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War at the Jersey shore over who rules the beaches

New Jerseyans have to put up with taxes, tolls, toxic waste and, occasionally, Snooki. So an occasional trip to the beach is all that keeps some folks here sane.

Now officials in the nation's most densely populated state are rewriting public beach access rules that could make it easier for well-to-do towns to keep out-of-towners off their beaches -- and a sandstorm is brewing.

The state says it had to act and give more local control over access after a court decision struck down more stringent rules that spelled out uniform standards for each shore town. The state feels it can accomplish more by working with shore towns and giving them flexibility rather than dictating a "one-size-fits-all" access policy to them.

But many beachgoers fear the new rules, if adopted, would reward the very people who have made it so hard for outsiders to reach the beach for decades.

Joe Woerner, an official with the Jersey Shore Surfrider Foundation, said he was handcuffed as a teenager 20 years ago as he came out of the ocean with his surfboard. He was taken to a police holding cell in Sea Girt for crossing a hundred yards or so of sand without a beach badge.

"I was a 15-year-old boy arrested for using the ocean," he said. "These are the kind of people who will be making our rules."

Most New Jersey beach towns require surfers to buy and wear beach badges costing anywhere from $5 to $12 a day, regardless of how long they are on the sand or in the water. Woerner's charges were eventually dropped, but not before "a bunch of people who own places on the beach gave me grief about being on the beach without a badge and how surfers were what's wrong with our town."

Oceanfront homeowners like Dorothy Jedziniak of Ship Bottom feel there's already more than enough access to beaches in her corner of Long Beach Island.

"We are being attacked with tourism, business and inundation," she said at a public hearing on the plan, appealing that state officials stand firm and implement the new rules, which she feels would lessen the influx of visitors.

"We have a beautiful island," she said. "I ask you, please: hang onto it."

New Jersey is one of a tiny handful of places in the United States that makes people pay for the privilege of dipping their toes in the surf or spreading a blanket on the sand. Under a legal doctrine dating back to the Roman Empire, the ocean, bay and river shorelines are to be open forever to the public.

auckland.scoop.co.nz » Council tourism department restructured

RDC economic & regulatory services group manager Mark Rawson says the new structure has been designed to align with the new tourism business plan developed over recent months by the council’s tourism committee. He said the tourism committee, comprising some of the best tourism brains in the country and ably chaired by former Pacific Blue Airlines chief executive Tony Marks, was right behind the revised structure. “In the interim Tania Bui is doing a great job as acting general manager and in the next few weeks we expect to announce the appointment of a new permanent general manager to head DRM, and we’re currently advertising for people to fill three other positions. While DRM’s total number of staff remains unchanged, its new positions and other changes to existing roles reflect the future business needs of the department’s new direction.

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