Dunes, A Casual $6.3 Mln, Remembering Albie – Friday’s Roundup

Dunes
Just in time for July 4, the Army Corps of Engineers has changed its plans for the Absecon Island dunes project, again (we’ve lost count). As Amy Rosenberg reports for The Inquirer, “In a move attributed to weather and equipment problems but which people in Margate immediately interpreted as payback from the highest levels of Trenton for their ferocious objections to Gov. Christie’s dune project, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said late Thursday it would spend the summer building dunes and closing beaches in Margate, not Ventnor.” A Casual $6.3 Mln
Yesterday we wrote about how much the state has spent on ‘overseeing’ Atlantic City. We’d just been given a dump of documents from the New Jersey Law Office and we hadn’t had a chance to go through them. Well, after some long hours, we now have a database.

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New Jersey Has Shelled Out Over $6 Million For Atlantic City Oversight

New Jersey’s Division of Law has spent $6.3 million with six consulting and law firms hired for projects related to Atlantic City’s oversight since March 2015, according to invoices released in response to a public records request. The invoices are heavily redacted so it is hard to glean details of the lucrative advisory work, but they show that many more thousands of dollars have been spent on unspecified consulting and takeover-related litigation than on monetizing Atlantic City’s few remaining assets. Just over half of that money was spent with Ernst & Young, which was hired in 2015 to analyze the city’s finances. The West Orange law firm Chiesa, Shahinian & Giantomasi, which was appointed by the state in November to run Atlantic City has charged $2.4 million for six months of work on everything from city council agendas to waste management and litigation, the documents show. You can download a copy of the database compiled by Route 40, with links to each invoice, here.

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Between September 1987 and December 1988, a period of about 16 months, the Holy Spirit High School Spartans played 21 football games. They won 20 of them.

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Pinelands Pipeline Update, The $2.5 Mln Bill, Film Festival – Thursday’s Roundup

It can be confusing, trying to keep on top of environmental issues in the Pine Barrens. There are now two different proposals to build a pipeline through the pinelands: the first one, green-lighted by the Pinelands Commission amid much public controversy, has now been dealt another delay by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.

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PierAC Will Seek to Draw Locals To Inlet End of Boardwalk

Atlantic City’s Garden Pier, purchased earlier this year by Philadelphia developer Bart Blatstein, will be reopening next month as a locals-focused entertainment venue with live music and a bar area. In the shadow of the still-shuttered mega-casino Revel and not far from Blatstein’s Showboat hotel, the newly renamed PierAC plans to draw Atlantic County residents with a reward-card program and drink specials – plus entertainment.

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Boatyard Biz, Narcan Use, Horizon – Tuesday’s Roundup

Atlantic County and Camden County are among the top four counties that saw the most doses of Narcan administered in the January-March period this year, according to figures from the state’s Attorney General’s office reported by SNJ Today. The anti-overdose drug, also known as Naloxone, was used 242 times in Atlantic County, 346 times in Camden County. Meanwhile Salem County reported just 27 uses, Cape May County reported 33, and Cumberland County reported 51. That makes us wonder about how population density affects the use of Narcan…

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New Businesses Move Into AC Boatyard

There have been many different plans for reviving Atlantic City’s fortunes, but one consistent idea has been to make more of the island city’s proximity to the water. This year, new tenants at the former Atlantic City Boatyard are launching two new businesses that will give that a go.

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Batsto, Immigration, Sports Betting – Monday’s Roundup

Batsto
The historic iron-works village of Batsto – in a remote part of the pinelands – is trying to draw more visitors. Visitor numbers have been stagnant in the last few years, but a group of volunteers knows that there is wider interest in the site. Wes Hughes, who heads the

state-appointed volunteer Batsto Citizens Committee, wants to get state approval to stream real-time videos from Batsto’s mansion tower. A previous video from the tower, one of just a handful of high points in the flat pine barrens, went viral in a couple of hours and volunteers hope this could draw more visitors. Read more via Jacqueline Urgo for Philly.com.

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