Brick Planning Board Approves Camp Osborn Site Plan

BRICK, NJ — Seven-and-a-half years after Camp Osborn was reduced to a pile of rubble during Superstorm Sandy, the members of the oceanfront community finally cleared a hurdle to getting their community rebuilt.

The Brick Township Planning Board unanimously approved the site plan for presented for the community, a hard-won approval that was the result of years of negotiations and discussions between representatives of the Osborn-Sea Bay Condominium Association and township officials.

The plan includes 67 units — three single homes and 64 units in two-story duplexes — on the site where 67 cottages stood, some sharing gutters, for decades before the storm.

The hearing on the site plan began in February, and property owners and members of the Osborn-Sea Bay Condominium Association were out in force at Civic Plaza to show their support for the plan, some bearing signs reading "Let me get back in my home."

But the hearing was carried to March after more than three hours of testimony on the proposal. A hearing that had been set for April was scrapped due to technical issues.

Anton Semprivivo, who owns adjoining property on Lyndhurst Drive, has been a dogged opponent of every proposal to rebuilt at the site; his most recent effort, to overturn a Coastal Area Facilities Review Act permit that was granted by the state Department of Environmental Protection, was rejected by a New Jersey appellate court.

Camp Osborn gained national attention when the decades-old beachfront cottage community caught fire in the midst of Superstorm Sandy in October 2012. With the Mantoloking Bridge partially washed out and the barrier island breached near the bridge, firefighters were unable to respond, and the fires, fed by broken natural gas lines, decimated more than 100 homes in the community.

In the 7-1/2 years since, Camp Osborn residents — many of whose families had passed down the properties for generations — have fought to be able to rebuild their community. A zoning overlay was approved in March 2018, and a site plan for homes on the median portion of the community was approved in 2019.

Going into the February hearing, the community was awaiting word on an appellate court ruling regarding the Coastal Area Facilities Review Act permit it had been granted by the state Department of Environmental Protection in 2018.

Semprivivo, who has sued repeatedly to stop any rebuilding at Camp Osborn, had claimed through his company JSTAR that the Osborn-Sea Bay Condominium Association had given inadequate notice of its proposal, argued that the DEP violated JSTAR’s and the public’s due process rights in the way it conducted the comment period and that the DEP considered insufficient data when granting the permit.

The three-judge appellate panel rejected all of those claims in a decision issued April 27, keeping the CAFRA permit intact.

"[N]either JSTAR nor any member of the public was deprived of an opportunity to bring to the DEP’s attention data, views and arguments that it felt should be considered in deciding whether to grant the permit," the appeals court said. "We disagree that the DEP was under any obligation to do more than it did in this case when considering the public's comments."

The court rejected JSTAR’s challenge that the notice should have identified the east-west portion of Cummings Street as part of the project, ruling the condo association was not obligated to identify that portion of the street as part of the project because it never planned to do work there.

The court also dismissed JSTAR’s objection to a DEP exemption from a required road elevation. The condo association said it could not make the road higher because doing so would risk flooding Route 35 during a storm, which was accepted by the DEP.

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