ASBURY PARK

Getting ready for the next Sandy

Kirk Moore
@KirkMooreAPP

ASBURY PARK – Beach replenishment by the Army Corps of Engineers won’t be enough to save Shore towns from the next big storm without making hard choices about where people live and changing long-held assumptions about how communities should look, experts said at a boardwalk forum Tuesday.

“We have no strategies for the back bay. We don’t have any real clear strategy for major urban areas,” warned Tony MacDonald of the Urban Coast Institute at Monmouth University. “Don’t rely on the beach project.”

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Part of those strategies will unavoidably include hard structures like sea walls and breakwaters, even if there’s a preference for using “nature based” protection like beaches and wide marshes to absorb and reduce storm floods, MacDonald told the group. There’s just not enough land in coastal New Jersey, “which is a very highly urban state,” he said.

Naval Weapons Station Earle is looking at tapping a federal fund that can be used to buy buffer areas around bases, using the land to keep houses from being built too close to military activities.

Earle also may receive more protection from future floods like superstorm Sandy’s surge that heavily damaged the Leonardo facility in Middletown.

Earle’s community planning officer, Dennis Blazak, did something similar when he worked at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst.

A project there with the state Pinelands Commission, Ocean County and other partners preserved land to keep Lakehurst aircraft runway approaches free of future development, and keep open space and wildlife habitat.

William D. Kastning, executive director of the Monmouth Conservation Foundation, said that got his attention.

“We’re all about land preservation,” said Kastning, whose group hosted the forum at Tim McLoone’s Supper Club here.

Finding money has been a problem for years, he said.

“The towns were tapped out. State funding was not too good. How about the feds?”

Building those partnerships now can benefit civilian communities around the base, he said. Towns are getting help for free from the Jacques Cousteau National Eustarine Research Reserve based in Tuckerton, which is employing new public Internet computing tools NJFloodmapper.org and NJAdapt.org to show where flood risks are at the neighborhood level..

A team from the center works with municipal officials to review all their planning — from zoning to emergency evacuation — to recommend the best changes, said Lisa Auermuller, the group’s watershed coordinator.

“Because our services are free to the community because of government funding, we’re a good bargain,” she said. The group is working with towns from Raritan Bay south to the rural Delaware Bay shore.

In Middletown, those maps are helping to redesign Bayshore Village, a senior community in Port Monmouth, where out of almost 100 households, 40 are still displaced from uninhabitable homes, said Jason Greenspan of the township planning department.

“Everyone wants to come back,” typical of residents in the small Bayshore neighborhoods, he said. To get there, Middletown is hoping to get Sandy aid funding to rebuild 110 units. But to do that, the township zoning ordinance has to be changed to eliminate required setbacks from the road. That will get the future Bayshore Village out of the flood zone, he said.

There is a split personality to New Jersey’s rebuilding plans, said MacDonald of Monmouth University.

On one hand, state workers are using federal money to develop plans to better withstand future storms.

On the other, the Christie administration’s Department of Environmental Protection has new coastal building rules that in effect reduce existing protection, MacDonald said.

“I know DEP is open to another round of changes,” he said. “But they’re not going to do that unless the communities ask them to.”