POINT PLEASANT, NJ – If you check out the Amethyst Beach Motel in Point Pleasant on travel website review pages, it’s pretty much everything you would expect from a Jersey Shore motel. It has decent reviews, complaints about cleanliness, and minor inconveniences, but you would never expect the mayor of the seaside borough would be seeking to raze it and create a parking lot in the tightly packed borough.
Many of the comments online about the motel are rave reviews about fulfilling family vacation memories. It’s the Jersey Shore. The entertainment industry has a five-month window to book rooms and nobody comes here expecting 5-star service.
In the winter, like many other motels at the Jersey Shore, after the tourists are gone, they are converted into seasonal housing, sometimes for Section 8 recipients.
Point Pleasant Mayor Paul Kinatra wants it gone and the borough council introduced an ordinance to make it so. The government of Point Pleasant, struggling to maintain their identity as one a family-friendly destination at the Jersey Shore is seeking to condemn the motel and take it through eminent domain.
There are conflicting reasons given by township officials. Kinatra’s ordinance doesn’t say why the township wants the property, other than to create a parking lot, but Police Chief Joseph Michigan said the transient population that occupies the hotel during the off-season brings with them their drug addiction and illegal activities.
The motel owner, Bob Fernicola said in a post on their Facebook page they’re not giving in to Kanitra’s power move against the business.