The North End “area in need of redevelopment.” Paul Goldfinger with “All Things Bright and Beautiful.” John Rutter. Paul Goldfinger photo.

By Paul Goldfinger, MD,  Editor and Complainer-In-Chief at Blogfinger.net of Ocean Grove, NJ, USA (This is for the many foreign readers who follow our blog.)

Here is a Blogfinger link regarding this topic:  July 2025:

Blogfinger North End summary. July 2025

Since 2008, Blogfinger.net has commented many times about the flawed North End Plan.   Our beloved land use expert Jack Bredin of Ocean Grove passed away last week, and we at Blogfinger will miss him:  He was a friend, a neighbor, a colleague, an artist and someone who spent untold hours helping us with this topic and speaking for the citizens of Ocean Grove.

If he were here now, he would be all over this “2nd  amended plan.”

We at Blogfinger send our heartfelt condolences to Jean Bredin who also is a Blogfinger staffer.

Neptune Township is planning to formally present their latest ” 2nd amended NERP plan” to the Committee. They removed it from the agenda for their last meeting.  Can anyone explain to our readers  why the disgraceful NERP has had to undergo “amendments.” ?

I am not an expert on land use law, but I have posted so many articles on this topic over the years, and so here are some comments which I can make based on what I learned from Jack.

I tried to read the latest amendment, but only a legal expert could handle it.

If any of you want to contribute to a learned discussion about this latest North End  hodge-podge, please contact us at Blogfinger. net. You won’t find much to admire on FaceBook. The main-stream press around here has been watching this but saying little.

a. The original North End Redevelopment plan dates back to 2008 when Charles Layton was the first Blogfinger journalist to raise an eyebrow over what was being proposed.

b.  There were some subsequent attempts to change the original plan, but from the beginning we objected to the original Neptune designation of the North End project as a “zone in need of redevelopment.”  It was our position that the approval of the NERP was illegal since there were no good reasons to apply this designation when the CMA did not need that zoning change to turn the North End into a profitable Master Plan supported  insistence that a community of single family homes should have been approved instead.

c. It was our understanding that the original Redevelopment Plan was law and could not be changed without starting over with the planning including public hearings and open applications for choosing a developer for the project.

We objected because no outside developers had a real chance to compete with the Gannon WAVE group— (later OGNED)   It seemed that the “fix was in” and that the CMA and Neptune Township went along with these choices without considering what was best for the town of Ocean Grove.  The citizens were apathetic and our pleas for an outside investigation were ignored despite our many posts in Blogfinger.net.  Our archives contain most of our complaints.

We were contacted by a local developer of large projects who complained bitterly to us that his design was not even considered for a chance at being chosen. We even posted photos of his design.

d.  In the recent past, Neptune approved  (Mayor Rizzo) a Re-Developers Agreement when the original such Agreement stood as law.  I’m not even sure that an original  law-mandated Redevelopers Agreement was ever submitted to Neptune. The Neptune Committee just stood aside as the years went by.

e.  This project failed to be implemented in a timely way since 2008, and so Neptune should have scuttled the whole thing for failure to move ahead, but the Neptuners were clearly tied to OGNED and CMA in a way that might have been illegal, but no outside agency took a look.   And our own citizens group, the “Home Groaners” not  only failed to push back, but they supported the plan as they cooked up a scheme to make changes which should have been illegal.

f. I’m skipping a lot of suspicious details, but lately  we have a law suit brought by two OG citizens to oppose the plan and then there is the effort to bypass the HPC which has been unhappy with the latest plan.  I don’t know of what is happening with those legal proceedings.  And it is unclear as to why the latest NERP has not been implemented.

Whatever is currently going on has not   been revealed publicly. Transparency has been buried regarding the North End since 2008 thanks to the Neptuners who never let we-the-people on to the real dynamics beneath the surface.

Jack often spoke at Committee meetings, but he would get 5 minutes, and no discussion followed.  On one occasion the Committee had a policeman remove him from the mic.

JOHN RUTTER  WITH THE CAMBRIDGE SINGERS: