Fair Haven resident Ben Hamilton, right, noting that “there are more dignitaries here than audience,” said he knows business owners who have been “suffering in silence” over the duration of the closure and will be glad to have it back in service. (Photos by Stacie Fanelli. Click to enlarge)

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.

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.

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.

It doesn’t look very red now, but the outlook for fans of Red Bank’s red clay courts is rosy. (Click to enlarge)

By DANIELLE TEPPER

A recent visit to Red Bank’s clay tennis courts in Marine Park found the riverfront facility deserted and unusually quiet. The courts, cracked and faded, looked more like a stretch of beige sand than a popular spot for athletes to brush up on their skills.

Not to worry though, for this is an annual lull. Over the next month or so, the only player working these courts will be court manager Rich Nicoletti, who’s been tending the facility, and its patrons, for decades.

“What you’re looking at here is the wear-and-tear of winter,” says Nicoletti. And its his job to bring the playing surface back to dusty-red glory, he said.

Each spring, the courts are stripped down to their bottom layer as Nicoletti and a team work their magic to revive one of America’s tennis rarities.

“It’s a long process,” Nicoletti said. “Repairing the damage, smoothing it out, laying the clay and the slate, nailing the lines.”

You read correctly: the court boundaries aren’t merely sprayed on. Long strips  of fabric are cut and, one by one, nailed to the court by hand.

It sounds like an arduous task, but the wait shouldn’t be too long.

“By mid-May, we hope to be just about finished,” said Nicoletti. “Then you can come back here and have your tennis match on our beautiful red clay.”

The courts are open to the public from May 26 to mid-October, seven days a week, from 7 a.m. to sundown. But they’re not free: court usage costs $28 per hour, though members get unlimited use. See the facility website for a schedule of fees for borough residents and non-residents.

For more information on the courts or lessons with “Coach Rich,” call (732) 530-2737 or email.

You can also check out redbankgreen’s 2007 article on the courts here.

By JOHN T. WARD

Red Bank’s streets are about to be abloom in yellow, and not solely from the spring return of the forsythia.

The town is giving away more than 2,200 bright yellow recycling bins to borough residents in an effort to create some identifiable uniformity to the re-use effort.

Town officials began giving the 20-gallon, lidded barrels out to senior citizen residents several weeks ago, and have now widened the availability to all residents, Maria Rotolo of the public utilities office tells redbankgreen.

To obtain one, residents have to call the department at 732-530-2773 or visit the office, on Chestnut Street opposite the armory ice rink. Residents have the option of picking up the barrels or having them delivered. The town will also remove any old containers that residents had been using for recycling, Rotolo said.

The barrels come at no direct cost to residents. A $17,925 grant from the Monmouth County Solid Waste Advisory Council covered the cost of the first 1,500 barrels, and the public utilities department pulled $8,800 from its budget to pay for an additional 726, said director Gary Watson.

While the total 2,226 barrels is fewer than the 3,000 single-family households in town, “not everybody wants one,” Rotolo said. “We’ve had people tell us they don’t want one, for whatever reason.”

Red Bank uses single-stream collection of recyclables, in which paper, plastic, glass and aluminum is picked up together and sorted afterward. Here’s some info on that: Red Bank Single Stream

By JOHN T. WARD

The developers of proposed 72-room Hampton Inn in Red Bank insist the property on which the hotel would be built is not on Rector Place.

Problem: they previously agreed that it was.

Easily the most multifaceted and complex case to confront  borough land use officials in years, the hotel, which would be built on the site of a closed Exxon station at the foot of the Cooper Bridge, has spawned three lawsuits and long-running, simultaneous sets of hearings at the planning and zoning boards.

At issue at the zoning board is a challenge by borough resident Stephen Mitchell, backed by a competing hotel group, who has asked that the board determine whether the main case was mistakenly sent by officials to the planning board. By his reckoning, the proposed six-story hotel violates the height limits of the waterfront development zone, and thus needs variances from the zoning board.

Mitchell’s challenge has led to three sessions resembling a trial, with lawyers for the opposing sides frequently clashing over rules of evidence and the relevance of questions in cross-examination.

