Happy New Year and welcome to my first newsletter as President of the Mays Landing Merchants Association. I have been humbled by all the support I have received over the last couple of months preparing to step into this role. I would like to thank Fred and Nancy Kneble from Kneble’s Auto for their time and commitment to the Association during their time as officers. I am delighted to know that I can lean on them for advice going forward.
At our last meeting, we presented our goals for 2019. First of all, we have a goal of doubling our membership by the end of the year to one hundred members. We cannot do this alone as an executive committee. Please reach out to any business owner or person that your feel could help us as an Association. Joining the Association is easy! Just go to mayslandingmerchants.com and click on the Join MLMA button. We also plan on having reciprocal memberships into larger business development organizations like the Greater Atlantic City Chamber of Commerce, the Chamber of Commerce of Southern New Jersey and the Southern New Jersey Development Council. We will be emailing to our membership any events that these organization are holding. If you would like to attend as our representative, please reach out to myself or Mike Dougherty so we can confirm your attendance to the event. When you get a chance, check out their websites and familiarize yourself with their organizations.
Also at our last meeting, we confirmed our events calendar for the year. The Hometown Celebration will be held on Main Street on June 29th. The South Jersey Wine and Food Festival will be held at Lake Lenape September 21st and 22nd. And finally, the Fall Fest will be held at War Memorial Park (next to Courthouse) on October 19th. These events are more successful when we have great volunteerism coming from the membership. Please consider offering a few hours to give back to the community.
Our meeting structure has some changes. We are lining up speakers that will be informative to our members. For example, we have asked the Mayor to come quarterly and offer some updates and be available for questions. Good dialogue between the business community and government is essential. We will have other speakers from though out South Jersey to keep the membership up to date on our area. We will also have a second speaker at the meetings, but the list will come from the membership. It is your chance to showcase your business and to give us tips on how we as a community can help your business grow. If a member’s business is successful then the Association is successful!
We would like to congratulate Art Schenker and Rodney Guishard, who were sworn in for their new terms at the Township reorganization meeting held January 2nd. During Art’s comments, he mentioned how his goals this year are to focus on the business community in the Township of Hamilton. This includes Main Street, the Industrial Park and Shopping and Racetrack District. We at the Association applaud the Mayor for his position and we look forward to working with him and the Committee in these goals. As mentioned previously, collaboration between the businesses and government only strengthen our community.
Thank you again for the support and please reach out to us if you have any questions or comments. Our doors are open for any and all ideas.