NORTH WILDWOOD – After many years of stop-gap beach replenishment, North Wildwood is looking into “legal options” in its attempts to persuade the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to bring assistance to the city’s beaches, Mayor Patrick Rosenello said in an Aug. 2 City Council meeting.
During that meeting, Council passed a resolution that says, “the City of North Wildwood, over the course of several years, has been attempting to persuade certain federal and state agencies to include the beaches of North Wildwood in a program of regular beach replenishment via the hydraulic movement of sand stock onto North Wildwood beaches.”
However, there are no concrete plans for the Army Corps to help the city.
The city is working with Marzulla Law LLC to engage a “legislative review” of relevant federal law. Marzulla, according to the mayor, specializes in holding “federal agencies accountable to do what they were legislatively authorized to do.”
The resolution claims that the Army Corps is federally obligated to use its funding to help beaches with shore protection measures. This obligation to help affected North Atlantic towns began in 2013 when President Barack Obama signed the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act into law.
The act set more than $1 billion aside to provide federal assistance to areas affected by Hurricane Sandy. More than half a billion dollars were earmarked to bring “emergency operations, repairs, and other activities” to affected areas.
North Wildwood has continued to hope that this money would come to its beaches. Much of the federal money was set aside to study ways that future storm damage might be prevented.
Rosenello said to the council that “we are now coming up on 10 years since that legislation was adopted, and we are the last municipality in the State of New Jersey that needs shore protection that the Army Corps has not done… So, we are hiring a law firm to… understand exactly what the Army Corps is directed to do.”
Although North Wildwood has not committed to any specific legal action against the Army Corps, Cape May County municipalities are no strangers when it comes to bringing suits against the federal entity.
Avalon, which is currently enjoying dredging and beach replenishment projects courtesy of the Army Corps, sued the entity in the past in an attempt to force it to bring its resources to the borough.
Rosenello said a legislative review will allow the city to know what its “legal possibilities are going forward.”
He stressed that the city has worked “administratively” with the Army Corps for more than a decade in attempts to bring a shore protection project to North Wildwood, but the lack of results has forced the city to look at its legal options.
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