Planning 104: The Difference Between Transparency & Engagement

Ever walk around Asbury Park and feel surprised by the many changes that have come to Asbury Park? Do you ever think to yourself:

Who decided that, and why didn’t we know it was happening?

The recent ending of Yappy Hour, for example. It’s not for everyone, it was a quirky, authentic, and beloved social event. If on-line reactions are any indicator, most residents only learned it was happening after the fact – a casualty to on-going redevelopment in the waterfront. Yes, documents were posted. Yes, hearings occurred. But surprise and confusion across the community point to a larger truth: a process can be transparent without being engaged.

To put it simply:

TRANSPARENCY and ENGAGEMENT are not the same thing.

Transparency means people can see what has happened; engagement means people can shape what is happening. Both are important — but only engagement produces outcomes grounded in the lived experience, priorities, and aspirations of residents. If you build early consensus for action, broaden participation, and pressure-test assumptions, you avoid the “wait…when did THAT get approved?” we know all too well.

Whether it’s Holy Spirit Church, 1201 Memorial Drive, the Memorial Drive Redesign, the Play Structure in Sunset Park, or even our in-person-only City Council meetings, the pattern is the same: Asbury Park’s process may be transparent but it is not engaged. In fact, the City relies on antiquated tools and does bare minimum to invite the participation of citizens in the decisions made on their behalf. Too often the public gets three minutes to react to fully baked plans instead of being invited to define what success looks like at the beginning.

It’s not complicated or expensive – it just requires certain progressives in City Hall to walk the walk. So to speak.

Watch What They Do, Not What They Say

Our “progressive” City Council speaks loudly about transparency and public input and ran on a platform of restoring it to our local government. Those values are the right ones, but transparency only matters if the public actually has a fair chance to participate.

That requires more than posting agendas online a matter of days before consequential topics are to be discussed or voted on. It requires awareness, access, and deliberate efforts to remove barriers to participation.

Can I demonstrate how Asbury Park meets the bare minimum of transparency but falls short on meaningful engagement? You betcha.

Public Meetings in the Age of Zoom

City Council meetings should be the most accessible entry point for residents to understand issues, ask questions, and shape outcomes in their community. In all fairness, the City does post agendas, minutes, and video recordings of public meetings. That’s transparency – the ability to look up what happened.

Putting aside how convoluted it is to locate those resources – or that they are only posted in English – the act of posting documents is not engagement. Engagement is the deliberate involvement of residents in shaping the decisions made on their behalf. Even when major decisions are on the agenda – Holy Spirit Church, redevelopment votes, or major infrastructure items – the public is left to sift through PDFs on a website where key information is buried several clicks deep and minutes appear with no summaries or context. Staying informed and participating should not require determination and perseverance.

A city that prides itself on progressive ideals should be leading the region in access and participation, not doing the bare minimum and calling it transparent.

However, the flow of information is only part of the problem – how meetings are conducted also present significant barriers to participation. So, in addition to posting agendas, anyone (and I do mean anyone) can speak on a topic of their choosing for up to 3 minutes. Without getting into the details, on the surface this seems like a great opportunity for participation, but…

Council meetings are (mostly) every other Wednesday at 6:00 p.m and you must attend IN Person.

If you can’t show up in person, there’s no livestream, no call-in line, no hybrid option, and no way to participate remotely. There may be no perfect time, but anyone who works outside the city, commutes, picks up kids, cooks dinner, or juggles the daily evening routine may be hard pressed. With a third of our population living at or below the poverty limit, do you expect attending a public meeting to be their top priority? And what about all our new part-time residents? Will they be driving from Bedminster, Boonton and Bala Kynwyd for the privilege of 3-minutes on the record?

Other New Jersey towns – Princeton, Morristown, Rocky Hill – treat hybrid access as standard practice. In 2025, insisting that everyone be physically present in one room at one hour isn’t engagement – it’s a barrier dressed up as tradition. Yet we still hear Council members lament low participation.

