We are rapidly approaching Labor Day. Tradition points to Labor Day as the official end of the summer season, a time when parents refocus on getting kids ready for school and when many return to work after late summer vacations.
Sure, we have a shoulder season, one that has grown considerably from what it was a decade or two ago. But there is still something important about hitting Labor Day. If the summer tourist season isn’t over, it is certainly on the downward slope. The guarded beaches are dwindling, municipalities have shifted some of their attention to preparing a new annual budget and planning for next season, and small business owners can see what the season has brought them despite what they may still gain from the post-Labor Day activity.
————
Gov. Murphy treats us citizens like children. He cannot expect the people to follow when he doesn’t create the big picture, tell us the necessary steps, and explain the pain we must endure to achieve the desired goals.
————
What we have in Cape May County is our own rhythm, the rhythm of shore life. It is built around the summer, the beaches and the hundreds of thousands of tourists, many of whom plan all year for their time at the shore.
We are captives, often willing captives, of our annual cycle. We enjoy the dead months at the year’s start when the ocean and the bay are ours. We get into gear in the spring to prepare for the onslaught of visitors soon to come. Yes, the increase in second homeowners has meant the old Saturday to Saturday routine has changed, but the roles are still the same.
As Cape May County residents we are the caretakers. We are tasked with ensuring that shore experience is ready each year, often for families that have been enjoying it for decades.
The task is always challenging, but the last few years have added significantly to the challenge.
The “energy revolution” seeks renewable sources of energy to feed an economy that has developed its dependence on fossil fuels for over 150 years. The champions of the revolution say their cause is an existential one. Imbued with urgency and righteousness, they move saying they have no time to explain, to outline their plans, to look carefully at the impact on our economy or our role as stewards of our irreplaceable environment. Wind farms are needed, transmission lines must be laid.
The Trenton-based resiliency efforts follow closely behind. The energy revolution will help decarbonize the atmosphere, but we are told there are threats due to climate change that can no longer be avoided. We must build as though we were closing in on the end of the century. Our planning horizon is governed by the official view of our world in 2100, a view increasingly dominated by curated science that no longer commands a consensus. We are, for example, to prepare for 5-foot rise in sea level that current science gives minimal chances of occurring.
The fact that reliance on a dated and unchanging scientific view is likely to do great harm to our economy, to the shore experience and to the property values of those who have invested billions in the Cape is of little consequence. Why? Because the stated goal of the effort is to incentivize a retreat from the shore. The same shore we have protected and readied for summer every year since Cape May City became a seaside resort.
Trenton, the place we send hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes derived from our tourist economy, has more to foist on us.
In 2020 the state, in its infinite wisdom, took on juvenile justice reform. Simultaneously those same state officials got to decide how to implement the results of the voter referendum on cannabis legalization. The result is three years now of juvenile mayhem at the shore where hundreds of underaged and barely-of-age young people feel free to engage in disruptive behavior that intimidates tourists, causes damage to property, flaunts illegal behavior and, at times, even results in serious bodily harm.
It is a topsy-turvy environment where a police officer who can smell marijuana on an underage user or has strong reason to believe illegal liquor is in a backpack can him or herself be changed with a third-degree indictable offense for seeking to enforce the law. Complaints to Trenton not only bring no relief, they actually elicit uninformed, condescending comments from the state’s chief law enforcement officer, the attorney general.
Add, too, the adoption of the California Advanced Clean Car II rule in New Jersey. It mandates a “gradual transition” to electric vehicles, setting annual targets for electric vehicle sales and an end point where every new light-duty vehicle sold in the Garden State must be a zero-emission vehicle by 2035.
There is nothing gradual about a complete shift in the personal transportation sector in a period of less than a decade. The infrastructure issues from repair shops to charging stations are gigantic.
An environment like Cape May County where the population, and the cars that move that population, go from less than 100,000 to around 800,000 weekly, depending upon the time of year, has special challenges. We must somehow supply the infrastructure needed by all of those electric vehicles even though that infrastructure is much larger than what our permanent population would require. Will Trenton build it for us?
Trenton does not consult. It acts, often carelessly.
Through it all we persevere. We stay in tune with our rhythm. We prepare for the summer season, we deliver the shore experience as though it were effortless, we catch our breath in the increasingly short dead periods, and we start over.
For those who come here we are always ready. The magic of the shore is waiting as it always has, timeless, the stuff of memories.
———-
From the Bible: Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself. Let each of you look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others. Philippians 2:3-4
