The long-running controversy over Sunday morning beach access from the boardwalk in Ocean Grove in Monmouth County has hit another delay.
Monday was supposed to be the deadline for state Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Shawn M. LaTourette to decide the next step in the fight over Ocean Grove’s religion-based tradition of blocking beach access on Sunday mornings.
Ocean Grove — a section of Neptune founded as a Methodist religious retreat — has chained off access to the beach from its privately-owned boardwalk on Sunday mornings from 9 a.m. until noon every summer.
LaTourette was scheduled to either affirm, reject or modify an administrative judge’s ruling in June in favor of allowing the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association to continue blocking beach access on Sundays.
However, a third extension has been granted to allow more time for the state Department of Environmental Protection to make a decision, a department spokesperson told NJ Advance Media.
The new deadline is Dec. 26, five months before the start of the summer beach season. An earlier 45-day extension was granted in September.
If LaTourette allows the administrative law judge’s earlier ruling to stand, Ocean Grove can resume its 155-year summertime religious tradition on closing the beach on Sunday mornings.
The Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association owns the land in the Ocean Grove section in Neptune.
The association has clashed for years with some local residents over its rules that kept access ramps to the beach chained off on Sunday mornings between Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day weekend.
The association cited religious freedom and its origins as a Methodist community camp in challenging a 2023 order from the Department of Environmental Protection to stop using chains and padlocked barriers blocking beach access from the boardwalk. If Ocean Grove defied the order it risked fines of up to $25,000 per day.
The association opened up the beach on Sunday mornings in May 2024 while it appealed the order.
However, an administrative court judge ruled June 26 that the association was within its rights to restrict beach access from its boardwalk. The judge rejected the state’s argument that restricting beach access ran afoul of the state’s Coastal Area Facility Review Act.
The judge’s ruling noted that those seeking to visit the beach still had the option of getting on the sand by walking in from adjoining beaches to the north or south during the hours on Sundays when the nine access points from the Ocean Grove boardwalk were closed.
The state Office of the Attorney General filed a response on July 18 urging LaTourette to reject the judge’s decision and stand by the original order to open the beach.
Under the original timeline, a decision by the commissioner was due in mid-August, before the end of the beach season. However, the extensions pushed the deadline beyond Labor Day.
The Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association leases land in the neighborhood on a long-term basis to homeowners and businesses. It also sells leases for 114 tents and 20 cottages for use during the summer season, according to the judge’s ruling.
Ocean Grove was governed by the association as a religious enclave for a century, until the New Jersey Supreme Court declared its original charter unconstitutional. It is now part of Neptune, though the association still controls the privately-owned boardwalk.
Critics of the Sunday beach access restriction separately took issue with the association’s decision to build a $2 million pier in Ocean Grove in the shape of a Christian cross that opened in April 2023.
Approximately half of the pier — the extension over the ocean — has been closed since December 2023 due to concerns about its structural integrity. It will remain off-limits “for the foreseeable future,” the association announced Oct. 6.
Staff writer Victoria Gladstone contributed to this report.
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