By Dana DeBari
When Hurricane Sandy struck South River, New Jersey in October 2012, then-Mayor and practicing attorney John Krenzel was still in his first term in office.
“It was an experience, and one that I was happy to never go through again. I don’t wish that on anybody,” Krenzel said. “The three major things I took this town through, Sandy was number one, Black Lives Matter, and COVID.”
Roughly thirteen years later, the collective trauma of Hurricane Sandy is still fresh for the political leaders and residents who dealt with the aftermath firsthand. However, the sense of urgency around implementing more aggressive resiliency measures, such as residential buyouts, has waned while the allure of waterfront development has persisted.
The slogan “Jersey Strong” is typically associated with both the state’s resiliency in the storm’s aftermath and the image of the Seaside Heights roller coaster engulfed by the Atlantic Ocean, but the storm’s impacts were felt well beyond the Jersey Shore and met with much less fanfare. Hurricane Sandy had severe flooding impacts on New Jersey’s coastal communities, including the boroughs of South River and Sayreville located in Middlesex County. These communities, home to roughly 16,000 and 45,000, residents respectively, and sit along the South River within the Lower Raritan Basin that flows into the Raritan River. Both municipalities “contain neighborhoods classified by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as among the highest-ranking ‘socially vulnerable’ census tracts in the state and the country.” The residents living within South River’s “Main Street” business district—a portion of which is within the flood plain and includes neighborhood grocery stores—are particularly vulnerable to the risks associated with natural disasters.
The storm’s lingering impacts continue to shape local politics, regional plans, and statewide policies today. Questions swirl around funding, resources, leadership, time horizons, and community identity, but the hottest debate more than ten years later quietly percolates around future development in these flood-prone areas.
A Region at Risk
Since the storm, there are visible, tangible discrepancies in how risks associated with climate change are being addressed across New Jersey’s 564 municipalities. The differences are particularly stark between neighboring South River and Sayreville.
In the wake of unprecedented property destruction, the storm led to a surge in government-funded residential buyouts, a form of managed retreat, with the highest concentration of buyouts taking place in Middlesex County (which is highlighted in neon green in Figure 3).
The initiative is formally known as the Blue Acres program and is facilitated by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP). Since 1995, the state-run program has received funding from several sources, including the federal government, to purchase properties from willing homeowners in high-risk, flood-prone areas and demolish them to make way for restricted open space to be managed by the respective municipalities.
Uniquely, the Blue Acres program is permanent (not prompted by disaster), time efficient (when compared to federal buyout processes), and well-funded with a dedicated revenue stream (a percentage of the state’s corporate business tax).
“At first, it was a bit difficult because it was all very new. We and Sayreville were the guinea pigs for the rest of the state, and I think for the rest of the country,” Krenzel said, about the early days of administering the Blue Acres program for South River. “And after a while, it smoothed itself out and became much easier to handle, and in fact, I was able to handle a few of the cases myself—the sales of the property. The state would come in and make an offer. The people can decide whether to accept it or not. The vast majority of people did. All the people got their money. It was a rather clean deal. Then the state came in, tore down the houses, scooped up like two to three inches of soil, planted grass, and said to the town, ‘It’s yours. You can only do certain things with it. And that’s that.’”
According to the current South River Borough Administrator, Art Londensky, there have been 114 properties purchased in South River through the Blue Acres program that are under state ownership.
Presently, local leaders are wrestling with what to do with the restricted open spaces. Many of the Blue Acres’ open spaces throughout the state, like in nearby Woodbridge, have been transformed into passive recreation spaces like walking trails, and feature flood control measures such as wetland restoration.
Some communities, including both South River and Sayreville, are faced with Blue Acres’ open spaces inconveniently interspersed with “hold-out” properties that have refused to accept buyout offers over the years. Essential services to these properties, like sewer and water, still need to be provided by the municipalities.
The Open Space Dilemma
The two communities’ approaches to handling the open space have diverged over the past decade.
