Federal money will be used to replenish beaches in Sea Bright and Monmouth Beach. (Click to enlarge)

By JOHN T. WARD

Sea Bright is in for some sand to replenish oceanfront beaches torn into by Hurricane Irene last August.

Congressman Frank Pallone of Long Branch announced Wednesday that the borough, along with neighboring Monmouth Beach, would share in $12.3 million worth of federal funding for sand replacement.

The work, to be 75-percent paid for by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is expected to begin in the fall, Pallone said in a press release.

The project isn’t free to borough taxpayers, but was much hoped for by local officials. Here’s the  text of an email from Mayor Dina Long in response to questions sent by redbankgreen Thursday morning:

My understanding is this replenishment will finish monmouth beach and continue north through sea bright. I hope it will cover our entire beachfront but that’s not clear yet. Our beach erosion is most severe in the south near monmouth beach, so we are  relieved to hear this news! As you know this project is through the army corps; the federal funding will be 75% and the remaining local share will be made up through a combination of state county and municipal funds. I expect sea brights portion to come in around 300 to 400k, which we must include in our budget this year. We have been lobbying congressman Pallone for sand for quite some time, more urgently after we lost our dunes in the hurricane. He’s been a great advocate for sea bright!

From Pallone’s announcement:

Last month the Army Corps of Engineers completed a contract that replenished a portion of the beach in Monmouth Beach that went forward due to funding secured by Pallone in 2011.  The $12.3 million secured by Pallone in 2012 will allow the Army Corps of Engineers to complete the rest of Monmouth Beach and Sea Bright.  Significant erosion has occurred in these areas over the last few years which can put homes and businesses in jeopardy when a storm hits the coast.

The money was approved as part of the fiscal year 2012 appropriations legislation passed in late December that funds the government through the end of the year. Pallone worked with the Army Corps of Engineers to request that funding be allocated to this project. The Army Corps of Engineers will begin the beach replenishment project later this year.

By JOHN T. WARD

A year after it was launched, a pilot trap, neuter and release program appears to have stopped population growth among Sea Bright’s stray cats in its tracks, proponents say.

No kittens are believed to have been born in the past year among the dozens of felines that inhabit the ocean beach and nearby edge of the Shrewsbury River, says Mayor Dina Long.

Long, who championed the program as a council member (and is the owner of ‘Leonard,’ a 14-year-old former stray from another town) says the program “had a great first year.

“Almost 100 cats were trapped, immunized, neutered and microchipped, at no cost to taxpayers,” she said, noting that costs were picked up by a grant from the Monmouth County Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “And for the first time, no new kittens were born on the beach last spring, which is huge,” she said.

The grant followed enactment of an ordinance that enables certified caregivers to feed and tend to the cats in the wild. The volunteers stepped in to trap the cats, and hosted them in cages in their homes during a transition period following sterilization and medical treatment and before the animals were released back into the wild, says borough resident and caregiver Frieda Finegan.

“The cats are all fed and healthy,” Finegan tells redbankgreen. “And there are no kittens.”

Long credits the volunteers for hunting down and trapping cats in advance of the 2011 winter mating season for the turnaround.

“We were out there in the rain and cold. We sat there for five and six hours” waiting to snare some of the feral cats, which won’t approach humans, said Finegan, who is 70 years old. “We had blue fingers.”

Some cats were trapped in an abandoned building, she said.

The borough was forced to act by the U.S Fish & Wildlife Service, which has responsibility for safeguarding piping plovers that inhabit the beach and are prey for cats. Previously, the town would round up as many cats as it could and have them euthanized, but the killings did little to halt population growth.

After requiring the borough to “jump through a lot of hoops,” the agency “thankfully, worked with us, and allowed us to manage our own beach” by signing off on the trap, neuter and release program, Long said.

Caregivers are responsible for tracking the microchipped cats and looking out for those without clipped ears, the signifier that a cat has been treated.

Finegan and four other volunteers monitor the cat colonies behind the beach recycling center and along the river twice a day, giving them “good quality food,” some of which she cooks herself. She estimates there are 40 cats in the two locations.

The challenge going forward, said Long, is keeping up the ranks of volunteers, who visit the cat colonies one or twice a day with food, fresh water and attentiveness to their health and safety. They also trap new cats – animals that have wandered off or been abandoned by their owners – and take them to the SPCA for sterilization.

Long says she’s not ready to declare the program a success yet, though. It’s a five-year operation, and “we’ll see after five years how many cats we have then,” she said.

The goal, she adds is not to eliminate the stray cat population –”I don’t think that would be possible,” she said – but to have all cats accounted for and cared for.

Finegan, who once took a waitressing job just to have access to scrap meat and fish for strays, says she’ll keep doing it as long as she can.

