What Horry County residents should know before Sept. 6 — and the money and governance questions still worth asking
Surfside Beach will close out the summer season for the second consecutive year with fireworks over the Atlantic, and this time the town is putting the show squarely inside Labor Day weekend.
The 2nd Annual End of Summer Fireworks Festival is set for Sunday, Sept. 6, at the Surfside Beach Fishing Pier parking lot at 11 S. Ocean Boulevard. Admission is free. The evening builds toward a fireworks display launched from the pier and fired out over the water.
For a town that went nearly a decade without a pier fireworks show, and that cut its Fourth of July display outright in 2024 to save money, a second straight year of Labor Day weekend pyrotechnics is not a small thing. It is a deliberate bet on shoulder-season tourism, paid for with accommodations tax dollars, and it arrived last year with an ordinance question attached that the town has never fully resolved in public.
Here is what residents need to know — the logistics first, then the parts that deserve a closer look.
What’s actually happening on Sept. 6
Join Us for the End Of Summer Fireworks Festival
The festival runs from 5 to 9 p.m. in the pier parking lot, with live music, arts and crafts vendors, food trucks and a children’s area featuring a bounce house and face painting. The fireworks close the night. Visitors are being told to bring beach chairs and show up early.
Parking is the practical hurdle, and the town has planned around it. The pier lot itself is used as the festival footprint, so attendees are directed to park in any town lot and ride a free trolley shuttle, which will run from 4:45 to 9:30 p.m. In year one, the pier lot and the pier itself were both closed from 5 a.m. on the day of the event for staging and safety, and the fire department, police department and public works all had a presence, with security sweeps before and after the display [Town of Surfside Beach, 2025].
One caution worth flagging: published start times are not consistent across the town’s own materials. The town’s 2026 events calendar lists the festival as a 3 to 9 p.m. event, while the town’s individual event listing and outside coverage both put it at 5 to 9 p.m. [Town of Surfside Beach, 2026; Visit Surfside Beach, 2026; WFXB, 2026]. Vendor language on the town’s event page has also been inconsistent with the vendor lineup described in press coverage. Residents planning around a specific arrival time should confirm directly with Town Hall at 843-913-6111.
That kind of small discrepancy is easy to shrug off. It matters more when you consider how quickly this event grew from nothing.
Nine years dark: how Surfside got back to fireworks
The 2025 festival was the first fireworks show launched from the Surfside Beach pier in nine years — the display had lapsed after 2016, when Hurricane Matthew damaged the pier.
The gap did not close on its own. As recently as spring 2024, Surfside Beach town council voted to strip roughly $30,000 in Independence Day fireworks out of a $22.5 million budget and move the money elsewhere. The debate was blunt. One councilmember described fireworks as essentially discarding money; another framed zeroing out the line item as an easy $30,000 in savings during a tight year [WBTW, 2024].
Roughly fifteen months later, the same town was launching shells off its pier — just on a different date, funded from a different pot, and attached to a full festival rather than a standalone show. Councilman Skip Walls offered the reasoning plainly at the time, noting that the same fireworks would have cost several times as much if the town had tried to book them for the Fourth of July [MyHorryNews, 2025].
That is the quiet strategic insight behind this event, and it deserves credit: the town found a date nobody else was bidding on. Fourth of July is the most expensive night of the year to buy a fireworks show in a market saturated with them. Labor Day weekend is not. Surfside solved a budget objection by moving the calendar rather than by spending more.
Whether the resulting spend has paid off is a separate question — and the town has published enough numbers to start answering it.
Following the money
The 2025 festival was funded through Accommodations Tax revenue, not the general fund. Council approved a $40,000 event budget; the town later reported spending $34,000 [MyHorryNews, 2025; Town of Surfside Beach, 2025].
The fireworks themselves were held to $19,999 after negotiation, hitting a ceiling council had explicitly requested. Councilmember LaVerne Kreklau — who had been among the voices against the Fourth of July show a year earlier — was the one who pointed out that the sub-$20,000 cap was a council directive [MyHorryNews, 2025]. The display ran roughly 20 minutes beginning around 9 p.m.
On the return side, the town’s own post-event report to council put vendor revenue at $2,070 across 40 vendors, and characterized 2025 as a test year. It described Pier District restaurants and bars reporting either their single best sales day ever or a day ranking among their top three, with hotels and rental houses busy [Town of Surfside Beach, 2025; WPDE, 2025].
Two things are true about that report at the same time, and Horry County residents should hold both.
First, the A-Tax framing is legitimate. South Carolina law restricts accommodations and hospitality tax revenue to tourism-related purposes, and a free public festival designed to fill hotel rooms on a shoulder-season Sunday is a textbook qualifying use. These are not property tax dollars being redirected.
Second, the success metrics are soft. “Best sales day ever” is self-reported by businesses to the town, not audited or independently verified. The town has not published a hard attendance figure — coverage consistently used the word “thousands,” which spans a wide range [WPDE, 2025]. And $2,070 in vendor revenue against $34,000 in spending is not a break-even story; it is a marketing expense, which is a perfectly defensible thing for a tourism town to make, but should be described as one.