In 2018, at a time when NJDEP heavily restricted allowable uses on Blue Acres open spaces, a community garden was established within the floodplain along the South River near Causeway Park for South River residents. The park is located right alongside Main Street, abutting the commercial downtown and the river.
According to Dr. Heather Fenyk, President and Founder of the Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership (LRWP), the purpose of creating the community garden was an initial, community-driven attempt to put a stake in the ground against future development. However, there is a 100-year legacy of illegal industrial dumping on sites along various portions of the Raritan River that may lead to “essentially dredged spoils” contaminating the land now being used to grow food.
Fenyk mentioned that the Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership has “other ideas, like a tree farm…or a Missouri gravel bed” for the open spaces in similar contexts to “prevent additional harm” to residents. Despite efforts from organizations like LWRP to inform community members of the associated risks, the South River Community Garden continues to receive applications through its website from residents looking to grow food on the available plots. En route to the community garden and park, Causeway Street is flanked by several auto body shops that remain in operation.
“It’s a question of how you can activate these spaces with DEP’s approval in a way that is meeting community members’ interests and needs,” Fenyk said. “A community garden was just sort of the fast and dirty way of doing it.”
As part of the space activation process that same year, the Middlesex County Office of Planning led a regional team (including the five municipalities of South River, Sayreville, Old Bridge, Perth Amboy, and South Amboy) in its pursuit of an NJDEP National Disaster Resilience Grant. In 2019, this regional team was awarded an initial planning and engineering grant through the National Fish and Wildlife Federation (NFWF) that ultimately funded 60 percent of “an engineering plan which will reduce not just coastal inundation in multiple communities surrounding the Raritan River, but also help preserve and restore the watershed’s ecosystem.”
In preparation for the grant implementation, Fenyk led a graduate-level Rutgers University Environmental Planning Studio during the Spring 2020 semester. The plan was to detail and document the “bigger picture” as it relates to the connections between climate and health outcomes among residents in the Borough of South River (with the municipality’s “vacant and neglected Blue Acre buy-out lots” serving as a foundational piece of the broader conversation). The report’s findings offer sobering insights into South River’s many challenges. Census Tract 69 was identified as one of the tracts with the lowest life expectancy rates at birth in the entire county, and the Borough has several census block groups along the water designated as “overburdened communities” under the New Jersey Environmental Justice Law.
The overarching goal of the studio report was to facilitate improved community engagement and organizing. With the project derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic mid-semester, Fenyk articulated that “LWRP’s primary goals were not met in terms of using the report as a springboard for ongoing engagement… and we weren’t able to get back up to speed with South River ever since.” Fenyk mentioned the loss of a local advocate, who moved to another state, and the incongruences among the community partners involved including local church leaders, as potential limiting factors that hindered the graduate student research team’s ability to gain traction beyond the initial data collection and analysis.
A proposal to develop a recreational trail along South River’s waterfront was included as part of its Master Plan Amendment in 2023, but it failed to gain traction. When asked about the trail proposal, Krenzel said that “we could be doing that, but that requires money and South River is a small town.” South River is small in both land area (around 2.8 square miles) and in population (approximately 16,000 people) when compared to Sayreville which is home to roughly 45,000 people who live within its 15.8 square miles.
In contrast, Sayreville has a dedicated Environmental Commission that develops reports with science-backed recommendations related to open space conservation. In 2022, the municipality hosted the Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership (LRWP), which presented on a proposed action plan with detailed ecosystem restoration and flood control projects. The town’s leadership team has been responsive to these proposals.
“Years ago, the municipality, by referendum, established an Open Space Fund to acquire and preserve open space, which is quite spiffy, and it gets replenished. It’s like a percentage off the tax base,” said Sayreville Borough Administrator Glenn Skarzynski, who started in the role roughly two and a half years ago. “I think we threw in about a half million, $600,000 a year goes into that account. I’m sitting on about $7 to $8 million in that account, which is great, but I’m very limited in terms of what I could use it for. We went to a referendum two years ago, trying to leverage that money to move this project forward, and it was voted down by the voters. We are at the point in our development that there just aren’t any large tracts of contiguous space that I can buy. There’s nothing left.”
