Sea Isle City Mayor Leonard Desiderio gives a boost to Republican legislative candidates Erik Simonsen, Michael Testa, Antwan McClellan and Freeholders E. Marie Hayes and Gerald Thornton.
BY DONALD WITTKOWSKI
Antwan McClellan and Erik Simonsen, the Republican Assembly candidates in the First Legislative District, are already intimately familiar with the critical issues faced by the beach and bayside towns at the Jersey Shore.
If elected to the Assembly on Tuesday, they are promising to use the experience they have gained while serving in local government at the shore to help coastal communities secure more funding, improve their infrastructure and boost tourism.
In Sea Isle City, they are focusing their attention on, among other things, the 80-year-old Townsends Inlet Bridge. The bridge linking Sea Isle with Avalon is often shut down for lengthy structural repairs, including a 10-month overhaul this year that interrupted traffic flow during the peak summer tourism season.
McClellan, an Ocean City councilman, and Simonsen, the mayor of Lower Township, said they would use their positions in the Assembly to help Cape May County acquire state and federal funds to eventually replace the antiquated bridge.
“The major thing is to make sure there are federal funds available and also state funds available to help them maintain the bridges,” McClellan said. “I know Sea Isle Mayor Desiderio has been dealing with the state to try to help them. It will be our job as state officials to make sure that task is easier for him.”
“The bridges and the beaches are the lifeblood of our shore towns, especially both in Sea Isle and Ocean City, and we have to do what we can to protect that,” McClellan added.
Sea Isle City Mayor Leonard Desiderio, at podium, gives a boost to the Republican legislative candidates, from left, Erik Simonsen, Michael Testa and Antwan McClellan and Freeholders E. Marie Hayes and Gerald Thornton
Simonsen believes Cape May County does not receive its fair share of money from the state Transportation Trust Fund, which finances road, bridge and mass transit projects.
He also wants Cape May County to get more money back from the state for the tourism tax revenue generated by the county. Cape May County sends close to $550 million in tourism tax revenue annually to the state, but gets only $1 million in return.
“We both feel that we’re not getting our fair share,” Simonsen said. “Of all the tourism dollars we send up to Trenton, we get very little back.”
Simonsen and McClellan were part of a strategy session with former Congressman Frank LoBiondo, a fellow Republican, to discuss key issues in the First Legislative District. The district’s transportation needs were part of their discussion.
“The major thing that former Congressman LoBiondo is trying to get across is that we have to continue to bring attention to the needs of South Jersey, to Legislative District One,” McClellan said. “If they’re not being consistently talked about or brought up by our legislators, then it’s just not going to happen.”
At the local level, McClellan and Simonsen praised the Sea Isle City Chamber of Commerce and Revitalization for its efforts to improve transportation and promote business.
Over the summer, the Chamber partnered with the Ocean View Resort to run shuttle service from the campground into Sea Isle for the first time. By tapping the campgrounds, the Chamber is drawing a new source of visitors to town to help local businesses, McClellan and Simonsen pointed out.
The two candidates are pushing for the extension of the Route 55 corridor from Cumberland County to Cape May County to expand the region’s transportation network. The highway’s proposed extension has been discussed for years, but has run into environmental hurdles.
Route 55, if extended, would link the industrial hubs of both counties and serve as a catalyst for jobs and economic development, they said. One area that could benefit is the Cape May County Airport and the “tech village” that is being developed there to attract new companies, Simonsen said.
“As we start to look at growing our businesses, one of the things you need for businesses to grow is obviously a major artery,” Simonsen said of Route 55. “Whether it’s manufacturing goods, whether it’s things for sale, you need access to and from where you’re going to produce those goods. And right now, we just don’t have it.”
Simonsen noted that Lower Township and other communities are creating “opportunity zones” to stimulate jobs and attract new industry. Better highway access, including Route 55’s extension, is critical for those developing those zones, he explained.
Both candidates also believe that Route 55’s extension would create a new evacuation route during severe coastal storms. They cited studies that have ranked the current evacuation routes from the shore as the sixth worst in the country. That alone is reason enough for Route 55’s extension, they said.
“So we all know it needs to be done, but we just want to make sure that the people are fighting to try to get it done,” McClellan said.
