Posted on August 9, 2016
By Jean Mikle
The Township Council has transferred $5 million from a capital bond ordinance into an account set aside for beach repairs.
Administrator Paul J. Shives said the money came from a $38 million capital ordinance adopted by the Township Council in early April 2013, less than six months after superstorm Sandy struck the Shore.
The ordinance provided for repairs to township buildings, drainage systems and roads that had been damaged or destroyed by Sandy. Toms River lost more than $2 billion in ratables when the storm hit in October 2012, and about 10,000 homes here were either destroyed or damaged.
Not all the money had been used, and Shives said the $5 million will be used to repair and shore up township beaches until the long-awaited U.S. Army Corps of Engineers beach replenishment project gets underway.
The project is now expected to go out to bid sometime in September, with construction beginning in the first few months of 2017.
“We transferred $5 million to make it available for beach replenishment,” Shives said. “We need to make sure we have enough funding on hand until the Army Corps of Engineers project moves forward.”
The township poured tons of sand on its battered beaches following an October 2015 nor’easter and a January blizzard that brought high surf and strong winds to the Shore.
Toms River spent more than $800,000 to restore beaches after the October storm, and another $1.7 million to shore up vulnerable areas following the January snowstorm. In April, Toms River paid contractor Earle Asphalt an additional $175,000 to place sand at a vulnerable spot in Ortley Beach where erosion had occurred.
The township has received $1,750,000 in grants from the state Department of Environmental Protection to help restore its beaches after storms.
In late June, the DEP announced that it had obtained all the easements – the legal documents oceanfront property owners must sign to allow access to their land – in the stretch of northern Ocean County from Mantoloking to Seaside Park.
“We currently have all the properties we need for the base project in northern Ocean County,” DEP spokesman Bob Considine said in June. “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 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, has said he expects the northern Ocean County project to go out to bid by September. Beach replenishment should get underway “before next beach season,” Voigt said.
That means at least another storm season will pass before replenishment comes for beaches that have not yet recovered from the battering caused by Sandy in October 2012.
The initial project is expected to cost $167 million and take more than a year to complete, Voigt has said.
Source: app.com
