Donald Wittkowski

Imagine a gigantic sock filled with sand and buried in the beach or dunes. Well, you’ve pretty much got the idea of what a geotube is and how it looks. Despite their decidedly low-tech design, geotubes are considered an important tool to protect shore communities from coastal storms – essentially acting as a bulkhead to block destructive waves from crashing ashore. Now, Ocean City wants to add new geotubes to some of the beaches in the north end of town that are particularly vulnerable to the ocean’s wrath.

Joe Fornara, a 55-year-old electrical contractor who lives in Warrington, Pa., has no trouble traveling to his summer vacation home in Ocean City. While many other summer visitors heading to the shore are stuck in heavy traffic on the Garden State Parkway or other roads, Fornara takes off from the airport in Doylestown, Pa., for an easy flight to Ocean City in his Cirrus SR20 single-engine plane. “I know everyone pretty well here. If I’m 10 miles out, they’ll say, ‘Joe, this is what the weather is like’ and they’ll tell me about the winds,” Fornara said of his cockpit radio transmissions with the airport staff. Recognizing the importance of the airport for pilots like Fornara, as well as its potential as a magnet for other visitors, Ocean City officials are discussing tentative plans to give the facility a facelift that would make it more attractive.

Ocean City is working with the Tabernacle Baptist Church to solve a property tax debt that has created a financial crisis for the town’s oldest surviving church. The historic church lost its tax-exempt status “through no fault of its own” when it came under private ownership in 2019 during a sale of the property to its former pastor, according to City Solicitor Dorothy McCrosson. McCrosson told City Council during its meeting Thursday night that Mayor Jay Gillian’s administration is trying to craft a payment plan for the church to pay its overdue taxes and avoid a tax sale on the property scheduled in October.

Ocean City’s aggressive seagulls were back to their old tricks again earlier this summer – brazenly swooping down to steal a quick meal of French fries, pizza or funnel cakes from unsuspecting tourists. But that was before the “police” arrived to chase away the pesky birds from the Boardwalk and beaches. Now, the menacing swarms of seagulls have all but disappeared. “It’s worked out really well. It’s been a big success. I’ve had tons of positive comments,” said Erik Swanson, owner of East Coast Falcons, a company that uses trained raptors to control the gulls. Swanson loosely describes his group of fierce-looking falcons, hawks and an owl as the police of the skies.

Shari Thompson says she plans to do a lot of praying for God’s intervention to help Tabernacle Baptist Church overcome its financial and legal challenges. Thompson and other leaders of Ocean City’s oldest surviving church are recovering from a court battle with Tabernacle Baptist’s former pastor over the ownership of the historic building at the corner of Eighth Street and West Avenue. “It had been a very ugly and contentious back-and-forth,” Thompson, chairwoman of the church’s board of trustees, said in an interview Friday.

Ocean City is stepping in to provide students at the primary and intermediate schools some of the social and recreational activities that otherwise would have been lost because of the coronavirus pandemic. Dan Kelchner, director of the city’s Community Services department, called it an “incredibly unique” program that will also feature a strong social component for the children while they are dealing with the challenges of the COVID-19 crisis. “Our emphasis will be on the kids who need it most,” Kelchner said while announcing the program Thursday night during a City Council meeting.

Ocean City plans to fight flooding with a series of projects that will include stormwater pumping stations, road construction, sea walls and possibly turning an abandoned railroad embankment into a protective barrier. To begin the planning for the projects, City Council awarded three separate professional services contracts Thursday night to the consulting firm ACT Engineers Inc. of Robbinsville, N.J., to develop conceptual designs for the flood-mitigation strategy. The city will target the Ocean City Homes area between 52nd and 56th streets, the Merion Park neighborhood and the section of town from 36th to 52nd streets and West Avenue – all places in the south end of town that struggle with floodwater.

Chronic flooding at the Ocean Aire Condominiums is so bad at times that stormwater literally surges as high as the windows. But residents living at the condo complex at 43rd Street and West Avenue in Ocean City’s south end won’t be moving out. They’ll be moving up. Funded by a proposed $3 million grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the condos will be raised nine feet higher to protect them from flooding that seeps out of the adjacent marshlands and bay. “It’s never been done before. It’s an unprecedented project,” City Council President Bob Barr said of the scope of the plan.

Ocean City has been spending millions of dollars in the past few years for an ambitious dredging program to clear out sediment-choked channels and lagoons along the back bays. In some places, the sediment had been so thick that boaters were unable to navigate through the shallow lagoons at low tide. The next round of dredging is expected to get underway this fall and will target a series of lagoons in need of maintenance to keep them in good shape. Local waterways scheduled for dredging beginning in September or October will include Snug Harbor, Glen Cove, Sunny Harbor, Venetian Bayou, South Harbor and Waterview, according to city documents.

Ocean City’s public housing agency has already jumped ahead of schedule in the early stages of a nearly $7 million project that will provide affordable housing for senior citizens now living in a flood-prone neighborhood. Construction began on the Ocean City Housing Authority’s Speitel Commons project on May 1 and is expected to take about 12 months to complete. In an encouraging sign, the authority’s contractor is already about eight to 10 days ahead of schedule and has made two adjustments that have reduced the cost by $180,000, a consultant reported Tuesday during the agency’s monthly board meeting.