By JOHN T. WARD

Adding yet another twist to what’s already the most convoluted building request in recent Red Bank history, the borough zoning board ruled Thursday night that a proposed 72-room hotel on the Navesink River exceeds height limitations.

In a trial-like case that turned on questions of property frontage and where streets begin and end, the board rejected the contention by Hampton Hotel developer RBank Capital LLC that the hotel site fronts on Route 35, rather than Rector Place, and should be subject to a height limit of 85 feet above mean high tide, rather than 60 feet.

The board’s 6-1 rejection of those arguments appear to mean that Rbank will have to either shear off several floors of the six-story structure or start its application all over again, abandoning a series of hearings now on hold at the planning board.

The zoning board was not ruling on the overall merits of the hotel plan, which had been the subject of planning board hearings that began last September.

Rather, the zoning board convened solely for the purpose of hearing an “interpretation” challenge by objector Stephen Mitchell, who contended that the height of the proposed structure, at 82.2 feet above mean high tide of the adjoining, put it in violation of limits for the waterfront development zone in which it would be built.

That, in turn, meant that the case should have been heard all along by the zoning board, which has different and arguably stiffer standards, Mitchell contended.

Lawyer Marty McGann and engineers for Rbank argued that though the former Exxon property has 47 feet of its southern border on Rector Place, it should more properly be seen as fronting on Route 35, and that a different height standard should thus apply.

The board, with little discussion and some apparent uncertainty, agreed with Mitchell.

Only board member Karen Waldman took Rbank’s side.

“Yes, I agree it’s on Rector Place,” she told redbankgreen afterward. “But I don’t think it ought to be treated like the rest of Rector Place,” which is lined with residences. “I think it’s separate and distinctive.”

Here’s Mitchell’s comment on the outcome, via email:

I never had an issue with developing the site with a hotel. My problem with the Hampton Inn plan was that it was too tall, too big, and too intense of a development for the 1 acre site. Tonight’s Zoning Board interpretation only bolsters my opinion. Now, let’s see if the Hampton Inn comes back with a more responsible and conforming design.

That, he said, would at least begin to address the law’s most problematic elements, as demonstrated by a recent brouhaha over a 100-foot tulip poplar.

At Monday night’s borough council meeting, Marchese proposed removing the controversial tree-preservation law from a land-use ordinance and reconstituting it as a code-enforcement matter.

The effect, he and borough Attorney Sal Alfieri said, would be that homeowners wishing to remove trees protected under the ordinance would no longer be required to obtain a zoning variance. Instead, they would take their cases to the borough council.

The law protects specimen trees and those that exceed specified girths. Builder Bob Susser saw his plan for a three-home subdivision on Woodland Drive, which otherwise required no variances, held up for months as his request to remove an 80-year-old tulip poplar was kicked from one department to another, and later on appeal to the planning board — three times. He succeeded in winning approval to remove the tree on the third try, in March.

Councilman Jerome Koch wondered if the change would “take some of the teeth out” of the existing law. Marchese said the move “doesn’t change how we define protected trees, but reduces the burden” on the planning and zoning arms of the town government.

“I still haven’t changed my opinion of the tree ordinance,” Marchese told redbankgreen afterward. “I will still seek to make it better.”

The amendment is expected to be formally introduced at the next council meeting on May 29.

By JOHN T. WARD

Can a Jersey Girl whose work as a 22-year-old prostitute helped derail a political career in spectacular fashion return home and remake herself as a small-town retailer?

Four years after her high-priced hotel romps with Eliot Spitzer dynamited his tenure as governor of New York and made her infamous, Ashley Dupré says she turned a page Monday with the opening of Femme by Ashley, a lingerie and swimwear boutique on the choicest block in downtown Red Bank.

The shop, Dupré told redbankgreen in an exclusive interview, “is almost like the beginning of the rest of my life.

“I made a bunch of mistakes when I was younger, and I feel like, for the first time in my life, I’m growing into an adult, and I’m really excited about that,” she said.