Sayreville’s elected officials have also worked collaboratively with both LRWP and nearby Rutgers University on various grant proposals to activate these spaces, especially on Weber Avenue. “No Mowing” signage is prominently displayed on each of the open spaces alongside new tree plantings.
In February 2025, it was announced that Sayreville was awarded a $1.57 million Resilient NJ grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s (NFWF) National Coastal Resilience Fund to finalize the designs and engineering plans from the initial 2019 NFWF grant. Despite the fact that Sayreville and South River share the South River as a water boundary, this funding would be dedicated to wetland ecosystem and upland habitat restoration on land within Sayreville’s jurisdiction.
“Sayreville is the municipality that really picked up on this and ran…They are so well resourced…and South River, how many times can you place a phone call or send an email and not get a response?” Fenyk asked rhetorically. “They have been invited to everything…just did not pick up the ball and run with it.”
South River’s lack of involvement in the grant application and implementation processes prevented the grant program’s designers from being able to tailor the program more to the municipality’s needs, Fenyk explained.
“Had South River been involved, we could have done more design that was specific for South River. We just could not gain traction, even after we had developed the initial 60 percent engineered design in partnership with South River and Sayreville,” she said.
Skarzynski explained that the final engineering phase of the NFWF-funded wetland and habitat restoration project is being developed with a focus on achieving three primary goals for the large tract of land: enhancing flood resiliency as much as possible, restoring natural habitats, and creating opportunities for passive recreation, such as walking paths and kayak launches. He also acknowledged concerns about securing future funding to maintain and operate these projects but noted that there are several potential options being considered to address this challenge.
While the Trump Administration cuts back on dispersing federal funds for resiliency projects, Skarzynski says he’s still hopeful “because at the end of the day, whether you’re an environmentalist or you’re a developer, you don’t want the shoreline flooding. You want the best bang for your buck out of any of those properties.”
Tax Revenue Implications
In defense of his active participation in facilitating the residential buyout process in South River, Krenzel described a noticeable decrease in the severity of flooding in areas that are now pervious open spaces along the South River. The conversation around the economic implications of the Blue Acres program for the borough was less positive.
“Economically, it’s been hard. We lost, I think now, it’s a total of 114 houses, and that hurts. That tax base is gone,” Krenzel said. “Sayreville was fortunate because Sayreville was big. So the loss of a little bit over here, a little over there…they were able to recover, by relying on the rest of the town.” Sayreville Borough Administrator Skarzynski confirmed this to be true.
The true economic implications of buyouts throughout New Jersey are currently being debated among academics with the help of federal National Science Foundation funding. As part of a “Demographic and Fiscal Modeling for Environmental Planning” event hosted at Rutgers University’s Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy in New Brunswick on April 22, 2025, researchers presented on an array of on-going projects, ranging from resident survey results detailing their perceptions of flood risk, to a newly developed fiscal impact analysis tool.
Developed by Junghoon Lee, Professor David Listokin, and Professor Clinton Andrews from the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University, the fiscal impact calculator web app serves as an interactive way to assess managed retreat and the loss of homes on New Jersey municipalities’ ratables and finances, based on property values and other factors. The tool can theoretically be used by local officials to map out exact tax implications when arguing in favor of more buyouts in the future—a key recommendation made specifically for South River in the Resilient NJ: Protect, Restore, Transition Resilience Action Plan For The Raritan River And Bay Communities Region.
The panelists at the event urged the need for “education” and “a lot of handholding,” around the value of these complex resiliency measures and policies—like managed retreat—especially for small municipalities with part-time mayors. Donna Rendeiro, Former Executive Director at the Office of Planning Advocacy and the New Jersey State Planning Commission, posed several intriguing questions to the audience. How do we collectively reconcile four-year mayoral cycles with twenty-year flood forecasts and address pressing regional challenges when home rule allows for municipalities to have complete autonomy over their land use and zoning? According to the New Jersey Department of Health, “New Jersey’s Home Rule Act grants municipal governments broad authorities to enact ordinance and regulations providing for public welfare and order, and stands as one of the major sources of authorization for local autonomy in the State.”
