By KEVIN NEVERS

For Mark Chamberlain, the newly installed president of the Chesterton/Duneland Chamber of Commerce, the community is on the cusp of a commercial boom.

And it is absolutely vital, he believes, for the Chamber to involve itself actively—far more actively than it recently has—in the planning process.

“In the next 18 months some very important decisions will be made in this community,” he told the Chesterton Tribune. “The Chamber needs to have a role in those decisions. Considering what’s happening in Portage and Valparaiso, what’s happening around us, you can be for economic development or against it, but it’s no longer an if question. The traffic’s heading in our direction. The idea is for the Chamber to get in a position to have some functionality, to sit at the table.”

Chamberlain frankly acknowledges that not everyone in Duneland is a hearty supporter of economic development. ”You know you’re going to take some arrows in the back if you have an opinion,” he said. “But you can’t complain about who’s in office if you’re not going to vote. We need aggressive but responsible growth. We need to make unified, responsible decisions about growth without losing the essence of the community. If you’re not moving forward, you’re dying.”

Here’s the problem, though. In Chamberlain’s view the Chamber lacks—or is perceived in the community to lack—the authority, the bona fides, to be a player. “You don’t want to be vocal if you don’t have credibility,” he said. “It’s not that the Chamber has been right or wrong in the past about issues. It’s worse than that. We’ve been irrelevant.”

A case in point: the Chamber fields a number of busy, highly productive committees--Partners in Education, Ambassadors, Retail, Legislative—but remarkably, Chamberlain said, it has tasked no functioning committee specifically to the ways and means of economic development.

That oversight Chamberlain means to rectify. Even now he’s recruiting some topflight minds to sit on such a committee—Chamberlain describes it as a “pretty powerful think tank”—and while he declined for the moment to name his volunteers, Chamberlain did say that they are “heavy hitters” who come from both business and the academy.

Still, however well packed the new committee may be with talent, it’s likely to achieve little in the way of substance if its members toil in isolation, apart from the elected and appointed officials in Chesterton who are also, as it happens, toiling in isolation, Chamberlain thinks. “Without a town manager or a mayor, there’s no coordination or communication,” Chamberlain said. “The one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing. I think there’s the feeling that nobody’s sure what’s going on, what’s on the table. We need more connectivity between the town and the Chamber.”

Chamberlain proposes something like a cross-fertilization, accordingly, with the seating of Chamber representatives, for instance, on the Chesterton Economic Development Company (CEDC), and the seating of CEDC reps on the Chamber’s new committee.

Meanwhile, Chamberlain intends to push volunteerism during his term. Sixteen people sit on the Chamber Board, he said, yet they meet only once a month. “It’s literally impossible to do anything that has to get done, much less what you want to get done, in that time. I’d like to see a more robust committee system.”

But that means more volunteers. At various times, Chamberlain said, the Partners in Education Committee has been down to three members, despite the enormous amount of work involved every year in organizing the Reality Store and the Career & Community Job Fair. “Some of the committee projects are pretty intense. More people on the committees would spread the work load. So I’ve been shamelessly asking everyone I know to help and to go back where they work and ask two or three people if they will help out too. I’d like to see a 16-member Board and 50-member committees.”

Chamberlain has lived in Chesterton for 40 years and is the Chair and CEO of Lakeside Financial Group at 407 W. Indiana Ave. He describes his own management style as an “enabling” one. “I’m an enabler, in a good way,” Chamberlain said. “I hire the smartest people I can find and let them do their thing. I don’t get in the way. ‘Don’t come to me with problems,’ I tell them. ‘Come to me with three solutions.’ That’s sort of my mantra.”

That sort of style, Chamberlain said, suits the Chamber well. “In terms of working with a mostly volunteer organization, it’s tough to be a micromanager. If you come on too strong, you put off people who just want to help.”

Chamberlain is strongly encouraging Duneland businesspeople and their employees to volunteer their time and expertise and make the Chamber a more muscular advocate of economic development. “It’s time for the Chamber to weigh in on intelligent growth,” he said.

Posted 2/12/2008