On Thursday night, the thing got even more bizarre, as a witness for the hotel testified its property is not in any way on Rector Place.

Though borough tax records, the post office and a flurry of legislative activity over the property in 2009 all identify the site as 80 Rector Place, an engineer for developer Rbank Capital LLC insisted Thursday night that not only does the site “front” on Route 35, but that it has no frontage whatsoever on Rector Place.

His proof: agreements between the borough and the state Department of Transportation, as well as a finely detailed roadway jurisdiction map. All, he said, show that a 40-foot stretch of the property long identified as being on Rector actually fronts on Route 35.

Exiting the property from that area would put a pedestrian smack on state property, not Rector Place, which is a Monmouth County road, says hotel lawyer Marty McGann.

The issue is key, McGann said, in  determining how to apply a measurement formula in a zoning ordinance to gauge whether the proposed hotel is too tall.

To prevail, though, McGann will have to overcome a wealth of contradictory evidence, including borough tax and other designations.

He’ll also have to reverse the stance taken by of his own client three years ago.

That’s when Rbank Capital sought, and obtained, a decision from the borough council that, despite its street address, the property had previously been included by mistake on a list of residential properties along Rector Place in an ordinance that aimed to preserve old homes. At no time, however, did Rbank representatives claim that the property had no Rector Street frontage.

McGann said the existence of the documents cited Thursday night was unknown at the time.

But Mitchell’s lawyer, Ron Gasiorowski, made clear he regards the frontage issue as a red herring. The ordinance, he maintains, makes no reference to frontage in its formula for determining where to measure a building’s height. Instead, he said, it requires a line be drawn between the river and “the nearest parallel roadway,” which he says is Rector Place.

And just as McGann maintains that the post office designation “is based on public convenience” and has nothing to do with zoning, Gasiorowski claims the highway jurisdiction agreements have nothing to do with zoning, either.

The hearing was tentatively scheduled to resume May 17.

By JOHN T. WARD

For six months, Salt Creek Grille owner Steve Bidgood has watched with guarded optimism the progress of work to replace the 100-foot-long bascule on the Oceanic Bridge over the Navesink River.

Denied since October the benefit of traffic the 72-year-old bridge was built to carry between Middletown and his side, Rumson, Bidgood’s foremost concern has been that the job wrap up, as advertised, by the start of the busy summer season – Memorial Day weekend.

“I’d love to see them do it,” Bidgood told redbankgreen this week, eyeing the elegant bridge framed by the restaurant’s windows. “If they do, I might even buy them dinner.”

It’s looking as though Bidgood will need to reserve a large table.

Monmouth County Engineer Joe Ettore, whose office is managing the project, tells redbankgreen that the Oceanic’s target reopening date remains Thursday, May 31.

An earlier reopening is possible, he said. But don’t count on it.

“We are doing everything we can, working with the contractor, to come in with the best possible date for reopening,” Ettore said Wednesday. “But there is critical work that remains, and that critical work has to by necessity take place at this late point in the project.”

Eighty-five-to-95 percent of the structural work is done, he said, but critical testing of the electrical and mechanical systems remains.

Ettore said the project “had a very tight window in which to complete a substantial amount of work” on the moving parts of the 2,752-foot-long span – by far the county’s longest. The timetable was designed to minimize the adverse economic impact on businesses that are reliant on bridge traffic, he said.

Aided by a snowless and unseasonably mild winter, it appears not a day of the summer season will be lost, Ettore said.

“The fact that we’re on-schedule is a real good sign, and we’re very happy with the contractor’s performance,” he said. The contractor on the $3.6 million job is Iron Bridge Group of North Brunswick.

Funding for the project came from the state, which prohibits early-completion incentives, Ettore said.

The repaired bascule is expected to have a useful life of 20 years, he said, but the long concrete approaches to the bascule are already overdue for replacement, a project that’s not expected to get into construction for at least three more years.

Local and county officials are hoping to persuade the federal government to fund another low-level drawbridge, rather than a high-arc, fixed span that area residents say would adversely affect property values and the aesthetics of the river.

The opening of a new bridge “is at least six years away, and it’s not inconceivable that it could be 10,” Ettore said.

Documents explaining the repair job can be found at the engineering department website.