The Broad Street boutique features lingerie, swimsuits and Victoria  Beckham sunglasses. (Click to enlarge)

Petite and wearing eyeglasses that made her appear somewhat more studious than she did in Girls Gone Wild videos made a decade ago, 27-year-old Dupré said she agreed to redbankgreen‘s request for a sit-down only at the urging of her boyfriend, TJ Earle, who thought it was important in establishing community roots. She said it would likely be her only interview on the topic.

Off-limits were questions about the events that made her a household name. Dupré also refused to allow redbankgreen to videotape the interview or even take her photo, saying she’d been “burned” in the past by the unauthorized release of images. Instead, she supplied a commissioned portrait.

“I’m just done with it,” Dupré said of her scandal-based persona. “I’m very private. People don’t believe that, but I’m a very private person. I don’t want that life. I’m not looking to be in the press. I’m just looking to get on with my life.”

Her focus, she said, is on becoming a business owner and “me doing what I enjoy for the first time, and not caring what anyone else has to say about it.”

Dupré’s image rehab effort might be traced to her hire two years ago as a sex -and-relationship advice columnist for the New York Post, which had previously reveled in labeling her a “ho” and “trollop” at every opportunity. In bringing her on board, the newspaper wrote:

She didn’t ask for fame, but, “Now that I have it, it’s up to me to take advantage,” she said.

Under the tag “Ask Ashley,” Dupré fielded questions that at first overtly traded on her notoriety. “How do I know if my daughter may be getting into trouble?” asked “Meredith, 40, Queens,” in the debut.

But the column later morphed into questions about keeping relationships fresh and exciting, Dupré said. “I think I have moved away from how I’m viewed to ‘how do I save my relationship?’ and ‘how do I make this work?’” she said.

The Broad Street store represents a continuation of that evolution, she said – and the likely end of the column, which she said has “run it’s course.”

Other than a confessional interview with Diane Sawyer on 20/20, a raunchy one with Howard Stern and a nude spread in Playboy, what else has Dupré been up to since the Spitzer scandal broke in March, 2008?

“I’ve been in a relationship,” she said. “I’ve just started my life over.” She and Earle, a paving industry exec, have lived in the Navesink section of Middletown for the past two months. She said she considers him her best friend, and his young daughters her family.

Growing up in Wall Township, Dupré said she was a frequent visitor to Red Bank. Moving back to the Shore after seven years in Manhattan and again visiting the town, “I just fell in love with the community as a whole,” she said. “It is like a little mini SoHo, and the people here are great.”

In creating Femme by Ashley, Dupré hired Amy Manor of West Front Street to design the space. Borough-based Frame to Please supplied oversized mirror frames and Solari Creative, also of Red Bank, did the website.

“We really kept it in the community. It’s like our own little networking circle here,” Dupré said. “It’s very important to me to have that.”

The resulting shop features white walls, ceilings and flooring. Long, silver velvet drapes form a pair of dressing rooms, each equipped with a plush purple chair so shoppers and their significant others can have some intimate time during a bikini or teddy try-on.

Dupré said the boutique’s merchandise, including labels Agua Bandita, Pily Q and Jenna Leigh, reflects her own evolving fashion sense.

“I’m  a girl, and I think every girl likes to shop and explore their tastes,” she said. “Getting into this business, I kind of explored all of these designers and fell in love with them.”

The shop offers swimsuits in the $180 to $200 range as well as some “special” underthings, Dupré said.

“I really wanted this to be a place where anybody could come in and get something and be able to afford it, but also to have the luxurious items, too,” she said.

Dupré said she plans to be in the store daily, and is braced for curiosity seekers.

“Well, I’m sure I’m going to see everybody,” she says with a laugh. “I’m sure a lot of interesting people are going to walk through those doors.”

Red Bank Mayor Pasquale Menna met recently with Dupré and Earle at their request, and said he came away impressed by their vision for the store and their enthusiasm about the town. Only one person, the wife of a retailer, had complained to him about Dupré’s arrival, he said. “I reminded her that none of us are exemplary in every aspect of our lives.” he said.