“They’re god’s little creatures,” she said. “They didn’t ask to be here.”

By JOHN T. WARD

Right off the bat, the above photo hints at what new Sea Bright Mayor Dina Long is up against.

Long is far from the first of the town’s top elected officials to confront flooding issues. Pinched between the Atlantic Ocean and the Shrewsbury River, the three-mile-long spit of sand can always count on seeing water slosh onto residential streets abutting the downtown business district during storms.

But a fix is finally in the works, says Long, who hopes to check off flood control, beachfront redevelopment, cellular service quality and one or two other longstanding projects from her to-do list in her term.

“I refuse to see things as problems,” Long told redbankgreen in a recent interview over coffee at Steve’s Breakfast & Lunch on Ocean Avenue. “Otherwise, you’re just stuck all the time.”

Long with Councilman Read Murphy at Steve’s Breakfast & Lunch. (Click to enlarge)

Long says Sea Bright has kind of been “poised at the edge of progress” for a years, and that it’s her job as mayor to “make the numbers work” to enable it to happen.

Her vision for the beachfront redevelopment, she says, is the same as the council’s: to transform a town of 1,800 that serves mainly as a summer destination for visitors into one with year-round draws. And the first stage of that plan is “finally about to happen,” she says.

Likewise for a flood mitigation plan that calls for taller bulkheads along the river and a pumping station to keep the streets drier, if not immune to nature’s worst.

Long, 42 years old, grew up in Neptune, where her parents still live. After graduating from Rutgers, where she studied journalism – a subject she teaches as a full-time faculty member at Brookdale Community College – Long worked as a paid campaign staffer for governors Jim Florio and Jim McGreevey, presidential candidate Bill Bradley and then-Senator Jon Corzine.

She met her husband, Rob Long, on the Florio campaign, for which he was treasurer. They moved to Sea Bright in 2002, when he became pastor of Sea Bright United Methodist Church. Rob now works for a law firm and serves part-time as associate pastor at Christ Church in Fair Haven. The couple have an 8-year-old son.

“Is Sea Bright like any other place you’ve ever seen?” Long says brightly, just minutes after helping some of her neighbors remove their cars from flooded New Street.

From early on in her decade in Sea Bright, Long says she has been enamored of a town that’s a little bit of Mayberry by the Sea, and was inspired to serve it. She had one year left in her third three-year term on council when she was elected mayor over former Mayor Jo-Ann Kalaka Adams in November.

Councilman Read Murphy, who clashed loudly and often with one of Long’s political mentors, former Mayor Maria Fernandes, says Long is “trying to get rid of the politics here” to make things happen.

Despite her party pedigree, Long calls herself a “disaffected Democrat,” one who is “extraordinarily conservative” fiscally, a fan of Governor Chris Christie and says she’s “holding a grudge against” President  Obama over bank bailouts, carbon tax credits and other issues she declines to detail.

She says Murphy is right that she wants to maintain and build consensus across party lines. But no one should mistake her for a pushover, she suggests.

“If you refuse to play politics, and everybody else is playing politics, then they’re going to politic you,” she says, adding, “I don’t allow myself to be trampled.”

More particularly, Long expresses resentment for party bosses “and other people who are not elected attempting to make decisions that should be in the hands of elected officials. I really object to that.” Though she says that, in all her time in politics, “at least on my side, that has never happened.

“There have been times when I’ve marched away from my party, away from the party chairman, because I’m independent,” she said. “I’m out for what’s best for Sea Bright.”

She declines to give examples of it happening on the other side, however, instead turning the conversation toward her “collegial” relationship with the borough council, all of whose members she’s worked with productively for at least two terms.

“She’s a real asset,” said Murphy, a Republican whose brash, often crass manner could hardly be more different from Long’s careful choosing of words. “I think she’s going to be a great mayor.”

Sea Bright residents and fans can now follow the town’s doings on Facebook and Twitter, via accounts set up by Long earlier this month.

By JOHN T. WARD

Years in the talking, the transformation of Sea Bright’s dowdy oceanfront into a moneymaker complete with a pool club and restaurant could begin early next year, officials say.

But first, the borough council is awaiting the results of an analysis aimed at gauging  the appeal of the project to businesses its meant to lure.

Town officials also hope to lure a restaurant to the project in a bid to draw more visitors during the off-season. (Click to enlarge)

Members of the council voted last week to table a pair of bond ordinances that expected to raise $2.85 million for the development of the municipal beach between the Chapel Beach Club to the north and the abbreviated boardwalk opposite to the south after borough CFO Michael Bascom suggested a market analysis and business plan.

“While we’re confident it’s a good plan,” he said, the analysis should be conducted “to be sure it can sure it can support the debt service” on the bonds.

“It’s important that we know that there’s a market for what we want to develop,” he said.

