CAPE MAY — City Manager Paul Dietrich detailed the city’s Hazard Mitigation Plan during the City Council meeting Sept. 3.
The plan is developed through the county’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) and the city’s OEM team.
“The Hazard Mitigation Plan looks at and reviews all the hazards that could affect Cape May City and what actions we may want to take to mitigate those actions,” Dietrich said, adding that the plan has to be in place to receive federal funding.
He said the team is wrapping up the planning process and is in a 30-day review period, during which the plan is in its final draft form.
He said once the 30-day period is over, it will get submitted to the New Jersey Office of Emergency Management.
“If they [accept] it, then it gets sent to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and if they accept it, then it comes back to us to do a formal adoption of the plan,” Dietrich said.
Memorial benches
Dietrich said construction on the Promenade is set to resume from Madison Avenue to Queen Street, which will involve adding new memorial benches.
“In spring, the council authorized the purchase of benches to replace the memorial benches on the Promenade,” Dietrich said.
Over the next several weeks, all memorial bench holders will be notified by the city to go over the updated plan.
“If we don’t hear back from them, we will hunt them down through voicemail, email, and smoke signals if we have to,” Dietrich said, adding that the intent is to make sure that if anybody has a memorial bench on the Promenade, they can take the bench with them or install a new bench.
Dietrich said the plan for the benches was solid and well thought out.
“We understand that these benches mean a lot to people, and that when they apply for them there is a memory of somebody special for them, and we want to respect that,” he said.
Workforce housing
Solicitor Chris Gillin-Schwartz updated council on the ordinance regarding workforce housing, which was sent Aug. 19 to the Planning Board for review.
“Everybody at the most recent Planning Board meeting would see that it was chewed up and comments were made, as these things do,” Gillin-Schwartz said. “They didn’t vote on it but looked at the record and what they were concerned with, and a couple things came out of that.”
The Planning Board revised the ordinance draft, limiting the scope to blocks on the Washington Street Mall instead of the entire C-1 zoning district.
“Reworking the definition of what we mean by workforce housing, this [ordinance] just as easily could have been called the anti-short-term-rental ordinance or anti-Airbnb,” he said. “We use workforce housing as a term of art but you have to really look at the definition of the ordinance itself, really thanks to duration greater than 90 days, which could be a whole list of things.”
Gillin-Schwartz said the revised ordinance he sent to Planning Board engineer Craig Hurless will be reviewed again by the board to address some of their comments and concerns.
“We’ll see what the outcome of that discussion is and when we think we’re ready for something to come back with all those comments, we can bring it back to the council table,” he said.
Other business
Dietrich said he misspoke in a previous meeting about mercantile fees and unlicensed short-term rentals.
“I misspoke when I gave my summary table; we had about a total close to just under 1,900 short-term rentals in total,” he said. “There are about 90 that were unlicensed that had been identified.”
He added that since then, the clerk’s office and code enforcement had whittled the number down. Clerk Erin Burke said the data was still being adjusted, which caused the numbers to fluctuate.
By RACHEL SHUBIN/Special to the Star and Wave
