North Wildwood makes deal with New Jersey for beach replenishment and seawall

Peace, sand, and an extended seawall will come to North Wildwood in the near future as the Shore city approved a settlement of a decadelong fight with the state of New Jersey over the state of its beaches.

“It’s better than fighting,” said Mayor Patrick Rosenello, who said things started to change in the bitter, expensive dispute between the city and the state after Gov. Phil Murphy got involved last April, along with State Sen. Michael Testa.

Until then, the city had been taking steps on its own to preserve its severely eroding beaches, in part by installing steel bulk-heading sheets to shore up its seawall, and had been incurring fines from the state Department of Environmental Protection as it awaited a long-delayed beach replenishment project.

The North Wildwood council approved a 140-page settlement at its meeting earlier this week. Under the agreement, the state agreed to rescind the $12 million in fines it had levied against North Wildwood, and the city agreed to drop its lawsuit against the state.

In June, under a tentative truce, the state began an emergency replenishment of North Wildwood’s beaches, resulting in a dramatic extension of the beaches.

This month’s settlement calls for an extension of the popular North Wildwood seawall, which currently wraps around the north end of the island, southward, from Third to Seventh Streets, and calls for a full beach replenishment covering the entire island, which the DEP has said will begin in 2025.

The steel bulk-heading plates will remain, Rosenello said.

North Wildwood’s cost for the projects will be $7 million, and the state will pay $50 million. “We think it’s a good investment,” he said. “We will drop our lawsuit, they will drop the $12 million in penalties against us. It lays out a path forward.”

He said the city will seek to cap the seawall with a flat surface, to extend the recreational use, and will be responsible for paying for that.

The island-wide project will involve removing sand from Wildwood’s famously very-wide beaches and creating an island-wide dune system, he said.

Replenishing North Wildwood, which began on an emergency basis in June, involves bringing in sand from the ocean in a slurry mix that he said is much more effective than just trucking in sand, as the city had been trying to do. He said the beaches have held up well since June.

“The hydraulic placement of sand is much more resilient than trucking in dry sand,” Rosenello said. “It’s coming in as a slurry, 70% water, 30% sand. The natural flow of the slurry does most of the building. It’s creating a very natural grade into the ocean. It’s flowing out much further out into the ocean. For a lot of reasons, it creates a much more sustainable beach.”

The Department of Environmental Protection, meanwhile, issued a statement thanking Rosenello and North Wildwood “for their collaboration in designing and implementing shore protection measures that benefit the City and all of Five Mile Island.”

The resolution of the dispute will allow the DEP to advance both the North Wildwood seawall and the Five Mile Island engineered beach and dune projects, expected to begin in 2025, the statement said.

The settlement will be published in its bulletin on Dec. 18, the DEP said, and subject to a 30-day public comment period.