By KENNY WALTER
Staff Writer
LONG BRANCH — Nearly two months ahead of schedule and three and a half years after it was destroyed in superstorm Sandy, Long Branch finally has a boardwalk.
City officials celebrated the completion of the boardwalk during an April 11 ribbon-cutting ceremony, and Mayor Adam Schneider said in an April 15 interview the reaction has been positive.
“It really looks nice, everyone in town seems real happy,” he said.
The council authorized a contract with the Howell-based George Harms Construction Company in 2015 for the replacement of the boardwalk, which was rebuilt twice as wide in some areas.
The contract also funded repairs to the protective bluff in front of the boardwalk, a 40-foot-deep protective metal wall and road work on Ocean Avenue.
Schneider praised the construction group, who won the $14.4 million bid in 2015.
“Getting the right contractor is a combination of dumb luck and planning,” Schneider said. “The dumb luck part is the right guy has to bid the best numbers.”
According to Schneider, while other towns rebuilt the boardwalk quicker, the damage for the bluff made the city’s situation unique.
“We knew the day after the storm, the comments I was getting, was this will not be open,” he said. “There were sections of the boardwalk that looked okay and I was thinking patch and mend, but we went down on the sand and you can just see parts were just hanging by a thread and that’s when we shut everything down and put up the fence.”
Long Branch has 16 beaches: Seaview Avenue, Great Lawn, Madison Avenue, Laird Street, Chelsea Avenue, Melrose Terrace, Morris Avenue, Pavilion Avenue, North Bath Avenue, South Bath Avenue, Matilda Terrace, Cottage Place, West End, Brighton Avenue, New Court and Takanassee. Beach season runs from Memorial Day through Labor Day.
The two concessions stands at West End Avenue and North Bath Avenue will have full cooking stations. The concession stand north of Cottage Place will not initially have a kitchen set up for cooking.