Beaches & Summer

Well, Memorial Day approaches and with it the unofficial start of the summer season.

A recent conversation with those in the know reports that much of our city beaches were lost to the North Atlantic in last week's Nor'easter. Anyone who has been down to the beach lately can see that Long Branch's shoreline is a sad remenant of its former self. It also reminds us at the LBA of the Long Branch beaches of the 1980s and early '90s--pre-beach replenishment.

The LBA has been a realistic voice in the world of beach replenishment. Federal money is warranted for beach replenishment as a means of mitigating the damage done during coastal storms. Unlike many of our fellow citizens from the midwest who may feel that it is nothing more than pork for rich beachfront landowners, the LBA knows that without that sand in place to take the brunt of the storm's fury, the shore line would be significantly further west than it is now. I guess our midwestern naysayers should just consider beach replenishment the Ethanol of the Jersey Shore--a useless waste of money to everyone except those who directly benefit from it.

It looks like the beaches around Pier Village are servicable, and the LBA did see some heavy equipment out there trying to build it up to extent possible but the Seaview Avenue beach is all but gone. Lets hope that it is a light tropical storm year, that the Noreasters leave us alone for a year or so and that He who taketh away also shall giveth back.

The weather promises to be wonderful so get out there and enjoy the sand we do have left.

Does the City need to realign sanitation services?

Redbankgreen has a good posting about the apparent increase of cigarette butts on the beaches of our area. Honestly, we at the LBA have never quite understood the fun of smoking on a hot beach but apparently environmentalists believe that many of the butts on the beach are not smoked on the beach but rather end up on the beach from points hither and yon.

Long Branch's public beaches have always seemed to be as good as expected but one has to wonder if they wouldn't be cleaner if the City adopted a new "clean city" approach. The clean city approach as the LBA envisions it, would adjust the city's employee-oriented approach to city sanitation and code enforcement and realign it to a goal-oriented approach.

The goals of sanitation should not just be to remove trash and litter but to leave the city cleaner and better looking than it was beforehand. The LBA hates the fact that there are pages of regulations about when trash can be placed, how it must be sorted, how it must be prepared and presented and the like but apparently no rules at all about how city employees approach the collection or conduct themselves in the execution thereof. Most side streets in the city look like the aftermath of an F5 tornado after the sanitation team gets done tossing garbage cans, recycling containers and the like back to the curb (if you are lucky) and down the street beyond your neighbors house in all likelihood.

This, as compared to the collection system in Ocean Township and Rumson Borough, where the sanitation teams are instructed to not only retrieve garbage receptacles from their place near or behind your home but to also return them, upright, to their original location. As a result, those towns look significantly cleaner on garbage days than Long Branch, even though the garbage from both communities was successfully collected from both communities, and the people walking down those streets are much more likely to maintain that look than they would be to throw trash on the street, as the LBA witnesses before our offices every single day.