Advocates staged a protest in April to call attention to restricted public access to local beaches like this gated entryway in Elberon. New state regulations that give local towns the authority to create public access plans for the waterfront may actually result in less public access to the state’s shores, according to environmental advocates.
Tim Dillingham, executive director of the Sandy Hook-based American Littoral Society (ALS), said in an interview last week that environmental groups are reviewing the new rules to determine if the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has adhered to the Public Trust Doctrine that ensures the public has access to the state’s waters.
“The impact of the rules will result in less public access for fewer people in fewer places,” Dillingham said in an Oct. 9 interview.
“New Jersey still faces tremendous challenges where people are kept away from the coast by development, by highways and by exclusionary local policies.”
“We’ll be looking at whether or not the rules are legal as they are adopted,” he said. “We are deeply concerned that they violate the Public Trust Doctrine, which gives the right of access to the shore that New Jersey courts have utilized for a couple of hundred years now.”
The amended guidelines were adopted by the N.J. Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) on Oct. 4 after an extensive public comment period on a draft set of public access rules that were universally panned by local environmental and surfing groups in 2011.
Under the amended guidelines, municipalities would be required to submit a Municipal Public Access Plan to the DEP, which would reject or accept the plan.
The plans would address a variety of issues involving beach access points, signage and parking.
John Weber, northeast regional manager for the Surfrider Foundation, said in an interview that comment by stakeholders had an impact on the DEP rules.
“We knew these rules were coming for a long time, the good news is the DEP had a much different idea two years ago as they started down this road,” he said. “We were able to get them to revise and change those rules but they still settled on something that fell a little short of really improving public access.”
Weber explained how the rules evolved.
“One of the central ideas was having towns come up with municipal public access plans and what changed is in the original set of rules there was no meaningful process for people in the town to participate in the process,” Weber said.
“We made it so people actually could participate on the local level and there is at least a hearing at DEP,” he added. “There’s a few steps along the way where the public could get involved every time a town submits one of these access plans to the DEP.”
In an interview last week, Larry Ragonese, DEP spokesman, said restricted public access is not a widespread problem at the shore.
“The critics are saying we are letting the towns run wild and do whatever they want. What we tried to do is, we took a look at the Jersey Shore and we know that most of the shore there is not much of a problem with access.
“Most people who go to the shore in the summer go to where they want to go,” he added. “It’s really an issue of several towns that are believed by people to be exclusionary.”
Ragonese said the DEP attempted to take a balanced approach to ensuring public access to the shoreline.
“There are people that believe that every bit of the shoreline should be completely open to anybody who wants to go there,” he said. “That is just not workable, so what we are trying to do is to get the towns to voluntarily open up as much access as possible. “We are trying to use common sense here, we talked to the towns, we made it clear to them we want to partner with them and help them create plans that would make sense for each individual town.”
In a press release, DEP Commissioner Bob Martin said the new rules, developed with extensive input from the public and stakeholders, set up a framework for the DEP to work one-on-one with municipalities to draft Municipal Public Access Plans “that make sense locally, instead of imposing one-size-fits-all mandates.”
The rules apply to 231 municipalities from the New York-New Jersey Harbor region, south along the entire coastline, and north along the Delaware Bay and tidal portions of the Delaware River.
According to Dillingham municipalities have little incentive to adopt plans that provide increased access.
“We will look at the local plans as they develop,” he said. “Towns that don’t have a lot of access right now really have no incentive to adopt these public access plans.
“They are not mandatory, they are voluntary,” he added. “The towns that have been bad on access don’t really have any incentive in these rules to increase access.”
He also said the littoral society would examine beach replenishment funding and how it is tied to public access.
Dillingham said fishermen, surfers, environmental community groups and most members of the public who use the shore have panned the rules.
Dillingham listed parking restrictions, private beach clubs and restrictive local laws including those that prevent fishermen from using the beach as ways municipalities limit public access.
“I think the biggest challenge is that access is not provided evenly throughout the coast and the bays,” he said. “Most of the access to the general public is through the municipal beaches.
“It is made worse by the lack of parking that is provided through much of the coast,” he added.
“Everybody but the Christie Administration seems to recognize that the shore is a public resource,” he added. “The public really shouldn’t have to fight every town and state government agency to get access to that public resource.”
Dillingham drew parallels between the beach access rules and a settlement between the Sea Bright Beach Club and the state that ended a long-standing access issue.
“Ironically the week that the Christie Administration was weakening the beach access rules the court said very clearly that the beaches are public, particularly where they were nourished with public money,” he said.
In a Sept. 28 ruling, the Appellate Division of state Superior Court affirmed a lower court ruling that the club must provide public access to the beach because it benefited from publicly funded beach replenishment.
Weber said the groups will monitor public access compliance and will be collecting data from people denied access to the waterfront.
“We are going to start collecting all these instances where people were denied access where we feel they should have had that,” he said.
“We are still figuring out where these towns have local laws that contradict the state rule,” he added. “Hopefully the state will help us because it is their rules and they should care about it.”
The rules will become official on Nov. 5.
To read the rule adoption document, which includes a summary of public comments and DEP’s responses, visit: http://www.nj.gov/dep/rules/adoptions/ado pt_ 20121105a.pdf.

