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A team of Northwest Indiana business and community leaders will be heading to town next month to see first hand what Asbury Park has to offer.

Organized by Leah Konrady of One Region and Vanessa Ide of the Vanide Group, the 20 to 25 group will be on a fact finding mission to help develop a revitalization plan for three counties along the Lake Michigan shoreline.

Located adjacent to the Chicago and the Illinois state line, the region has a population of 750,000, Konrady said.

“Like any other region, you have cities working with each other and then also competitive with one another,” she said.

Konrady said she discovered Asbury Park through word of mouth, and made a preliminary trip in July trip to vet the State’s most innovative cities.

“When I talked to people about this trip, they say, ‘Oh yeah, The Stone Pony,” she said.  

The team’s focus will be on the city’s downtown renaissance and plans for the waterfront, Konrady said. Their quest will be to get the behind the scenes grassroots stories and the leadership involved in bringing stores and restaurants to the downtown and waterfront.

During a meeting last week with Mayor John Moor, Deputy Mayor Amy Quinn, City Manager Michael Capabianco, and Land and Redevelopment Director Michele Alonso, Konrady and Ide drew parallels between Asbury Park and their region.

“I think this community is a really nice parallel,” she said. “For example, Michigan City’s downtown is currently going through its own revitalization. We are a part of a commuter rail system that feeds into Chicago, and the community is now undertaking initiatives to connect the lake to the downtown region.”

She said the socioeconomic, crime and workforce statistics also fall in line with strengthening how they can utilize Asbury Park’s successes to help their communities. And since the arts are playing a role in revitalizing their region, the team will be particularly interested in catching a glimpse of the city’s art galleries and music culture.

The City’s elected officials and professionals shared their insights; giving a brief history of the resurgence, what the city has to offer, its challenges, and its future plans.

Deputy Mayor Amy Quinn said the uniqueness of the grassroots development in the downtown region speaks volumes to the City’s success. The blend of interest in restoring the residential Victorian architecture, growth of the LGBT community, and the art and music culture helped define the city’s revitalization.

“The galleries came and set up shop and then you saw a lot of niche businesses [and novelty shops] begin to set up shop in the late 1990s and early 2000s,” Quinn said. “I think it came from people being able to buy or rent space in Asbury for a reasonable price. And then some smaller developers came.”

The city’s Director of Land and Redevelopment Michele Alonso said downtown redeveloper Carter Sackman was the first to take advantage of the historic preservation tax credit to refurbish iconic structures like the Steinbach and former Asbury Park Press building.

Mayor John Moor said today the entire downtown region, formally known as the Central Business District, now has the historic designation.

City Manager Michael Capabianco said the Indiana team should look to developers who have cash at hand. He said many people come to city with the hopes of opening a business but ask for financial support from the city.

“We just don’t have those types of programs because we can’t under our laws,” he said.

In laying out the City’s challenges, Capabianco said, “This is four municipalities in one. We have the waterfront, we have the Central Business District, we have the poor southwest and then the middle class northeast. It’s very hard from a management side because every single demand is different, and every single socioeconomic group has different needs, wants, and expectations.”

And since a primary focus will be on transit-rail development, the Indiana team wanted to know more about the City’s pending Transit Village development.

Moor said he hopes to increase the number of trains running to and from the city throughout the year since a goal is that Asbury Park grow into a year round destination. He spoke of the various events that currently draw thousands to the City during the fall and winter months.

Capabianco touched on asset monetization, saying they are in discussions to bring advertisement to the municipal owned train station. Any funds accrued through advertisement would be reinvested into the maintenance of the property, thereby freeing up the budget line item from the municipality’s operating budget.

Another initiative will be to work with Verizon to implement a data tracker than can tell the city where its visitors are coming from and how long they are staying.

The goal the City team said is to plan not just for the next 10 years but for much further down the road. Currently the City’s Master Plan Reexamination Report, Workforce Development, Municipal Public Access Plan, and Southwest Revitalization efforts are being vetted.

“Everyone has a part to play,” Capabianco said.

The team of 20 to 25 people will tour Asbury Park for just a few hours. They will arrive in the late afternoon of Oct. 23, take a tour, spend the night at The Asbury, and fly out of Philadelphia the following morning, Konrady said.

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