Local business representatives throughout the Northwest Indiana Region rose bright and early for breakfast on March 14th. When one is invited to meet for a breakfast date with other business reps keen on local politics, they can hardly turn down such an opportunity. Suffice it to say, the Regional Chamber of Commerce’s first ever Pancakes and Politics gathering drew its intended audience.
The motivation behind Pancakes and Politics is straightforward: get local business owners and representatives to come together and maintain connections, as well as stay informed on any upcoming regional projects and various economic influences.
Candace Shaw, Chair of the Voice of Business Committee and Board Member for Crossroads Regional Chamber of Commerce, was inspired to organize Pancakes and Politics by the handful of other chambers across the country who hold the same program.
“We felt like this would be a really good fit for our chamber, with our goals and with our strategic plan…” Shaw said. “We put the idea together last year and decided to launch in 2018.”
Each meeting will feature a speaker who delivers a presentation, and allows for a brief session of questioning afterward. Bill Hanna, Executive Director of the Northwest Indiana Regional Development Authority, served as the first meeting’s speaker. Hanna provided an update, as well as some insight, on the ongoing expansion of the South Shore commuter line.
A mixture of state, federal, and local funding sources propelled RDA’s plans to create a South Shore rail extension throughout the Region, as well as a double tracking project in the works.
“In 2015, we had just finished the extension of the runway at Gary Airport, and we were still not getting the trends we really want in terms of economic impact,” Hanna said. “We thought, ‘What are we missing?’”
Hanna explained that, after an updated strategic plan and a comparison of population declines and increases, Northwest Indiana lacked one thing that every Illinois-based suburb of Chicago possessed:
“Everything pointed to rail connectors to the Loop,” Hanna said. “There are as many jobs in the Chicago Loop as there are in the entire state of Indiana. So my thought process was, ‘Why don’t we take people to work more efficiently, more effectively? How might this positively impact quality of place [for NWI]?’”
Hanna added that the RDA was pursuing upgrades on the South Shore transit line, which is where the double rail project comes into play. He stressed that single rails, as evidenced in current South Shore stations like Miller, dissuade people from choosing the train as their method of commuting.
“Aside from those already living here, the impact [of a single rail line] on the people who want to move out of the city is much more drastic,” Hanna explained. “They think to themselves, ‘That’s not what I’m used to.’ Sure, they may pay twice as much to live in Naperville or Barrington, but they can get on the train and know that there are triple tracks, it’s modernized, it’s what you think of when you think of getting on a train and commuting to the city to go to work. We don’t have that.”
During the questions that followed, business members agreed that the expansion project would garner economic growth, as well as promote quality of energy, quality of air, and quality of living.
Hanna hopes to officially break ground on the West Lake line in 2019, and the double rail expansion in 2020. The project is currently in Washington D.C.’s FDA waiting room with a few other major transit projects.
“Technically speaking, the construction activity has started,” Hanna said. “The preliminary and preparatory work has been done. And that’s half the workload.”
Crossroads will host its Pancakes and Politics meetings quarterly, at least for the first year.
“This way, we can start to get the brand out there, people can get familiar with the concept, and then we can really gauge interest in participation,” Shaw said. “We feel like it’s pretty good today—we have just under twenty people here, and we planned this one under shorter notice than we will in the future.”
Indeed, a healthy mix of different local businesses, from bankers, hospitality workers, to employees from nonprofit organizations, were present. Shaw was pleased to see the networking in action.
“This kind of meeting has a little bit of all the things we want to see in a chamber,” Shaw said. “We want the education, we want people asking questions and engaging, and we want networking.”
And pancakes, of course.