N.J. town fighting $8.5M fine for trying to hold back the sea
— From atop the local lifeguard headquarters, Mayor Patrick Rosenello looks out over the shrinking shoreline of his hometown.
To the north, past the kaleidoscope of umbrellas that dot the beach, he can see the massive bulkheads the city has installed to hold back the encroaching sea — the same ones at the heart of an ongoing fight with the state, which has sued North Wildwood and fined it more than $8.5 million for that and other work it says was unauthorized, misguided and destructive.
Rosenello can also glimpse the signs he posted along beach entrances this summer, bearing photos of New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and the state’s top environmental officer, calling them “directly responsible” for failing to fix the erosion problems here.
“I try not to pour fuel on the fire,” says the man who has poured a considerable amount of fuel on this fire in recent months.
But he isn’t apologizing.
The way the mayor sees it, this scenic town of 5,000 — a number that swells to nearly 10 times that each summer — has little choice but to take matters into its own hands. Murphy speaks often about climate change and resilience, Rosenello says, but for years North Wildwood has grappled with erosion, rising seas and fierce storms largely alone while other coastal communities have seen their beaches restored.
“It’s easy to sit in Trenton and talk about these things,” he says, referring to New Jersey’s capital. “But here’s a real-world resilience project that his administration can’t get done ... We’ve spent an enormous amount of money, and they’ve done nothing.”
Shawn LaTourette, commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, calls Rosenello’s accusations disingenuous. The main reason a long-planned beach nourishment project has languished is not because of state inaction, he said in an interview, but rather because the communities along the five-mile-long island that is home to North Wildwood failed to universally embrace the project until this year.
“This is the part of the story that I think folks misunderstand,” said LaTourette, whose picture is featured on Rosenello’s signs. “We’ve been eager for the last decade to help here, but that help has been rebuffed.”
The peculiar, acrimonious fight playing out along the Jersey Shore is, in one sense, an outlier — a rare case in which state and municipal officials have launched legal battles and remained at loggerheads over how best to safeguard a threatened stretch of shoreline.
At the same time, the standoff between North Wildwood and New Jersey — a state experts say has been proactive on long-term planning and coastal adaptation — hints at the sort of conflicts likely to unfold more often in the age of climate change.
As sea levels surge, storms grow more intense, wildfire risks spread and destructive rainfalls proliferate, adapting to those shifting realities is becoming more expensive and urgent.
“It’s a bad thing to have every town for themselves,” said A.R. Siders, a University of Delaware professor who researches climate adaptation policies. At the same time, she said, localities are on the front lines of the problem and often can move more quickly than states or the federal government.
“There is a real tension here between these levels of government that we don’t have a great way of solving at the moment,” she said.
“I do think we are going to see a lot more of these kinds of fights.”
Decades ago, an expanse of beach nearly 1,500 feet wide unfurled along much of North Wildwood. “Sand accumulated, plants grew, and these island dunes were impressive,” according to a historical analysis from Stockton University’s Coastal Research Center.
That reality has changed dramatically.
North Wildwood’s location at the tip of a barrier island, along with the shifting sands of nearby Hereford Inlet, has led to relentless erosion. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers led construction of a sea wall at the northern end of town that was completed in 2006. And the state of New Jersey teamed with North Wildwood on a beach restoration project that commenced in 2009.
But over the past decade, storms have eaten away at the city’s defenses. Some had names — Sandy, Irene, Jonas, Ian. Others were nor’easters that swept in to devour dunes and shrink what beach remained.
On several occasions since 2013, North Wildwood installed vinyl and steel bulkheads along stretches of the beach where dunes had atrophied, and nearby roads, buildings and drainage systems were left mostly defenseless. Rosenello said the city notified state regulators of the work, but did not wait for explicit approval.
“There’s no doubt that the actions we took saved blocks of the town from being washed away,” he insisted.
North Wildwood also trucked in massive amounts of sand from neighboring towns each winter, believing that the federally backed renourishment project approved in the wake of Hurricane Sandy would soon become reality.
But after years of delay, the project isn’t scheduled to begin until 2025.
The clash between North Wildwood and state regulators escalated in December, when the DEP sued to prevent town leaders from installing several additional blocks of steel bulkheads.
In its 500-page complaint, the agency said the planned work was “illegal” and that there was no “imminent or ongoing threat” to lives or property. It also argued that it risked “permanent and irreparable harm” to vegetated dunes and wetlands that could provide habitat to endangered species, such as peregrine falcons.