On Tuesday, August 27th, FEMA issued the Preliminary Work Maps for Cape May County. This long-awaited release of official flood mapping replaces the Advisory Base Flood Maps and delineates new flood zones and elevations. Cape May County’s Emergency Management Coordinator Martin Pagliughi indicated that that the new maps “reduced the acreage in the V-Zones by about 80 percent.”  He stated that, “Now it’s going to take some time for individual municipalities to analyze and get into the detail and look at the accuracy of where the lines are.”

With Hurricane Sandy’s landfall and damage still at the forefront the Jersey shore’s recovery efforts, it is essential that property owners review the new mapping and designations specific to their lands and understand the implications of the assigned zones and elevations.  The Lomax Consulting Group has been tracking updates to and the release of FEMA’s Preliminary Work Maps on behalf of its clients, and is now engaged in reviewing impacts and implications resulting from these mapping changes.

These maps are preliminary, and they will now go through a period during which municipalities and the public can review and comment on the delineated boundaries and designations.  As these preliminary maps are now the prevailing flood designations […]

WILDWOOD — For many years the parking requirements under the N.J. Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) Coastal Area Facility Review Act (CAFRA) regulations have made coastal redevelopment of hotels a difficult venture. These standards required as many as four parking spaces for each hotel unit – an overburden strangling the economic vitality of hotel redevelopment.

The Lomax Consulting Group, a local consulting firm, teamed with municipalities, local hotel owners, and the construction trades to establish reasonable design standards that balance parking needs with parking demands based on hotel unit size. Wildwood Crest Mayor Carl Groon indicated that he had approached the NJDEP to provide a more realistic parking standard that would foster urban redevelopment in the Wildwoods and to encourage hotels to replace room stock lost to condominium conversions. Continue reading →

WILDWOOD CREST – While other resort towns spend millions to pump sand on eroded beaches, the beaches in Wildwood Crest just keep getting bigger and bigger. But applications filed with regulatory authorities in recent months demonstrate how the beach’s growth creates problems of its own. This spring, the borough had to obtain an emergency beach maintenance permit allowing it to use sand from its front beach – near water’s edge – to address problems at the back, where there is a mishmash of dunes in one area and bulkheads of questionable structural integrity in another.

Emergency work was also needed to address ponds that formed in back beaches as a result of this winter’s storms. With water as deep as three feet in some places, the expansive ponding barred beach access and jarred visitors who, instead of finding a scenic view of the ocean, came upon what appeared to be a new lake covering whole beaches. Continue reading →

By BEN LEACH Staff Writer
| Posted: Sunday, January 10, 2010 |

The thought of cutting down and removing trees from Avalon’s treasured maritime forest might seem like the last thing environmentalists would want to do. But Brian Reynolds expresses no remorse as workers removed portions of trees along 74th Street on Thursday morning.

“We have to get them out,” Reynolds said.

Reynolds, who chairs Avalon’s Environmental Commission, is talking about only one kind of tree; the Japanese black pine. When planted in the 1960s, the trees were a great way to keep the dunes from eroding. Continue reading →