March 10 Asbury Park Press
LONG BRANCH — A new set of proposed beach access rules could be ready for debate in early April, and advocacy groups say they are trying to raise the issue's public profile to reverse what they see as a state retreat on access issues.
"Go one-quarter mile up the road, and you'll start seeing the "no beach access' signs. . . . It's like that pretty much all the way up to Sandy Hook," said John Weber of the Surfrider Foundation, one of four groups that hosted a press conference at the Bare Wire Surf Shop on Wednesday.
The state Department of Environmental Protection is readying a new set of access rules, in part because of a state court decision that struck down some requirements imposed on Avalon. That ruling held that the DEP could not explicitly demand certain parking or access requirements as a precondition for beach funding.
Still, with its new rules, the DEP could use those criteria when it scores towns for eligibility to get state funding, according to Ray Cantor, a top adviser in the agency. "We're very confident this will result in better access," Cantor said from the agency's Trenton headquarters.
The Avalon decision also struck down the DEP's demand for public access points at every quarter mile of linear beachfront, but "the Army Corps of Engineers requires half-mile access (for beach restoration projects), and we'll be incorporating that," Cantor said.
Ranking towns by their performance on access "is not a bad approach," said Tim Dillingham of the American Littoral Society. "You can prefer to spend your money on towns that provide parking, that provide access." But Dillingham said he has yet to see proposed rules on how ranking would be accomplished.
A legal principle called the public trust doctrine holds that the state owns the tidal water's edge and must ensure access for all, Dillingham said. Court rulings in the 1970s and 1980s struck down municipal restrictions on who can use the beaches, but "meaningful" access is still a problem in places without parking and public restrooms, he added. Access activists argued that the proposed rules could do much more to solve remaining access problems while working around roadblocks that the court raised in the Avalon decision. "That decision was made on very narrow grounds," said Ralph Coscia of the group Citizens' Right to Access Beaches, who with others worried that the Avalon case is being used to justify a wider state pullback. "We're giving these towns the ability to make these decisions based on their thought patterns," without harder state criteria, he said.
The CRAB group is focused on northern Ocean County, where beachgoers can encounter 16 entities controlling access along 1.5 miles of sand in Point Pleasant Beach, and two-hour parking limits in Mantoloking, Coscia said.
"Their way of keeping people off the beach is very, very restrictive parking restrictions," Coscia said, a pattern also seen in Deal that reduces fishermen's and surfers' use of the beach there, Weber said.
The last round of access rules, adopted in 2007 during the Corzine administration, seemed to have some effect, Coscia said. "Until these rules came out, the only way we could resolve these issues was through long, costly litigation," Coscia said. Showing photos of signs that once warned people away from sections in Point Pleasant Beach, he added, "Signs like this had begun to disappear over the years. . . . Over this past summer, coincidence or not, these signs started to reappear."
Cantor of the DEP said beach access is not a widespread problem in New Jersey, but more like "maybe three towns in the entire coastal area that have not been acting in the best interest" of the public. Still, Dillingham said, that raises questions on the issue of "separate and unequal" when there's not realistic access to beaches maintained with taxpayer dollars.
Monday, March 7, 2011, By DONNA WEAVER Staff Writer, Press of AC
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LONG BEACH TOWNSHIP — The North Beach section of the township has a new dune system thanks to migrating sand from recently replenished beaches in neighboring Harvey Cedars. For now, despite their jokes about the migrating sand, the mayors in these two Long Beach Island municipalities will share the sand dumped on LBI as part of a $72 million federal beach replenishment project.
“The sand from Harvey Cedars was trespassing in North Beach and I arrested it all,” Long Beach Township Mayor Joseph Mancini said and laughed.
Long Beach Township remains in a holding pattern as it waits for its own beach replenishment project. The township is fighting for scarce federal funding and continues to battle oceanfront homeowners for easements to complete the project.
“Knowing that we’re not going to get federal funding for a while, we took the sand that was on our property, pushed it up and groomed the dunes and made it look like a real beach,” Mancini said.
He said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will eventually return to Harvey Cedars to restore the beaches and sand lost during storms. “I’ll probably send Joe a bill for the sand or I’ll send a dozer down and get it back,” Harvey Cedars Mayor Jonathan Oldham joked. “We’ve lost a bit, but sand moves from wind and waves on the north end into Loveladies, but we lost more down south. In the wintertime, the wind blows northeast and erodes the beaches to the south.”
Oldham said that if the beach replenishment project had been completed islandwide, Harvey Cedars would not be losing sand in a sucking, vortex effect to neighboring beaches.
This is not the first time Harvey Cedars has lost sand since a $25 million project was completed last year. In June, a dredge returned to the borough to repair a portion of the beach that was eroded by winter storms. The dredge pumped 300,000 cubic yards of sand back onto beaches in the northern half of the project. During the multimillion-dollar project, 2.7 million cubic yards of sand were pumped onto Harvey Cedars beaches.
Nearby Ship Bottom benefited from sand that migrated from Surf City’s beaches after a similar beach replenishment project was completed in 2007.
Mancini said ravaged dunes along North Beach’s mile-long shore have recently been rebuilt to 18 feet above sea level with all of the sand that migrated from Harvey Cedars. “We put in the Mancini no-think method dune system,” Mancini said.
Stephen Rochette, spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said the longshore transport of sand is a natural process and can change at different times of the year and move in a northern or southern direction. It is a natural process and is not something that can be changed or stopped, he said. The Army Corps will be completing project monitoring surveys in the fall to evaluate the conditions of the beach in Harvey Cedars, Rochette said.