Posted on June 28, 2016
The state has at last secured the easements necessary for a long-awaited beach replenishment project that will build 22-foot dunes and expand beaches from Mantoloking to Seaside Park.
“We currently have all the properties we need for the base project in northern Ocean County,” said Bob Considine, a spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Protection. “We do have some minor administrative paperwork to complete on about a dozen of the easements, but we do have them in hand.”
The DEP has been collecting easements – the legal documents beachfront homeowners must sign to give access to their land – so that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers can complete the beach replenishment work. Some holdouts had long refused to sign easements, and dozens of them challenged the DEP’s condemnation process in court.
Ed Voigt, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Philadelphia District, said he expects the project to go out to bid by September. Beach replenishment should get underway “before next beach season,” Voigt said.
The corps will also maintain the beaches for 50 years after replenishment. The total cost of the project over that time is expected to be about $514 million.
The initial beach replenishment project will skip Bay Head and Point Pleasant Beach, where dozens of oceanfront property owners still have not signed easements. Berkeley’s South Seaside Park section is also not included in the initial project.
Bay Head homeowners are in court, and have argued that they should be allowed to continue to maintain a rock wall that they credit for saving their properties from the massive damage that happened in Mantoloking. Oceanfront property owners in Bay Head have also questioned whether money will be available in the federal budget for ongoing maintenance of beaches.
Voigt said the corps still intends to complete beach replenishment in Bay Head and Point Pleasant Beach, but the area from Mantoloking south will be done first.
Ortley Beach Voters and Taxpayers Association President Paul Jeffrey described residents’ feelings about the easement news: “people are cautiously jubilant.”
“It’s been years,” Jeffrey said of the long fight to get beach replenishment in northern Ocean. “There’s still a concern that something will upset the apple cart, something will happen in the bidding process, or something will go wrong.”
But Jeffrey said he will be ecstatic when a barge at last begins pumping sand onto Ortley’s beach, which was battered by superstorm Sandy in 2012.
“We’re going to count this as a great accomplishment, when I actually see a dredge start pumping sand,” Jeffrey said. He said he believes property values in Ortley, which have been depressed since the storm, will start to rise once an expanded beach is in place.
Ortley Beach was one of the hardest-hit communities when Sandy roared ashore in October 2012. All but 60 of the 2,600 homes in the oceanfront community were damaged by Sandy’s surge. More than 200 of them were completely destroyed.
Since the storm hit, the voters and taxpayers association has been lobbying strongly in favor of the beach replenishment project, participating in a rally in Trenton and holding a march in support of dunes last summer.
Seaside Heights Mayor Anthony Vaz said earlier this week that the borough had signed the easement allowing beach replenishment in Seaside. The borough had initially resisted, concerned that the large dunes would make it impossible for people on the boardwalk to see the ocean.
“It’s a different world now,” Vaz said. “We have to protect the boardwalk and the properties here.”
Obtaining the easements has been an arduous task.
The state first attempted to seize beachfront property by using the Disaster Control Act, which New Jersey officials believed would be faster than the traditional eminent domain process.
But last year, Ocean County Superior Court Judge Vincent J. Grasso ruled against Long Beach Township in an easement case in which the township used the Disaster Control Act to take an easement located on oceanfront property in Loveladies owned by the Minke Family Trust.
Judge Grasso ruled that the township could not use the act to avoid condemnation actions. Instead, towns must pursue easements from homeowners who are unwilling to give them voluntary by using eminent domain – a process that could take much longer.
The state then began filing eminent domain actions against recalcitrant property owners in northern Ocean County. Several of those actions were also challenged in court, with some homeowners contending that the state was attempting to turn their beachfront land into public property.
In March, Superior Court Assignment Judge Marlene Lynch Ford ruled against 28 oceanfront property owners who had asked the judge to block the state Department of Environmental Protection’s attempts to acquire a portion of their land to build bigger beaches.
The ruling helped pave the way for the beach replenishment project.
Judge Ford rejected the claim of 28 beachfront homeowners who argued at the March 4 court hearing that the law allows the DEP to take property for some projects, but not explicitly for shore protection. And they argued the state is using eminent domain to convert private beaches into public ones.
The property owners had asked Ford to dismiss the eminent domain cases, but she refused.
“The court finds no merit to the argument that the DEP is restricted in taking permanent easements for public access for recreational beaches, which are enhanced by the public funds committed to the shore protection project,” Ford wrote.
Toms River has spent more than $2 million to place sand on its beaches in the last 18 months, as a strong winter storm and an October nor’easter battered Ortley Beach and the township’s northern beaches. The DEP has given the township about $1.75 million in grant funds to help pay for the sand.
Toms River has had its own issues with easements. The initial documents the township acquired from indiividual property owners and beach associations were rejected last year by the Army Corps because of a supplemental agreement Toms River had added with DEP approval.
The township was forced to get the easements again.
Source: app.com
