Joe Grillo announces city council candidacy
'We're at a crossroads in Asbury Park'
Joe Grillo has announced his candidacy in the 2013 city council election.
Grillo, 36, lives on Cookman Avenue with his wife, planning board member Seresa Grillo, and their three-year-old daughter, Leonora. Grillo works as the executive director of the Monmouth County Democrats and is the chairperson of the Asbury Park Democratic organization.
Previously, he was managing partner and sales director for his family’s ceramic tile and granite importing company, Ideal Tile Importing. He credits his 18 years there with teaching him the ins and outs of running a small business, from making payroll every week to managing employees.
After growing up in Freehold, Grillo attended Rider University, attaining a bachelor’s degree in political science and philosophy. He moved to Asbury Park in 2006.
“I fell in love with the diversity of the town and the potential the town had — the burgeoning music scene at Asbury Lanes and [the now-defunct] Oddfellow’s, and all the different venues,” he said. “We want [our daughter] to grow up in a diverse neighborhood with all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds and to realize that diversity is our stength.”
Grillo was instrumental in coordinating volunteer efforts after Hurricane Sandy, collecting phone numbers and dispatching volunteers to wherever they were needed, including Asbury Park, the Bayshore areas and Belmar. He helped orchestrate everything from food service at Phillips Seaview Towers to lake clean-ups throughout the city.
“We all worked together with the office of emergency management for that common goal of making sure our residents were safe and cared-for and basically taken care of,” Grillo said of the post-storm efforts. “That kind of community spirit is what affected me the most in terms of coming up with the decision of whether or not to run.”
Grillo, who is a member of the city’s zoning board, hopes to both speak for the whole city and give younger residents a voice with his council run. He hopes to spread prosperity throughout the city by promoting employment of city residents.
“We’re at a crossroads in Asbury Park,” he said. “There’s been all this progress in the past 10 years throughout the city and I feel that progress needs to continue, but we also need to look at the neighborhoods that haven’t enjoyed as much of the prosperity of the other parts of the city.”
Job availability is central to this issue, Grillo believes. If elected to the council, he would seek to establish a network between local businesses and qualified job seekers through job fairs, training and mentorship. He also hopes to use available resources like Interfaith Neighbors and the Springwood Center to “create avenues of skill development involving local unions and local technology companies,” he said.
He also wants to boost employment by enforcing and expanding ordinances involving local construction projects, public and private.
“We need to work with these private developers and negotiate with them to ensure their construction jobs are contracted to local, certified, trained workers,” Grillo said.
Grillo also hopes to continue the push to redevelop the Springwood Avenue corridor with both business and residential construction, in hopes that the largely vacant area will be repopulated.
“You see an intermingling of the different people from different backgrounds, and that’s where you get that creative juice that Asbury Park is famous for,” he said.
He would also like to bring City Hall up to speed technologically by introducing an ordinance to create a chief technology officer.
“My goal is to bring City Hall into the 21st century by implementing cutting edge software that will manage municipal functions, streamline redundancies at the municipal level, cut out waste and ultimately save taxpayers money,” he said.
He’d also like to see elected officials opening up lines of communication with the public through social media, he said.
“Why not take a page from Cory Booker and tweet your information?” he said. “I think every single employee should have some kind of avenue for residents to get in touch with them.”
He also finds environmental issues to be important, and would push for Bradley Cove to be turned into a public park if elected, he said.
Grillo hasn’t chosen a ticket on which to run yet, but said he will pick running mates within the next few weeks.
Grillo’s campaign website is joegrilloap.com, and his campaign Facebook page can be accessed at facebook.com/joegrilloap.
The city council election is scheduled for Tuesday, May 14. Petitions for candidacy are now available in City Hall. All five city council seats are up for grabs.
