Dredging the city’s back bays may not be that far off, as the state is considering allowing Margate to place dredged material in a 57-foot-deep hole near Wellington Avenue in Atlantic City.
According to city attorney J. Scott Abbott, Margate officials plan to meet with representatives from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and the US Army Corps of Engineers next week in Trenton to discuss permitting such a project.
Abbott said the site, which is a hole in the bay created when developers needed fill to build up areas of Atlantic City for development, has a capacity of about 680,000 cubic yards.
Margate has anywhere between 150,000 to 350,000 cubic yards of material to dredge from its bay and lagoons to make the waterway navigable.
This site is a new development in the dredging saga that is New Jersey’s Intracoastal Waterway. Late last year, Margate hired Stewart Farrell of Stockton University‘s Coastal Research Center using a National Fish and Wildlife Fund grant to study possible locations to place dredged material. Those sites included an area adjacent to the Margate bridge known as the “Amherst cut” and a dredge hole at Shelter Island near Ventnor Heights, which is owned by Ventnor and Margate.