By DONALD WITTKOWSKI
Sea Isle City’s beaches are in line for a major makeover.
The shoreline will be replenished with new sand in 2023 as part of an estimated $30 million federal project that will also include restoring the beaches in Strathmere and the southern part of Ocean City.
Mayor Leonard Desiderio said Sea Isle was notified last week by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection that the city’s next cycle for beach replenishment is scheduled to take place next year.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency that oversees beach restoration projects, anticipates that it will award a contract for Sea Isle, Strathmere and southern Ocean City in March 2023, Desiderio announced.
At this point, it hasn’t been determined exactly how much new sand will be used to restore the beaches. Desiderio also noted that it is not yet clear which sections of the beachfront will be replenished.
He would like all of the resort’s beaches replenished. But specifically, he said the center of town and the south end of Sea Isle appear to need new sand the most.
After an unusually harsh winter at the shore, some sections of Sea Isle’s beaches and dunes suffered storm erosion.
The new project will help the tourist-dependent town keep its beaches in tip-top shape so it may continue attracting summer vacationers as well as residents who want to live in Sea Isle full-time, Desiderio noted in an interview Saturday.
“It’s extremely important. As you know, we were voted the sixth best beach in New Jersey,” Desiderio said of Sea Isle’s ranking in a recent statewide survey by NJ.com. “That goes a long way with helping tourism and year-round residents. People like wide beaches.”
He commented on the 2023 beach replenishment project during a busy weekend in the resort.
“It’s a beautiful and busy weekend in Sea Isle,” he said.
Besides the aesthetic value of having wide, powdery beaches, the city will also benefit from the replenishment project by having a bigger barrier of sand and dunes to protect homes, businesses and local roads from the ocean’s storm surge.
Sea Isle is on a three-year cycle for beach replenishment as part of a 50-year agreement with the Army Corps of Engineers.
In the summer of 2020, Sea Isle’s beaches were widened and replenished with more than 750,000 cubic yards of new sand between 28th and 52nd streets in the midsection of town and from 74th to 93rd streets in Townsends Inlet at the southern tip of the island.
The Army Corps replenished the beaches on the ocean side of the Townsends Inlet Bridge in 2020. However, the eroded beaches and dunes on the bay side of the bridge were outside the boundaries of the project.
City officials have urged the Army Corps to change the scope of its project to replenish the beach on the bay side of the bridge. So far, the Army Corps has indicated it will not include the bay side of Townsends Inlet for beach restoration.
What the Army Corps plans to do is to share technical data that it gleans from its ongoing surveys of Sea Isle’s shoreline to help the city devise a strategy to protect the beaches and dunes on the bay side of the Townsends Inlet Bridge, the agency said.
Sea Isle used sand that it harvested from healthier beaches to patch up the badly eroded shoreline and dunes on the bay side of the inlet last fall. Naturally occurring sand deposits also helped to restore the beach overlooking Townsends Inlet.
Traditionally, the federal government pays for 65 percent of the cost of beach replenishment projects, while the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and the towns split the remaining 35 percent.
As part of Sea Isle’s capital plan for 2022 to 2026, the city has proposed spending $2 million in 2024 for beach restoration. The capital plan, though, represents a broad blueprint for the city’s infrastructure projects and changes from year to year, which would allow Sea Isle to shift the beach restoration funding to 2023 if needed then.