“We are a very diverse town,” Menna said. “We welcome everyone.”

Dupré, though, doesn’t expect everyone to be welcoming. She says she’s learned to shrug off whispers, which she finds prevalent “whether you’ve been involved in a scandal or not. People always talk about other people. And it’s sad that you don’t have anything more important to talk about in your life, but that’s just the way of life. Not everybody can like you, and it’s OK. I’m OK with that.

“What am I going to do, live in the past, regretting every mistake I’ve ever made?” she said. “That’s the sign of a weak person. You need to get over it and move on.”

Russell Vann, 54, right, was one of 20 defendants named as alleged members of “a criminal enterprise responsible for the distribution significant quantities of heroin and the trafficking of firearms,” Prosecutor Peter E. Warshaw, Jr. said in a prepared announcement.

Two other men arrested in the sweep and previously identified as Red Bank residents were not named in the indictment. They are Charles Dixon, 54, and Raymond Jackson, 41.

Vann, whose street address was not given, was among 40 people arrested in a series of raids last summer, the announcement said. The prosecutor contends Vann was a “mid-level” heroin dealer, one of a number of such alleged player who were

indicted for racketeering conspiracy for their roles as “runners” who distributed, stored or collected money for the sale of quantities of heroin sold under Stevenson’s supervision and at his direction.

During the course of the investigation, approximately 200 bricks of heroin, a quantity of cocaine and approximately $72,000 in U.S. currency was seized. The heroin seized has an estimated street value of approximately $50,000.

Vann was charged with multiple counts of drug possession and conspiracy, including the intent to distribute drugs in a public housing complex. He is not charged with any weapons-related offenses.

He was being held of $350,000 bail, with no option to post 10 percent, and facing a bail source hearing, the prosecutor said.

Here’s the announcement: 5.14.2012 Nygee Indictment. And here’s a charging chart identifying the defendants 5.14.2012 Nygee charging chart.

By JOHN T. WARD

Mark Lockwood spent the night on his boat at the Shrewsbury River Yacht Club in Fair Haven Friday, and woke to the sight of a Navesink River gone brown. The worst kind of brown, he thought.

Though it didn’t smell, it appeared to be human waste, he said.

“It was disgusting,” he told a Fair Haven police officer who’d come to the club to investigate Saturday evening. “I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’ve been on this river all my life.”

Ben Hamilton, whose home abuts the club property, said he had never seen anything like it, either.

But whatever they saw, it wasn’t from the town’s sanitary sewer, said an official with the regional sewerage authority that serves the borough. And it may have been pollen.

“We can guarantee that the Two Rivers Water Reclamation Authority pipe isn’t leaking,” TRWRA commissioner and yacht club member Bill Baarck told redbankgreen Saturday night, referring to a waste pipe that runs just beneath the Navesink River shore from Gillespie Avenue east to the yacht club, where it meets a pumping station.

“But we can’t guarantee that tides and winds haven’t brought in pollutants from elsewhere, over which we have no control,” he said.

Though he said he had not seen the brown tide himself, other recent reports of human waste — one on the Metedeconk River, and one at a location he could not immediately recall —  turned out to be vast collections of dead pollen on the water, Baarck said.

An authority inspector investigated the Navesink report and found no sign of leakage along the beach, either from the buried pipeline or the several manhole-topped access holes along its length, he said.

The entire stretch of pipe, which is about 40 years old, is scheduled to be replaced soon, with heavy construction equipment slated for delivery to the beach via the yacht club’s ramp as early as Monday. Baarck said the work is preventative.

Mayor Ben Lucarelli tells redbankgreen that a recent video inspection of the pipe found river water infiltrating the system at the foot of Gillespie Avenue, but that no sewage was getting into the river.

“It’s in weak condition,” Baarck said, and was one reason the authority sought and obtained state Department of Environmental Protection permits to replace the piping with a new system.

The new pipes will be laid next the existing pipes and, when completed, a cut-over from old system will be scheduled for the middle of the night to prevent any waste from getting into the river, he said.

