The five-acre tract is owned by the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association, which in fact owns much of this semi-autonomous community within the larger Neptune Township. The association's redeveloper of choice, which must still be approved by the township, is Wesley Atlantic Village Enterprises LLC, or WAVE, headed by local resident William Gannon. The redevelopment plan is the work of T&M Associates, a Middletown-based civil engineering firm.
And the Ocean Grove North End Redevelopment plan, as it currently stands, calls for an 80-room hotel and 108 residential units, 85 of them condos and the rest single-family. A retail component of unspecified size is also part of that plan. A price tag hasn't yet been put on it.
The major change prior to this week's vote was to reduce the number of condo units and increase the single-family, related to concerns over the density of the previous plan. "This plan gives us a framework of what can be built here," said committee member James Manning Jr. prior to the vote.
Voting against the proposed plan this week was committee member Mary Beth Jahn, who cast that "no" vote on the basis of what she termed "a blatant disregard" for the community's historic architectural tradition. Ocean Grove is one of the largest collections of Victorian architecture in the world, second in the US only to Cape May, NJ, a couple of hours to the south of here.
Next step in the ongoing process is approval of WAVE as the chosen redeveloper and then final approvals of the plan itself.
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