The analysis, by Bascom, is expected to take up to 90 days.

Just what the project will look like is still in flux. Council members received the concept illustrations that go with this article after their meeting Tuesday night and have not discussed them, town officials emphasized.

But the general plan calls for the redevelopment of the 20.5-acre beachfront along the municipal parking lot between the free-standing public library and the firehouse, as well as the vacant lot of the long-vanished Peninsula House Hotel. it would include an extended boardwalk, an oceanfront restaurant and a pool club with lockers.

New facilities to replace the existing beach office, which Mayor Dina Long calls “dangerous,” are also anticipated. The space is used by lifeguards and other municipal employees.

Councilman Brian Kelly, who heads the council committee overseeing the plan, says redevelopment has been under discussion since before he joined the governing body in 2004.

“It’s been a long, slow process,” he said.

Kelly said the council’s goal is to have the plan finalized, approved by the state Department of Environmental Protection, and funded for construction by early 2013..

“Sea Bright has been  of poised at the edge of progress in kind of changing how our town looks for a long time,” Mayor Dina Long tells redbankgreen. “That’s finally about to happen. The challenge is going to be making the numbers work.”

With interest rates low, now’s a good time to finance the project, she said.

The site may also be home to a cell tower that town officials hope to see built to eliminate chronic dead spots in cellular service, Kelly said.

It’s a megayacht so lavish that it not only has its own website, but the website has tabs marked “main saloon” and “sky lounge.”

It’s so large that a motorist turning down Church Street in Sea Bright Tuesday morning thought an apartment building had been erected at the end of the block in his absence.

Welcome to the Islander, 196 feet of floating, sumptuous luxury, now docked next to a muddy steel fabrication yard in Sea Bright.

What’s it doing there? The captain, who politely declined to give his full name, politely declined to say, politely telling redbankgreen that the unnamed owners prefer to keep a low profile for the vessel.

Clark ‘Bubba’ Craig, whose metal shop is doing some work for the Islander, also declined to give away any state secrets. But he said super-duper yachts are not unheard of in this stretch of the Shrewsbury River.

Speaking of which, how did it get into this stretch of the river, having had to pass through the Rumson-Sea Bright Bridge? The thing is more than 35 feet wide.

Craig said it just takes a skilled captain, and the Islander’s, he said, managed the job without knocking off its sideview mirrors.

The vessel carries the flag of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and is available for charter. Prices are not posted on the website.

By JOHN T. WARD

A deployment of police, search dogs and two helicopters failed to find a suspect wanted for exposing himself to a woman on the beach at Sandy Hook Sunday night, authorities said.

The case, which was originally described as a sexual assault on police radios, was not a sexual assault because it did not involve intimate contact, said National Park System spokesman John Warren.

The suspect, however, did masturbate over the victim and at one point grabbed her by the jacket, adding a potential assault charge if he is caught.

According to Warren, the incident was reported at about 8:40 p.m. after the unidentified woman, who had been lying on the sand at Beach C, looked up to see a man masturbating above her.

The woman screamed and the offender grabbed her by the jacket before fleeing on foot, Warren said.

Several witnesses saw the commotion and the man running away along the beach in the park, which is open until 10 p.m. this time of year, Warren said.

Police from Highlands and Sea Bright responded to assist U.S. Park Rangers in their hunt for the suspect. K-9 units from Hazlet and the Monmouth County Sheriff’s office were brought in, and two helicopters one from New York City, one from Monmouth County scoured he peninsula until about 1 a.m. Monday, Warren said.

“We take the safety of our visitors that seriously,” Warren said.

The suspect, a description of whom authorities are withholding, was not found, and the investigation is continuing, Warren said.

The park gets two million visits a year, Warren said.

SkimBash, the “premiere pro/am skimboarding contest on the Jersey shore,” took to the small waves in Sea Bright Saturday and Sunday.

Photographer Peter Lindner was there for redbankgreen to catch the rock & roil.

To enlarge the photo display, start it, then click the embiggen symbol in the lower right corner. To get back to redbankgreen, hit your escape key.

Braced for the worst, and recalling the devastation caused by the northeaster of 1992, the borough of Sea Bright evacuated all residents in advance of the arrival of Hurricane Irene Saturday. Even emergency personnel were ready to relocate to Rumson if things got as bad as forecast.

But less than 24 hours after what was supposed to have been the peak of a horrific storm, residents and business owners on the narrow spit of sand had one word to describe what they experienced when Irene, by then downgraded to a tropical storm, blew through: “lucky.”

Early Monday afternoon, redbankgreen retraced its steps of last Friday, this time to find out how the storm that inspired so much anxiety actually played out.

We began, as one must, at the beach…

Check out more videos at redbankgreen’s YouTube channel.