County needs to define ‘parking spaces’ and ‘scurrilous’ charges

Monmouth County’s Belford ferry project coordinator, Kevin Ganson, (in a March 6 letter to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) has characterized the opposition to the project by the Belford Citizens Association (BCA) as "scurrilous charges ... by a singular opposition group of limited representation."

Let’s look at the facts. The county’s case is riddled with contradictions.

Nine years ago, the county predicted that the East River service at the Highlands would have to relocate to Belford in order to find sufficient parking. Today, passengers on that service have increased threefold, with reserve parking capacity to accommodate a further 50 percent growth.

The county is now claiming that the catchment area for the existing service is "different than the catchment area for the Belford Project." In the same breath, they state that more than half of the Belford riders will be new users of a ferry.

To the BCA, this sounds suspiciously as if almost half of the passengers would be diverted from current users of the unsubsidized service based at terminals which were built and maintained without the use of tax dollars.

Last year, the county supplied data that claimed there was a public need for terminal space "which cannot be satisfied by the existing facilities at Highlands and Atlantic Highlands." The county said that the parking at the three existing terminals is limited to 750 spaces.

In February, the BCA showed the corps over 1,800 legal parking spaces regularly used by commuters to park their cars before taking a ferry (on the busiest day last summer, "conflicting" users of these spaces never took up more than 200). Mr. Ganson’s response to the corps questions the BCA’s understanding of "what constitutes a ‘parking space.’ "

At Atlantic Highlands, "based on a site visit and experience," the county says 450-500 of the 750 corps-observed parking spaces are not available to Seastreak’s ferry users. At Seastreak’s proprietary Highlands location where parking was increased from 460-660 by the removal of the hotel and seven other structures, the county’s number of parking spaces, 450, reflected the number "that were available to the hotel" prior to its removal at the new Highlands terminal where the second operator is now regularly parking up to 450 cars per day in illegal spaces observed by the corps. The county says that only 260 should be considered by the corps.

These county-supplied numbers have led to a false conclusion. The $9 million Bayshore Ferry Terminal is needed because "existing facilities at Highlands and Atlantic Highlands cannot satisfy the demand." According to the county, scurrilous opponents shouldn’t be allowed to count the empty parking spaces that refute the county’s preposterous claim.

The county has the political power to earmark $8.5 million of our federal tax dollars for this project. Since "only" a half million of the project construction costs will come from county taxes, they wonder what there is to be against.

The BCA would like county definitions of commuter parking spaces and scurrilous charges.