Charge owners of tall boats for costs of drawbridges

Every week I read the same old stories about the replacement of the bridges over the Navesink and Shrewsbury rivers. The public is demanding that all alternatives be explored, so here are a couple of new ones.

Most of the hype seems to be about the height of the proposed fixed span bridges. The height is necessary to allow tall boats to pass underneath without the need (read costs) for a drawbridge and a salaried attendant.

So one suggestion is to provide low fixed span bridges, and those very few people with tall boats will have to dock them on whichever side of the bridge they wish.

The other suggestion is to provide low drawbridges and require tall boats to have an E-ZPass tag as part of NJ Boat registration. They will be charged $10 every time they go through a drawbridge. The funds raised need to be sufficient to pay for the higher costs of building and maintaining a drawbridge and to pay for the salaried attendant.

Richard Sparshatt

Rumson