By Philip Sean Curran
Political and business officials in the nine towns that make up the Bayshore region are putting their heads together to see how they can increase tourism to their part of Monmouth County without overlapping one another.
Bayshore 2020 aims to develop ways to publicize what is available for people to do in those communities along the Route 36 corridor. The effort is being led by Keyport Mayor Collette J. Kennedy and Cliff Moore, a businessman who also serves as the director of economic development of Highlands and Keansburg.
“There is so much to do in the Bayshore besides visiting Sandy Hook National Park,” Kennedy said June 21.
She said those options run the gamut from boating and other water activities to dining out and visiting museums, among other things. Towns also have outdoor movie nights, live music, festivals and even an amusement park in Keansburg.
“Nearly every night of the week, you will find something to do, all summer long and into the fall,” she said.
Her comments came at an event Monmouth County held in Keyport to mark the start of summer. Bayshore officials and others are hoping the county, through its public information and tourism department, will help promote what happens in their communities. They met with county officials earlier this year to press their case on the issue for a region that feels it has been overlooked in the past.
Monmouth County Board of Chosen Freeholders Director Thomas A. Arnone said at the summer kickoff event that the Bayshore has a “full-fledged partner” in the county and that “we’re going to treat all of the county equally for their needs and make sure that we just advance you and be part of that success that you’ll have.”
The aim of Bayshore 2020, made up entirely of volunteers, is to have the towns stop working in “silos,” in Moore’s words, and instead work together. Moore said the region faces a unique set of challenges, including the fact that Route 36 is the only way in and out of the towns, a collection of “blue collar communities,” he said.
“There’s no contiguous roadway other than Route 36,” he said. “So we have challenges and obstacles that other people don’t have.”
Yet Route 36 also provides opportunities, given the 1.7 million visitors each year to Sandy Hook who take the highway to get to the beaches there. But he said tapping into that market would require coordination, such as towns not having outdoor concerts on the same nights of the week.
“We all do movies on the beach,” Moore said. “Let’s not all show ‘Jaws.’ Let one town show ‘Jaws,’ right? So it’s those types of things that we want to collaborate with.”
Another strategy is to attract young families to visit the region to take advantage of free beaches and highlight that, even on rainy days, there is something in one of the nine towns to do no matter the time of year, he said.
The Bayshore consists mostly of small towns of around 10,000 people or fewer. A community like Middletown, part of which makes up the Bayshore, traces its roots back to the 17th century, during the colonial period. Atlantic Highlands boasts of its stock of restored Victorian homes.
“So many of us have history people don’t know about,” Atlantic Highlands Mayor Rhonda C. Le Grice said in an interview after the kickoff event.
Moore said the narrative about the Bayshore also has to change. He said that while the region bounced back strongly after Super Storm Sandy hit in October 2012, people need to stop saying the region is “still coming back from Sandy.”
“That’s a bad message, because when you tell people that, they don’t want to come here,” he said. “So we need to change that quite a bit.”
Kennedy called the Bayshore the best “day-trip region” throughout the year.
“There is nothing you can do in New Jersey you can’t do in these nine towns,” Moore said.
Tourism is a major part of the state’s economy. Last year, New Jersey had 111 million visitors who spent $44.7 billion, with more than half of all spending on food, beverages and lodging, according to a report by the state Division of Travel and Tourism. Of that total, 8.6 million people visited Monmouth County – among the highest totals in the state.
Arnone said some think the tourism industry in the county only means the Jersey Shore area.
“And that is farthest from the truth,” he said. “Tourism goes throughout our all 53 municipalities.”