Think this sounds like a complicated issue to fix? It’s not. In fact, the Civic Engage platform the City licenses (with taxpayer dollars) to collect your sewer payments and license fees supports on-line and hybrid public meetings – it’s simply not enabled or added to our license. It’s not a perfect fix, and it’s not all that needs to be done, but hybrid meetings are one easy way to invite more participation, build consensus, disseminate information, and allow residents to interact directly with their government before decisions are made.

How transparent is that? Transparent Enough to See Right Through It.

Redevelopment: Notice Without Involvement

In addition to how and when meetings are conducted, the ‘redevelopment’ process adds another layer of obscurity to decisions that carry enormous consequences for neighborhoods. The redevelopment process decides new circulation patterns, housing options, neighborhood character, and social spaces that make Asbury Park more than a tourist attraction. While there is no technical legal requirement to notify residents of these applications, that is no excuse. Especially when the creation (and amending) of redevelopment plans is entirely controlled by the City Council, residents deserve more than the (appallingly low) technical minimum.

Take 1201 Memorial Drive – the vacant lot on Memorial Drive between 4th and 5th Ave. It was the actions of informed residents (including myself) who worked to disseminate information, keep people informed, and hold the City Council to account for the decisions being made on our behalf but without our involvement.

The one time the City was legally required to provide residents notice was after the redevelopment plan had already been drafted, negotiated, and approved. And even then notification came one day before the Planning Board hearing where the public has almost no power to change anything. It also arrived on a day City Hall was closed with instructions that residents could “review the plans at City Hall” – which was impossible. Also, notices only go to property owners within 200 feet. This means that most rental tenants and anyone more than a block away were unaware of a coming 130-unit development that is larger than the total housing stock of their neighborhood.

This is not a one-off either. The same thing happened with the recent ‘improvements’ to Memorial drive.

Neither residents nor highly engaged advocates on the Asbury Park Complete Streets Coalition found out about a major ‘redesign’ of Memorial drive that included bike lanes, parking realignment, and altered sightlines until the project was already out to bid for construction. Even then, advocates proposed a safer and more consistent two-way bike lane adjacent to the train tracks. Ultimately, small changes to how the street is painted would have eliminated driveway conflicts, improved sight distances, and improved pedestrian safety. Instead, the City insisted “the deal is done,” and proceeded with their configuration. The results speak for themselves.

What’s more the so-called redesign of memorial drive was later used to justify why circulation patterns at 1201 Memorial “couldn’t” be re-considered. One unengaged process became the excuse for another. Seems a feature of the system, rather than a bug.

These aren’t small oversights. They’re signals of a system where the public learns about decisions only after they are irreversible. It tells you something about the value placed actually involving local residents who could have improved the outcomes or helped to form consensus within the community about what success looks like.

Transparent, yet somehow still opaque.

The Master Plan Is Our Chance to Get It Right

Asbury Park is about to embark on a once-in-a-generation rewrite of its Master Plan. No one expects the process to happen secretly – but this moment offers an opportunity to do engagement and not just transparency.

Doing it well means meeting people where they are:

• Multiple meetings and formats to meet people in places/neighborhoods they already gather
• Hybrid Access so working families can participate from home.
• Neighborhood workshops and charrettes where ideas originate from the community.
• Multilingual and accessible materials to ensure a process that is inclusive.
• Simple online surveys and text alerts so residents don’t have to dig for information.
• Clear follow-through showing how public input influenced decisions.

Real engagement isn’t complicated or expensive – it’s just intentional and a little bit slower. What’s more, it puts people in touch with each other. It’s how cities build trust, reduce conflict, and produce plans that genuinely reflect the people who live there.

If Asbury Park is serious about its future – and addressing the needs of the people who live here – then transparency is the bare minimum. Engagement is what is needed to assure we have a clear vision of the city we will be 10 years from now.