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Higher Highlands? Downtown may be elevated, rebuilt to prevent future floods By Rob Spahr / NJ.com HIGHLANDS - Nestled against northern Monmouth County's Bayshore, where the Shrewsbury River meets the Sandy Hook Bay, this tiny, working-class town has existed in near anonymity for more than 100 years.
And when Hurricane Sandy slammed into the Jersey Shore, Highlands – a 1.4-square-mile borough with elevations ranging among the highest and lowest on the state’s coast - once again played second fiddle to its higher profile neighbors, even though more than 83 percent of the borough's 1,500 homes were damaged in the storm. “The problem we have is we don’t have that sexy thing we can put on TV of someone driving a golden spike into our boardwalk or a rollercoaster in the ocean. We don’t have anything that is going to get on anybody’s campaign posters for a national campaign or a state campaign,” Mayor Frank Nolan said. “We just have row and row, and house after house of working class people trying to survive, trying to raise their kids and do the right thing.” But while other Jersey Shore towns are working to rebuild in time for summer, Highlands officials say they are working to prevent their town from being "wiped off the map." “The first process is getting people back into their homes, because they have nowhere to live. A lot of our folks are scheduled to run out of their relocation money from FEMA by the end of the month, at the latest, some as early as this week,” said Nolan, adding the town’s flooding issues would have to be addressed at the same time. “If we had the money right now to raise every home in town, we’d still have a flooded downtown and business district. It’d be like putting a Band-Aid on the problem.” Because Nolan said flooding will not be something Highlands residents will simply be able to tolerate anymore. “Storms are getting worse, and I think the severity of regular storms are going to be a lot worse and there is going to be more and more flooding,” he said. “But what people could live with in the past, you won’t be able to live with anymore. Because what used to be six inches in the past, is going to be two to three feet in certain areas.” The radical solution “But we’re unique, we flood from the inside out. The first place we flood is on Bay Avenue, our downtown, because the water comes up through the storm drains and then heads out to the water,” he said. “So if we were to build a wall like that, we’d just end up with a huge bathtub effect.” Highlands officials do have an idea of how to solve the problem, however – backfill and raise the entire downtown. Representatives from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are expected to tour the town later this week, at the request of borough officials, to determine if the downtown can be backfilled and rebuilt at a higher elevation. “Raising the town, as radical as it may seem, is a look towards the future,” Borough Administrator Tim Hill said. “Because if we do nothing to help mitigate future flooding events, that in itself speaks volumes. And who is going to want to invest here?” Nolan said engineers could use the hill as a “backstop” from which to backfill the downtown out from, raising its elevation. Other towns, such a Galveston, Texas following the deadly 1900 hurricane, have successfully conducted similar town-raising efforts. “And that was 100 years ago, I’d have to think the science and technology is better now,” said Nolan, adding Highlands’ project would be much small in scope than Galveston’s. The cost to backfill the entire downtown is expected to be at least $25 million, Nolan said, which does not include replacing utilities and infrastructure or the cost to raise or rebuild existing buildings. “This would be something the town would facilitate, but would be funded through a combination of public and private money,” said Nolan, adding most homeowners could use specific money from their flood insurance policies to raise their homes and that the public/private funding would help cover the cost of doing the rest. “But the first thing we have to do is find out if the science is there,” he said. “And from the people I have spoken to, who are smart guys, I believe it is.” The worst-case scenario “Right now it’s about $50,000 or about 25 percent of what it was before the storm,” he said. “That’s not what it might say on a piece of paper, it’s the economic reality of what people will pay for them because everyone knows what happened and what’s going to happen again.” And the borough itself lost all four of its municipal buildings. This still has municipal officials and emergency responders crammed into temporary headquarters, just to keep the town functional. “Moving forward, each one of them will have a $500,000 deductible for future events, unless a federal disaster is declared,” Nolan said. “So if we get another Irene or one of the many other hurricanes we get here, we would be on the hook for $2 million in deductibles alone, which right now is 25 percent of our yearly budget. Clearly we have to do something.” Hill said the town has already lost approximately $20 million in assessed value since Hurricane Sandy, and that is only from the property owners who went through the process of getting their homes reassessed – the total impact to the borough’s ratable base could be much greater. “I hate to put it in any other context, but it’s day to day and overwhelming to a degree,” Hill said of how the town is operating with an uncertain future. But Nolan said Highlands would not move too far in its rebuilding process until a determination on the possibility of backfilling the downtown is made. “Home owners and businesses are not going to keep rebuilding. Not a lot of people have the resources to keep doing that. Most people here are living paycheck to paycheck,” Nolan said. “And we want to try to bring new businesses in, but who in their right mind is going to invest here when you go to walk out the store and you’re ankle deep in water? That’s a tough sell.” Even though the town is facing major obstacles, Rick Korn, the committee chair of the non-profit Hope for Highlands, which is raising funds to assist in the Highlands recovery, called the backfilling plan “a great opportunity.”
“This is a town with incredible promise. As they say in retail, it’s ‘location, location, location.’ And we are located at the entrance to the Jersey Shore. We have Sandy Hook and other incredible beaches right here,” Korn said. “If we can mitigate the flooding issues, this town can be a boom town. And from a business perspective, this is a home run waiting to happen.” Nolan, agreed, saying that backfilling the downtown could help raise property values to where they were prior to Hurricane Sandy and would entice more businesses to invest in the town. But Highlands has to get there first, he said. Because unless it does, the worst-case scenario would be business after business leaving, causing a huge decrease in the town’s tax base and prompting taxes to soar. “The people hit the hardest would have to pay more in taxes. We’ll lose people who can’t afford to stay here. And people who can’t sell their homes, because they are no longer worth what they paid for it, will walk away from them. No town could endure that,” said Nolan, adding it could result in Highlands being merged into a larger neighboring town. “If we don’t show a clear direction and a final solution to the problem, our people will walk away from here,” he said. “And I don’t blame them.” |
