Officials in Brick Township, which was heavily damaged in Hurricane Sandy, are planning to take action to help secure the municipality from future storms since they’ve been told beach replenishment may be a year away. Brick Township Mayor Stephen Acropolis told NJ Today Managing Editor Mike Schneider that they can’t wait that long since hurricane season begins in two months.
State officials said last week that the Army Corps might not be able to start the beach replenishment project until sometime in 2014, which Acropolis said is too late since hurricane season is two months away with predictions projecting a worse season than last year. Brick officials have decided to take a proactive approach.
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“We’ve put in our capital budget about $7.5 million for Geotubes, kind of doing the stuff the Army Corps should be doing,” Acropolis said. “We have a meeting with them coming up I think in about two weeks. If things don’t go well at that meeting, I believe the council’s going to approve it. We’ll actually start that process right away because we need to protect, obviously not only the barrier island, we need to really protect the mainland.”
Rebuilding dunes has become somewhat controversial with some residents resisting the practice because of a lack of information and others worried about the value of their properties getting reduced. Gov. Chris Christie has weighed in on the issue, threatening to publicly name homeowners who don’t allow protective dunes to be built.
Acropolis said in some of the shore towns, citizens have become applicants to the DEP or Army Corps and then don’t need an easement because they are doing the work on their own property. He said Brick Township may make the $7.5 million available to residents who live along the barrier island in the form of a grant so they wouldn’t need easements, though he said they would like to get them if possible.
“I think most people will give us those easements when they find out where the dune line is gonna be,” Acropolis said. “That’s another issue. The Army Corps has still not set the dune line so you can’t expect someone to sign an easement if you don’t know where the dune line is.”
Acropolis said most of the people who live on the barrier island understand the severity of the situation and know the dunes need to be replaced. “It’s just a matter of who’s gonna do them, when they’re gonna get them done and who’s gonna pay for them,” he said. “We do expect to get reimbursed if we put this money out because it is a mitigation type project, but I think the biggest thing that we’re concerned with in Brick is the time of this.”
The mayor blames the people in Washington for the letting plans sit on the shelf for more than 10 years because they didn’t want to spend money to re-engineer the dunes. “You’re penny-wise and pound foolish. You didn’t want to spend $150 million to $200 million to protect assets we know are worth — because of the breach — about $38 billion,” Acropolis said.
Getting easements from homeowners has also been problematic. “People don’t want to give the easements until money’s allocated for the project. People don’t want to do the project until the easements are gotten. So what comes first, the chicken or the egg? We can’t wait,” Acropolis said.
Brick Township had about 10,000 damaged homes from Sandy, according to Acropolis. He said the municipality now has 4,000 homes in the new velocity zone. Before the storm, only 400 Brick homes were in the velocity zone. According to Acropolis, many of those people have not repaired their homes yet.
If another hurricane like Sandy hits the barrier island with the same type of damage, Acropolis said, “You’re talking about the federal government having to spend a lot more money. So yeah, we’re worried about it and we’re not gonna wait. We’ve gotta be proactive instead of reactive and a lot depends on the meeting next month with the Army Corps.”