The cleanest fix is also the easiest: publish a defensible attendance estimate, and publish year-over-year September A-Tax and H-Tax receipts alongside it. Surfside already tracks those revenues closely — Mayor Robert Krouse walked residents through multi-year accommodations and hospitality tax trends in a May 2026 budget update [Town of Surfside Beach, 2026]. Attaching a single festival weekend to that same data would move the conversation from anecdote to evidence.
There is also a question that has nothing to do with money.
The ordinance question nobody has closed out
Surfside Beach’s own code, Section 8-21(a), makes it unlawful to discharge fireworks within town limits outside narrow windows on July 4 and Dec. 31, and specifically bars discharging fireworks within 500 feet of the town’s fishing pier [Town of Surfside Beach, code of ordinances].
That prompted residents in 2025 to ask how the town could hold a fireworks show off the pier. The answer is Section 8-21(b), which carves out town-authorized public displays conducted under State Fire Marshal rules — a real and adequate exception [Town of Surfside Beach, code of ordinances; MyHorryNews, 2025].
The looser thread is process. Krouse said the 30-day notice requirement attached to that exception would have required calling a special council meeting, which he did not consider a good use of time, and that communications coordinator Tabitha Mull instead presented the event to council for approval by email [MyHorryNews, 2025]. Krouse also argued the discharge restriction was aimed at residents and visitors rather than the town, while acknowledging the language might need clarifying.
He was right that it needs clarifying. A year later, that is still the unfinished business here. Approval by email is not a public vote, and an ordinance the mayor himself said may need to be rewritten has, as far as the public record shows, not been rewritten. The fix is small — a clarifying amendment and a noticed agenda item authorizing the display each year — and it would cost the town nothing but a few minutes of a regular meeting.
Residents who want to raise it have an obvious opening: ask council to place the 2027 display on a public agenda in advance, and to amend 8-21 so the exception reads as clearly as the prohibition does.
The bottom line for Horry County residents
Go. It is free, it is family-oriented, it is one of the few Grand Strand events that costs a household nothing but gas and a beach chair, and the trolley system means you do not have to fight for a pier parking space.
But go with your eyes open about what this is. Surfside Beach is spending tourism tax dollars to manufacture a reason for people to stay one more night at the end of the season, and by the town’s own account, year one worked well enough to justify year two. That is a reasonable use of restricted funds and a genuinely clever piece of calendar arbitrage.
What is still missing is the accountability layer: verified attendance, revenue data tied to the actual weekend, and a clean public authorization that matches the town’s own ordinance. None of that is hard. All of it would make the case for year three considerably stronger than a self-reported “best day ever.”
Bring the chairs. Then ask the questions.
Further Reading
End of Summer Fireworks Festival – WFXB — Surfside Beach To Host 2nd Annual End Of Summer Fireworks Festival (Aug. 27, 2026): https://www.wfxb.com/2026/08/27/surfside-beach-to-host-2nd-annual-end-of-summer-fireworks-festival/
End of Summer Fireworks Festival – Town of Surfside Beach — End of Summer Fireworks Festival event page: https://www.surfsidebeach.org/396/End-of-Summer-Fireworks-Festival
End of Summer Fireworks Festival – Town of Surfside Beach — End of Summer Fireworks Festival event page: https://www.surfsidebeach.org/396/End-of-Summer-Fireworks-Festival
End of Summer Fireworks Festival – Town of Surfside Beach — 2026 Events Calendar (PDF): https://www.surfsidebeach.org/DocumentCenter/View/4097/Surfside-events-2026
End of Summer Fireworks Festival – MyHorryNews — Surfside Beach is closing out summer with a nearly $20,000 fireworks finale (Aug. 14, 2025): https://www.myhorrynews.com/entertainment/surfside-beach-is-closing-out-summer-with-a-nearly-20-000-fireworks-finale/article_a1367c1e-d295-4477-9310-97e880c66035.html
End of Summer Fireworks Festival – WPDE — Surfside Beach closes out summer with first pier fireworks display in nearly a decade (Sept. 1, 2025): https://wpde.com/news/local/surfside-beach-closes-out-summer-with-first-pier-fireworks-display-in-nearly-a-decade-kite-festival-spring-robert-krouse-reception-vendors
End of Summer Fireworks Festival – WBTW — Budget cuts nix Independence Day fireworks show in Surfside Beach (2024): https://www.wbtw.com/news/grand-strand/surfside-beach/budget-cuts-nix-independence-day-fireworks-show-in-surfside-beach/
End of Summer Fireworks Festival – Town of Surfside Beach — October 2025 council packet with post-festival report (PDF): https://www.surfsidebeach.org/AgendaCenter/ViewFile/Item/1501?fileID=6644
End of Summer Fireworks Festival – Town of Surfside Beach — Fireworks ordinance, Section 8-21: https://www.surfsidebeach.org/406/Fireworks
End of Summer Fireworks Festival – Town of Surfside Beach — Accommodations Tax Committee: https://www.surfsidebeach.org/158/Accommodations-Tax
End of Summer Fireworks Festival – Mayor Krouse’s Weekly Update, May 15, 2026 (revenue trends): https://www.surfsidebeach.org/m/newsflash/home/detail/791
End of Summer Fireworks Festival – Visit Surfside Beach — Surfside Beach Fishing Pier events: https://www.visitsurfsidebeach.com/venue/surfside-beach-fishing-pier/
