“We need more clarity on what we need to do,” Dennis said.Ībbott said that he has personally spent “hundreds and hundreds of hours, mostly non-billed” to try to get the state to approve the permits and using Shelter Island as a disposal site. “If there is new material there that wasn’t there before, and if it is significant enough, they could make us go out and re-sample.”ĭennis said the DEP and ACE is meeting at the end of June to review the results of sampling conducted by Stockton University years ago to determine if the city can use Shelter Island as a dredge hole. “If there are significant differences, they will re-look at the sampling plan we did,” he said. The city will be required to submit new survey data showing the differences in sedimentation, he said, although the process will not delay dredging as the city is not ready to move on funding the project. “Through all the twists and turns on this…unfortunately, they want us to survey the entire dredge area.” “It’s not the answer we were looking for,” he said, noting that the DEP requires survey data be no more than six months old. The commissioners learned that all the city’s permitting documents are in order, but DEP regulations state that the eight-year-old survey data needs to be updated to determine if there are any changes in sediment, engineer Ed Dennis Jr. He suggested the city hire a lobbyist to push the DEP into approving the citywide dredging permit. The delay is not from us, it’s from them.” “When some bureaucrat from the DEP casually says, ‘by the way, let’s re-survey that and maybe we have to re-test it again,’ it’s costing us a lot more money.
“It’s distressing,” Abbott said at the June 15 Board of Commissioners meeting.
Army Corps of Engineers meet later this month, they may want the city to conduct additional sampling of the sedimentation in the bay.Īccording to Solicitor John Scott Abbott, the cost of doing the study and sampling a second time could cost more than $100,000. MARGATE – The NJ Department of Environmental Protection, which has been reviewing the city’s request for a dredging permit for the last seven years, wants the city to conduct a second survey of the dredging area. File Photo/Somers Point dredged the bay in 2019 to create a new marina.
0 kommentar(er)