Regarding the buyouts’ impact on South River’s tax base and overall resiliency, Dr. Fenyk echoed a similar sentiment: “In the long run, it will benefit South River. They just won’t have to be dumping money into a very vulnerable landscape and community.”
A Transition in Leadership
After twelve years serving as South River’s mayor, John Krenzel lost the Republican primary to Peter Guindi, a then-sitting councilmember, in June 2023. When recently asked about the town’s open spaces, Mayor Guindi described them as an unsightly administrative burden that is costing the town plenty, in both tax revenue and sorely needed opportunities for development.
Mayor Guindi is admittedly laser-focused on working with private developers to recoup lost tax revenue, revitalize the Waterfront Revitalization District, and bring the mayoral position from “the 1950s to 2025.”
“We lost a lot of utilities, a lot of tax ratables on these houses. And now I’m trying to make it back by bringing redevelopment, which I’ve been so far successful,” Guindi said in an interview. “I mean, we already sealed the deal on four major redevelopment projects. They’re going to be breaking ground by the end of this month.”
One of the projects Mayor Guindi is referring to is the redevelopment of the former Laffin Chevrolet property in the town’s main commercial district along the South River in the floodplain (AE flood zone). The mixed-used project is slated to include a new supermarket, Seabra Foods, and seventeen new housing units.
When asked about this specific mixed-use project, former Mayor Krenzel let out an audible sigh. “Well, (the developer) told us it’s going to be prepared…that if it floods, they are prepared. People are looking forward to it and there’s going to be apartments there, but they are going to be up high.”
Mayor Guindi floated several other ideas as part of a broader strategy to create a more functional waterfront, ranging from dredging the South River to facilitate ferry commuter service to New York City, to controlled fires along the marsh.
Regarding the Blue Acres open space, “I’m still running into the problem, because (sic) you have all this empty space. And it looks terrible when you’re driving down some of these roads in South River,” Guindi stated. “The Blue Acres (program) has come up with so many crazy laws and so many rules, and they’re neglecting the obvious, where towns such as South River, where it’s only a 2.7-mile radius, we’re struggling just to bring ratables into our town and here I am fighting from both angles.”
In both South River and Sayreville, current leadership bemoaned the hold out properties that refused to be bought out at the height of the Blue Acres program, but for different reasons. The properties in Sayreville have prevented the expansion of existing open spaces, while the twelve holdout properties mentioned by Mayor Guindi are considered a barrier to potential private developers’ aspirations.
Since Hurricane Sandy, NJDEP made a concerted effort to get the word out about the Blue Acres program to local leaders and their constituents, but with every passing year without a destructive storm to serve as a catalyst for action, South River’s new leadership team appears to grow more skeptical of the program’s value. This may negatively impact future participation in the program among residents at a time when experts continue to drive home the point that more buyouts are desperately needed.
As the leader of LWRP, Fenyk says she “has focused on areas where these issues have gone unexamined and the municipal rules are not oriented to resilience at all…. They are just not connecting on why this is such a big issue.”
Still, Fenyk remains optimistic about the long-term opportunities posed by the Raritan.
“There is so much need in South River and in the central New Jersey area, the lower Raritan,” she said. “It’s one of those spaces where you think that if you can crack the lower Raritan nut, you can really have a model that can be applied almost anywhere. I mean, not like a one-size-fits-all but if you can make it happen here, then you can figure out resilience almost anywhere else.”
Dana has completed her first year in the Urban Planning program. Raised in central New Jersey, Dana’s interest in economic development and resilience grew while developing public policy and managing a legislative office’s communications strategy within the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Dana’s engagement with local reporters in New Bedford, Massachusetts—a coastal city with industrial roots—helped solidify her reverence for investigative journalism. More recently, Dana was involved in developing Northeastern University’s proposal for the Center for Climate Solutions competition on Governors Island.
