Wildwood and Wildwood Crest don’t want to share sand with North Wildwood

WILDWOOD — The beaches of Wildwood are so wide that in summer, the city runs a taxi service, John Deere Gator, over the sand to take people from the Boardwalk to the water’s edge.

Those wide beaches — in some places more than a quarter-mile from boardwalk to ocean — are an anomaly along the erosion-prone Jersey Shore. But in the last decade, they have become such a part of the town’s identity — and a cog in its economic engine — that Wildwood and neighbor Wildwood Crest now say they don’t want to share with sand-challenged North Wildwood.

But such a Robin Hood-esque replenishment, borrowing from the sand-sated Wildwood towns to give to skinny North Wildwood, is at the core of a 50-year island-wide federal beach replenishment project, formally known as the Hereford Inlet to Cape May Inlet Coastal Storm Risk Management Project, on which all three Wildwoods have signed off.

You can’t deny the logic.

On Wildwood’s vast beaches, there is room for the Barefoot Country Music Festival, tournaments for beach hockey, Ultimate Frisbee, flag football, and soccer, Wildwood Beach Baseball, Monster Truck Beach Races, and a Jeep beach invasion. “There’s events on the beach every day in the summer,” said Wildwood Mayor Ernie Troiano. “We have 150 fields for soccer. When there’s Frisbee, there’s 100 fields.”

Meanwhile, in North Wildwood, huge cliffs of eroding sand had become a frequent sight until an emergency beach fill last spring from the state plumped up the beaches a bit and led to the end of years of costly litigation. The full federal project, more than a decade in the planning and funding, was finally on deck.

But the mayors of Wildwood and Wildwood Crest are now balking.

In letters to the Department of Environmental Protection, and at a follow-up meeting Dec. 16, they expressed surprise at how much of their beach they could be expected to give up, and concern over the impact to their towns, throwing the project into uncertainty.

At a recent commissioners meeting shown on YouTube, Wildwood Crest Mayor Don Cabrera said the town was now opposing the project. “Our beaches are beautiful,” he said. “They’re wide. They’re spacious. When you start engineering as such where you could shrink it, that could cause a lot of problems.”

In a Dec. 11 letter to DEP Commissioner Shawn LaTourette, Cabrera and the town’s two other commissioners said the final plans for the project include “significant reduction of beach space which not only threatens the capacity of our beaches to accommodate the anticipated hundreds of thousands of visitors but also jeopardizes the overall experience of beachgoers.”

Wildwood Crest further said the planned construction of a 75-foot-wide dune within the Crest’s existing dunes “raises alarms regarding potential ecological disruptions,” in addition to reducing the number of accessible crossovers. Specifically, the dunes provide “vital habitat for numerous species,” the Crest said, which could be put at risk by the new dune construction.

Officials worry that some of the dunes will have a lower profile than what’s currently there, and that some entrances will be widened, leaving those areas more vulnerable to coastal storm damage.

“Our natural dunes provide vital habitat for numerous species, and while we acknowledge the intent to replant vegetation, we fear the timeline for restoring this delicate ecosystem may take too long,” the letter stated.

Troiano, Wildwood’s mayor, said his town has not only adjusted to its abnormally wide beaches over the years but now depends on them.

“We’ve always had some reserve with regards to this,” Troiano said, “primarily because we have turned the beach area into an economic engine for not just the city and island, but also for the county and for the state. There’s nobody that comes close to the amount of events we have on our beach.”

Troiano said the latest version of the plan shows a worst-case scenario that would bring the ocean 900 feet closer to the Boardwalk.

The city contended in its letter that this was a different scenario than previously presented when the project was signed off on. “The current plan to shift the [Mean High Water] line to this planned location is not what the city anticipated, nor what it would accept,” the letter states.

“If I was to eliminate half my beach, the economic loss would be staggering,” Troiano said. Among other things, he said, “The country concert would be very difficult to put on.”

By now, it’s a familiar phenomenon on Five Mile Island. Wildwood’s wide beaches are the result partly of natural patterns of sand migrating in a south-southwesterly direction out of the Hereford Inlet to the north, and partly the result of century-old human engineering of the Cape May Harbor to the south and the Turtle Gut inlet in the Crest.

It all has combined to result in beaches that have steadily grown in Wildwood and Wildwood Crest, to the detriment of North Wildwood (and parts of Cape May).

It hasn’t always been that way.

“The conditions on the ground are North Wildwood needs sand, and Wildwood Crest and Wildwood do not,” said North Wildwood Mayor Patrick Rosenello. “I’m old enough to remember when it was the exact opposite, as recently as the late ’80s and early ’90s.”

In recent years, North Wildwood has resorted to a DIY approach as it awaited beach replenishment, including installing steel bulk-heading sheets to shore up its seawall, which brought fines from the state.

U.S. Army Corps projects up and down the Jersey Shore have relied on pumping sand from out in the ocean onto beaches. Sand that has steadily built up in the Hereford Inlet was (logically) used by the state DEP during the emergency beach fill last spring.

But federal rules, as currently interpreted, prohibit federal funds to be used to harvest sand from the Hereford Inlet, though both Troiano and Rosenello would be just fine if that’s where the sand came from.

Troiano says the Hereford Inlet, which separates North Wildwood from the southern end of Stone Harbor, is long due for a dredging. As for Rosenello, he has nothing to gain from insisting the sand come from one place or another — he just needs sand.

Rosenello said his main concern is that the federal government has finally come to the Wildwoods ready to embark on a 50-year guarantee of beach replenishment. All the mayors signed off in 2023. (There was a different mayor in Wildwood.)

To back out now, Rosenello says, is legally questionable and risks the island’s long-term protection.

“Obviously every town has to watch out for their own interests,” Rosenello said. “Everybody currently has a legal obligation to proceed with this project.”

He said the opposition to the project is shortsighted.

And while that also may be Wildwood’s and Wildwood Crest’s point — that, despite their riches now, they might need the sand later on — Rosenello says the willingness of the federal government to make a half-century commitment to shoring up the island’s beaches should not be missed.

“My point to the other mayors is you’re making a 50-year decision now,” he said. “If a town turns down a project, it could impact federal emergency declarations down the road. What is the impact on flood insurance in the town? If that train leaves the station and we’re not on it, there’s no saying if that train is ever coming back.”

The Army Corps and the DEP say they are planning more meetings in the Wildwoods this month. Army Corps spokesperson Stephen Rochette said the “approved borrow area” has remained the same since the project’s feasibility study in 2015.

“The current designs anticipate using a smaller area than the approved borrow area,” he said in an emailed statement. “However because of the dynamic nature of the coastline we need to consider the full potential impacts necessary to construct this important coastal storm risk management project.”

Still, he acknowledged, the Army Corps has also signed an agreement with the state to conduct a general reevaluation of the project to consider alternate sources of sand — including Hereford Inlet and offshore borrow areas.

DEP spokesperson Larry Hajna said the concerns of Wildwood and Wildwood Crest (Lower Township controls a small section of the island as well) would be discussed individually in January, “as we move toward bidding and construction slated for spring of 2026.”