said the storm is predicted to be at the category 2 level at landfall and city evacuation plans are based on that.

“We are advised that you plan for one move up so for our planning purposes we need to be thinking about a category 3 which does dictate time of evacuation which is one of our initial concerns making an appropriate decision concerning the evacuation of low-lying areas,” he said. “It is anticipated that the county will be doing something affirmative along these lines at 8 o’clock tomorrow morning. That is what we believe will happen at this point in time.”

Councilman Jason Dyken wanted to get word out now for visitors on the Island to go ahead and leave as soon as they are ready.

“Should we go ahead and make a declaration that we urge visitors to go ahead and vacate anticipating we’ll have a voluntary evacuation by in the morning?” Dyken asked. “Should we go ahead and make that statement proactively instead of waiting at this point and get that word out immediately?”

Craft and the rest of the council agreed they should.

“We will be able to piggy back on top of that when that announcement is made to also encourage our visitors to the area not to wait that long,” Craft said. “If they’re ready to leave we encourage them to go ahead and begin their evacuation process from the visitors’ standpoint so the roads will not be any more congested for our residents to get out.

“When we get our announcement from the county we will absolutely add our comments to that as an encouragement.”

The voluntary evacuation declaration is aimed mainly at low-lying areas.

“We’re different certainly than Orange Beach in that our elevation and some of our low-lying areas are a lot lower,” Craft said. “And a lot of one way in and one way out West Beach areas, Plash Island and some of Fort Morgan that it is just really important for us to get these people moving a little quicker.”

Gulf Shores had an emergency meeting on Saturday but postponed any official action on the impending bad weather until the Sunday meeting.

“We’re watching it very closely and we feel like (Sunday) gives us the window of evacuation necessary,” Craft said. “If tomorrow the factors have not changed then we probably will be voting to put some type of voluntary evacuation.”

The three items on the agenda Saturday were to discuss Isaac, whether or not to cancel SEC BeachFest activities for Sunday and whether to declare an emergency and call for a voluntary evacuation.

The only action taken was to move Monday’s council meeting to 9 a.m. instead of the normal 5 p.m. for regular sessions.