Lockwood and Hamilton said the brown stuff appeared to have come from the west, based on Saturday’s winds. Baarck said that while the authority ruled out the Fair Haven system as its source, he could not rule out the possibility that it had come from the Red Bank system.

Lockwood and other club members said they sometimes see post-storm waste from the Middletown side of the river, where mansions along Navesink River Road are not hooked into a sewer and rely instead on septic tanks. But Saturday’s brown blob was far larger, they told redbankgreen.

Red Bank’s property tax won’t rise as much as expected this year.

Councilman Mike DuPont, chair of the council’s finance committee, says a penny has been trimmed from the increase anticipated as recently as two weeks ago.

That means the owner of a residential property assessed at the borough-average $401,000 will pay 1.4 cents more per $100 of value than last year, or a full-year increase of $56.50, DuPont said following the formal introduction of the $20.8 million spending plan Wednesday night.

The budget, which calls for raising $12 million from borough property owners, is $209,000 lighter than expected last month, said Chief Financial Officer Colleen Lapp. The biggest individual component of the drop came on an audit of payments for health insurance, which yielded $32,000 after some borough employees were found to have been billed for the wrong plans and other clerical errors.

A line item for arborist’s services was reduced from $27,000 to $5,000 after more funding became available under a shared services agreement with neighboring towns, she said. Red Bank will now hire an arborist on an as-needed hourly basis, DuPont said.

A public hearing and final vote on the budget are scheduled for May 23.

Meantime, DuPont said borough officials are still receiving and reviewing private-sector proposals to take over the town’s health insurance plan. A 22-percent increase in costs handed down earlier this year by the multi-town Health Insurance Fund, which Red Bank helped found, has officials considering a departure from the plan, DuPont said.

By JOHN T. WARD

In a contentious exchange that appeared to foreshadow a lawsuit to come, a lawyer for a Red Bank convenience store challenged the rationale for a new local law that banned all-night businesses Wednesday night.

Squaring off against three lawyers sitting on the council dais, store attorney Philip San Filippo said a revision to a noise ordinance passed by the governing body just moments later was overly broad in scope and designed solely to torpedo his client’s plans, now pending at the borough planning board, to convert the store to a 24-hour 7-Eleven.

The law, cast as an amendment to a noise ordinance, was “absolutely” designed with his client’s plans in mind, San Filippo told reporters afterward.

“It absolutely was not,” insisted Councilman Mike DuPont, even as he touted the hastily enacted law as a “creative” response to a problem.

Welsh Farms owner Dina Enterprises is scheduled to return to the planning board on May 21 for what is expected to be a vote on its proposal, which calls for a small expansion and changes in signage.

The plan, however, has met fierce opposition by neighbors. They say allowing the store, which now closes at 10 p.m., to operate all night raises security and quality-of-life issues.

At the council’s April 26 session, Mayor Pasquale Menna, who is an attorney and a member of the planning board, introduced the noise ordinance amendment. The item was not on the agenda, and no written copies were available. Afterward, asked why the council was acting in such a rush, Menna told redbankgreen: “Get it done now.”

The law doesn’t affect existing businesses, only those within 100 feet of a residential zone that are not already open after 11 p.m. Restaurants and bars are also exempted.

Now, though, even if Dina Enterprises is successful at the planning board, the Welsh Farms would be barred from opening all night. San Filippo said he would consult with his client about the possibility of filing suit against the council.

That prospect was already in DuPont’s mind when the public comment portion of the meeting opened and San Filippo began asking questions about police department data cited at the April 26 introduction. That data purported to show a pattern of disturbances requiring police intervention at convenience stores late at night.

DuPont, a lawyer whose office is next door to SanFilippo’s on Broad Street, repeatedly cut off San Filippo.

“Your asking questions which I find to be alluding to or insinuating that the statistical date didn’t support the vote,” he said. “It’s kind of disappointing. It was a creative way to protect our neighborhoods from all-night establishments that had never been there before.”

