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 →

As Governor Jon Corzine prepared to leave office Monday, January 28, 2010, he signed the Permit Extension Act Renewal (S3137/A4347) into law, which amends the “Permit Extension Act of 2008”, further extending the expiration date of certain permits for an additional 2 1/2 years.

Under this law, a significant number of municipal, county, regional and state approvals shall be extended to December 31, 2012. The initial “Permit Extension Act of 2008” was set to expire on July 1, 2010.

All other requirements of the Act remain, and no approval subject to this amendment can be further extended greater than six months after the end of the extension period – June 30, 2013. Continue reading →

The following Renewable Energy legislation was signed into law in New Jersey on January 16, 2010.

S1538/A2859 Concerns biomass, solar, and wind energy generation on farms

Allows solar and wind energy generation on preserved farms under certain circumstances and includes solar and wind energy generation on commercial farms as protected activities/permitted use under the “Right to Farm Act.”

Certain distinctions are made between preserved farms and non-preserved farms.
Preserved farms limited to 110% of annual onsite consumption.
Applications for site development will go to SADC (State Agricultural Development Committee) not to the municipality.
S2528/A3740 Provides for regulation of small wind energy systems by municipalities Continue reading →