True Leaders Come for Everywhere

At a NAIOP Conference in Edison, NJ this week one of the speakers was Jo-Anne Schubert, mayor of South Bound Brook, NJ. She wasn’t born in the town of 5,000 and in 1996 when she first ran against the two term mayor who had been born in the town--as she says, “I was still considered an outsider even after living there for 18 years.”

As she related, “The old mayor was comfortable with us being a bedroom town and we needed a vision and balance for the town. We had lost a major plant in the late 80s that took up 12 acres right in our downtown area and it was the death of the community. We had to do something to turn the town around. So I ran. My husband told me: “if you win, that’s great. If you lose we are moving.” She won big.

The factory site that needed to be cleaned up wasn’t any site. It was where asbestos shingles had been invented and had been an industrial site for over 100 years. It was the pits!

The process of changing the image of their town from “the town that no one wanted to admit they lived in, into a charming little town on the banks of the Raritan River” wasn’t easy, had major bumps in the road and didn’t happen overnight. A 100 year flood caused by Hurricane Floyd in 2000 almost derailed everything. As you could imagine, working through the environmental issues with the site were complicated. Mayor Schubert said, “I’d failed science in high school, but now I’m an expert on environmental issues.”

How did she accomplish such a turnaround? She met constantly with her council, sometimes every night of the week. She went to state and federal sources for funds. She got the citizens involved. The group chosen to do the redevelopment was vetted before 200 local residents in a public hearing where everyone had a vote. She was a dynamo!

Every town would do so well to have a mayor like Mayor Schubert who was told in high school that she wasn’t “college material.” Tomorrow: Redevelopment and Branding in South Bound Brook.