San Filippo, though, argued that the kinds of disturbances cited in the data are already against the law, whereas the amendment seeks to curtail land use without going through the process of vetting the change against the town’s Master Plan and land-use bodies.

“If you’re really concerned with noise associated with businesses located in proximity to residences, then let’s deal with the activity that generates the noise,” he said.

Menna and borough Attorney Dan O’Hern defended the change as supported by court precedent. O’Hern also said the change reflected “common sense. If you put a 24-hour operation within 100 feet of residences, that’s going to interfere with the peace, quiet and solitude of the residents nearby.”

Here’s the ordinance: 2012-8001

By MARY ANN BOURBEAU

Looking to form a pickup hoops or softball game, but don’t have enough friends? Try Joinagame, a new social network for pickup sports based right here on the Green.

Launching today, Joinagame was built by Corey Wagner of Rumson and Patrick Finan of Fair Haven to handle all the pesky details, such as finding and reserving an available field or court.

But it also addresses a bigger hurdle: not knowing enough people who might be game for a game.

“Once you leave college, you lose your sports network,” said Wagner.

Wagner and Finan work with the recreation directors in Fair Haven, Little Silver, Red Bank, Rumson, Sea Bright and Shrewsbury, as well as Atlantic Highlands and Oceanport, to monitor availability of facilities. Once a person registers at Joinagame, he or she can sign up to play a game already formed online or start their own.

Sports offered are basketball, flag football, kickball, soccer, softball, tennis, Ultimate Frisbee and volleyball.

Joinagame is free, though some towns offer players the option of reserving a field for $40, which all the players would split via online payments. Joinagame takes care of all the paperwork, insurance and payments, making it a win-win for the players and the municipalities. The site will soon offer referees for hire, too.

“It’s free to register and we hope to keep it that way, covering our costs with advertising from sports merchandise stores or bars,” said Wagner.

Finan, 22, earned a finance degree from Providence College in Rhode Island, where he played intramural tennis, soccer, hockey and softball.

“Sports are a huge passion of mine,” he said.

But Joinagame isn’t just for the freshly minted grads. “I’ve seen a lot of parents who bring their kids to practice and say they miss being out there themselves,” he said.

Wagner, a 25-year-old construction worker, and Finan, who is currently waiting tables, met four years ago when Wagner began dating Finan’s sister Jennifer. They’ve spent the last five months creating the site.

Wagner says Joinagame works as well for avid players as it does for those who can only squeeze in a game or two a season.

“A pickup game is nice, because you can show up once,” he said. “You don’t have to commit to a league, and if you don’t mesh with the guys, you can get a whole different group next time.”

The key challenge to their roll-out, they said, is getting enough players on board from the outset so that games have enough players to commence. They spent a full day last week putting up fliers in area coffee shops, salons and other high-traffic businesses, and were pleased to find a lot of interest.

“I was surprised how quickly people picked up on the concept,” said Wagner. “We’re starting local to see how it goes, but we would like to do it for every town in the area.”

By JOHN T. WARD

A bridge-replacement project in Little Silver that’s expected to take up to nine months could jam up a pair of intersections more than a mile away starting in July.

That, in turn, may also reinvigorate a dormant debate over whether those intersections are long overdue for traffic signals, Mayor Bob Neff tells redbankgreen.

The detour involves the installation of a temporary light at Branch Avenue and White Road, above, and another at Branch and Rumson Road. (Click to enlarge)

The replacement of a small, timber bridge on Seven Bridges Road just north of the Little Silver Point Road intersection is scheduled to begin shortly after the July 4 holiday, officials said. A concrete span with 12-foot lanes, three-foot shoulders and a six-foot pedestrian walkway on the westerly side will be installed in the $2.7 million project.

The work, originally scheduled to begin in 2008, has been repeatedly delayed.

Neff said that as part of the traffic-control portion of the project, the county will install temporary traffic lights at two locations on Branch Avenue: at the intersection of White Road, and at the intersection of Rumson Road, just yards away. That’s to accommodate an expected increase in volume caused by the closure of Seven Bridges at its northern (Rumson Road) and southern (Silverwhite Avenue) ends, as well as at the eastern ends of Kings Road and Point Road.

