Environmental groups laud S.B. beach suit
Boro officials will try to have town exempted from civil complaint
BY SUE MORGAN
Staff Writer

CHRIS KELLY staff Donovan's Reef in Sea Bright is one of the private beach clubs targeted in a suit brought by the state Attorney General's Office and the state Department of Environmental Protection.

SEA BRIGHT - Soaking up the sun on publicly purchased sands ought to be open to all, not just "members only," according to beach access advocates.

Those advocates are cheering the legal action taken last month by state officials seeking to ensure the right of all New Jersey residents, not just the members of eight Ocean Avenue private beach clubs and residents of the new homes that supplanted a once popular club, to use sands paid for with taxpayer dollars.

To Jeff Tittel, executive director of the New Jersey Chapter of the Sierra Club, the civil complaint filed jointly against those beach clubs by the state Attorney General's Office and the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) amounts to "finally taking on the Berlin Wall of the Shore."

Meanwhile, two elected officials from the Borough of Sea Bright, which was also named as a defendant, in the four-count complaint, expect to head to Trenton today as a means of trying to work out issues pertaining to the town's collection of beach fees during the summer and money owed for a 2003 beach replenishment project.

Aside from the borough government, the eight existing beach clubs and East Brunswick-based Kara Homes, which owns the property that once was the site of the Tradewinds Beach Club, are also named as plaintiffs in the suit filed on Sept. 22 in the Chancery Division of state Superior Court, Freehold.

As the beneficiaries of a publicly financed $29.4 million sand replenishment project begun in 1993, the beach clubs have acted brazenly by forbidding nonmembers to come onto sands that they claim are theirs, Tittel said.

"I've always thought that these people [private beach clubs] have a lot of chutzpah to get all this public money to keep their beaches private," Tittel said in an e-mailed statement.

The three-miles of oceanfront hosting seven beach clubs and The Trade Winds at Sea Bright, the residential subdivision built by Kara Homes, represent an abuse of the public trust by the private sector, according to John Weber of the Surfrider Foundation, a nationwide coastal environmental group.

Even after agreeing to open up their oceanfronts once they were replenished following storms in 1993 and again in 2003, the private clubs have not done so, Weber said on Monday.

"We have repeatedly held up that strip as the poster child for unfulfilled promises of [public] beach access after a beach fill project," said Weber, Surfrider's regional manager for the east coast.

Likewise, Tim Dillingham of the American Littoral Society, threw the organization's support behind acting Attorney General Ann Milgram, who initiated the lawsuit on the heels of the state's successful court battle against the Atlantis Beach Club in Cape May County.

That private beach club can no longer ban nonmembers from its waterfront, paid for with taxpayer funds, as the result of a 2005 ruling by the state Supreme Court that opened up the sands outside the Atlantis to the public.

"We have always thought that the beaches shouldn't be privatized," said Dillingham, whose organization is based north of Sea Bright at the Sandy Hook Unit of Gateway National Park. "[Privatization] is a disturbing and dangerous trend."

"We're happy to see that the acting attorney general is following up on the Atlantis Beach Club decision," Dillingham said on Monday. "That case set the stage for this action. The court order allowing public access should be expanded all over New Jersey."

Though he was not aware of the lawsuit until after he read newspaper accounts of the court action, Dillingham says his organization has contacted the office of Gov. Jon S. Corzine to garner the endorsement of the state's top leader.

"We talked to the Corzine Administration," Dillingham said. "We have found him supportive of public access to the beaches."

On the opposite side of the issue, Sea Bright officials, Councilman Thomas Scriven and Councilwoman Dina Long, are hoping that Corzine's office will support and listen to their side as well.

The two officials are preparing to meet with a Corzine staffer and with Milgram this afternoon to see if the state will drop the borough as a plaintiff in the suit, Scriven said on Monday night.

"We're hoping that they'll let us out of the suit," said Scriven, who chairs the Borough Council's beach committee.

Information detailed in one count of the civil complaint charging the borough with retaining and not accounting for a beach surplus of $17.7 million collected between 1993 and 2004, is incorrect, Scriven said.

"The lawsuit is based on erroneous information," he said.

Milgram's office is seeking to order Sea Bright to account for monies collected via beach utility between 1993 and 2004.

Between Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends, the borough charges $7 per day or $95 per season, with a senior citizen seasonal rate of $35, for users of the municipal beach located on the site of the defunct Anchorage Pool and Surf Club.

During the 2006 beach season, the borough took in a total of $271,566, Scriven said.

Free public parking for the municipal beach is situated at the parking lot known as the Peninsula House "or P House" lot, a reference to a long-gone restaurant that once stood there.

Borough Attorney Scott Arnette could not be reached for comment by press time.

At the Sea Bright Beach Club, one of the private entities named in the suit, a manager on duty indicated on Monday that the club is owned by its membership and has not yet been served with court papers. She referred all further questions about the issue to the club's board of governors.

A manager on duty at Donovan's Reef, another plaintiff in the suit, stated that the club's ownership is aware of the lawsuit and is seeking out an attorney. She refused to comment further.

The other five beach clubs named as plaintiffs are Chapel Beach Club, The Surf Rider Beach Club, The Sands Beach Club, Driftwood Beach Club, and Ship Ahoy Beach Clubs.

Messages left for the owners or managers of those beach clubs were not returned at press time. Messages left for the legal department at Kara Homes were also not returned at press time.

The fourth count of the complaint alleges that Sea Bright officials have kept portions of the Peninsula House property "inaccessible and in disrepair" and that the borough is trying to barter away a portion of the site to the neighboring, Chapel Beach Club, "in exchange for landlocked property, on which the borough intended to construct a new municipal building."

Because the Chapel Beach Club does not allow public access to its waterfront, Sea Bright has breached a 1992 contract with the state government by seeking to enter such an agreement, according to Lee Moore, a spokesperson for Milgram's office.

The suit also seeks repayment of $556,270, plus interest that the state spent in 1993 to cover Sea Bright's share of the beach replenishment project