Assembly candidate Erik Simonsen addresses a Republican rally outside the Historic Cape May County Court House.
McClellan and Simonsen, who are running with Senate candidate Michael Testa, a Vineland attorney, on the Republican ticket, also believe that Route 55’s extension would serve as a gateway for more tourism to both Cape May and Cumberland counties.
In Cape May County, the beaches are the heart of the tourism industry and must be protected, McClellan and Simonsen stressed.
“Why do people come here? It’s for the beaches and the boardwalks,” Simonsen said. “You have to make sure that your beaches are maintained. We do get a lot of erosion here. We have to make sure our boardwalks are maintained.”
Simonsen was critical of Gov. Phil Murphy’s recent decision not to use millions of dollars in state funding to repair damage to Wildwood’s Boardwalk.
“Getting millions of dollars cut from our boardwalks, like we did in Wildwood, does not help,” he said of efforts to promote tourism at the shore.
Sea Isle, Ocean City and Strathmere will soon undergo a $31.5 million beach replenishment project to add 2.4 million cubic yards of fresh sand to the storm-damaged shoreline.
According to initial estimates for Sea Isle, a total of 760,000 cubic yards of new sand will replenish the downtown beaches from about 29th Street to 52nd Street and from around 68th Street to 93rd Street in Townsends Inlet in the south end of the barrier island.
Assembly candidate Antwan McClellan speaks to a group of supporters at a community meeting in Ocean City.
McClellan and Simonsen said the knowledge they have gained from the beach replenishment projects in Ocean City and Lower Township would help them in the Assembly to focus on coastal protection.
“We need to continue to evaluate everything every year,” Simonsen said. “I know from experience in Lower Township, because we have the bayside and the seashore side, we have dune replenishment. They’re actually building a berm on the ocean side from Lower Township up to North Wildwood to help with another storm such as Superstorm Sandy.”
Bayside communities in both Cape May County and Cumberland County should not be overlooked for shore protection projects, Simonsen added.
“Especially with a town like Ocean City, Sea Isle and obviously where I’m at, and even when you go up in Cumberland County, a lot of times the bayside communities get forgotten about by our legislators,” he said. “There’s a lot of erosion on the bayside, and whether it’s fishing, water sports, etc., they’re valuable also and sometimes that gets lost.”
“A lot of our towns here in Cape May County have both an ocean side and a bayside. A lot of times the bayside gets lost in the shuffle,” he continued. “We need to make sure we maintain our bayside as much as anything because it’s valuable, not only as property, but it’s also a valuable natural resource. People go there to the beach on the bayside for fishing and water sports.”
McClellan noted that Ocean City’s Council introduced a bond ordinance in October that includes $3 million in funding for beach replenishment. The funding package also calls for the installation of a new geotube, essentially a large, synthetic sock filled with sand, to help protect an area of the dunes that is vulnerable to erosion.
“We just recently approved a new geotube to be installed on our beaches along with the beach replenishment program. So we’ve been consistent with everything here for our beach replenishment program in this city,” McClellan said. “We’re doing it tip to tip and we’re going to continue to do that to protect the homes on the beach, protect our beaches and protect our Boardwalk.”
McClellan believes Ocean City’s ambitious capital improvement program – the largest in the city’s history – for road, drainage, dredging and beach projects could serve as a model to help other towns in the First Legislative District.
“That’s one of the things that we’ve done as a Council, as a mayor and as an administration, we’ve been able to be innovative,” he said. “So, we see problems and we’ve been able to get out in front of them and fix them early, as opposed to waiting until they’re a very poor or bad situation and then we’re out there begging and pleading for help from somebody else.”
“So we’ve been very forthcoming with that, and I think that’s a great opportunity that we can take and spread through Trenton to help the rest of Cape May County and parts of Cumberland County,” McClellan said.
Bios:
Assembly Candidate: Antwan McClellan
Age: 45
Political Experience: Ocean City Councilman in Ward 2 for seven years; Former School Board member, three years
Hometown: Ocean City
Occupation: Public Information Officer and Confidential Aide to Cape May County Sheriff Bob Nolan
Organizations and Activities: Manager/Coach Field of Dreams Baseball, three years; Coach Girls Junior High School Basketball, nine years; Member Cape May County NAACP; Volunteer Ocean City Historical Museum