Residents whose homes can only be accessed via Seven Bridges will be permitted to bypass closure signs, but the bridge will remained closed to all but pedestrian and bike traffic for most of the duration.

But the installation of the lights prompts the question: why not make them permanent?

That turns out to be a live wire line of inquiry, said Neff. Hearings on the bridge “before my time on the council” some six years ago stirred up passions pro and con, he said.

The borough “held huge hearings, well-attended enough that one had to be moved to the Markham Place School,” he said.

And then, as he expects today, “you had people who want no traffic lights, people who had wanted traffic lights for years before this project came up, and people in the middle. The conclusion was the best way to do it was to go with temporary lights.”

Now, he said, “this discussion has started again: should we make these lights permanent?”

One one side are commuters who lament the difficulty of making left turns off Rumson and White roads, backing up vehicles on each at rush hours. On the other are those who see the lights as unnecessary and likely to adversely impact property values near the intersections.

The temporary lights should be a good test of whether the signals should become permanent, Neff said.

“Perhaps the use of the temporary lights will give us some idea of whether they might be workable,” he said, though the detour may be seem as exaggerating the extent of the problem, he notes.

In any event, the question of permanent signals “is a county issue, because it’s a county road,” he said of Branch.

Officials from the Monmouth County Engineer’s office could not be reached for comment.

Little Silver has asked the county to install the temporary lights during late-night hours to prevent further traffic congestion and to minimize the number of police officers required to direct traffic, Neff said.

By JOHN T. WARD

Kathie Panepinto was leading a tour of the Red Bank Primary School property and lamenting the heavy growth that hides an adjoining pond Monday when groundhog that had been sunning itself in the grass scooted across her path and into the brush.

“Oh, look at that,” she said said excitedly, noting that up-close sightings of deer and other wildlife are common at the school, which sits on landfill in a former wetlands abutting the Swimming River.

It was the kind of moment that for decades has inspired talk of the school’s potential as natural sciences learning center. And it underscored the value of ongoing efforts by Panepinto and other volunteers in their most ambitious effort to date: creating a permanent physical link between the school and the inaccessible pond.

A concept plan shows a walkway out into the pond that the foundation hopes to win funding for. (Click to enlarge)

Since its revival from dormancy four years ago, the nonprofit Red Bank Borough Education Foundation has focused its efforts on small-bore projects: leading cleanups of the 17-acre primary school property, lending a hand and a few dollars to installations such as a butterfly garden, a small greenhouse and a human sundial clock.

Now, though, the all-volunteer group is raising its sights with a proposal to build an outdoor classroom in the form of a pier and observation deck on the pond. The structure would enable students at the K-3 school to see land and aquatic habitats up close, and “to do wet and muddy samplings,” said RBBEF member and Councilman Ed Zipprich.

“Most folks don’t even know there’s a pond back there,” said member Susan Berke.

“The idea is to make access to the pond not just for science, but for reading, writing, art,” said Panepinto, an RBBEF officer.

No cost estimate for the project has yet been worked up, and foundation members don’t even know if they would need and might obtain permits from the state Department of Environmental Protection for the structure, which may be subject to limitations on building in coastal areas.

Still, they’ve begun the process of trying to win a grant for as much as $460,000 from the National Science Foundation, said foundation president Doug Winning, an architect. “We’re going for the full enchilada,” he said.

Meantime, the organization has raised about $10,000 in each of the past two years through art auctions held at the Atrium at Navesink Harbor. This year, no such event is planned, though members hope to put together an Antiques Roadshow-type event for 2013.

Meantime, the group has produced a reusable canvas shopping tote featuring Red Bank student art that will soon be available around town for $5. For $10, residents get the tote and membership in the RBBEF.

“We’re still taking baby steps at this point, but we’ve got momentum going, and that’s the important thing,” said Zipprich.