The Army Corps of Engineers has scaled back a plan that would have installed several massive flood gates in the back bays and inlets found in Ocean Atlantic Cape May and portions of Burlington Counties.

Those gates meant to stave off the flooding that often disrupts life for residents in the bayside towns.

But the high cost with a ticket price of $16 billion plus some environmental concerns around the gates made the plan controversial.

Ted Goldberg has an update on what a new plan will now include and the updated price tag, which has been slashed in half.

We are going to have to wrestle with this question of how do we live with the shore and not just on the shore.

There's a lot of energy in these waves around Manasquan.

It's great for winter surfers, but bad for people who have to constantly worry about flooding.

Coastal flooding is a fact of life, and it's going to get worse as climate increases its impact on the shoreline.

Tim Dillingham leads the American Littoral Society, a coastal conservation group based in Highlands.

He's happy to hear about the new proposal from the Army Corps of Engineers, which plans to help communities hurt by Superstorm Sandy that frequently deal with bayside flooding.

It's scaled down from the original proposal, which would have built floodgates to use during storms.

They hadn't done an environmental impact assessment.

We believe that that environmental impact would have been really unacceptable.

The new plan, which is projected to cost about $8 billion, is half the price tag of the original $16 billion proposal.

Dillingham says the new version is smarter for excluding those flood gates, which are expensive to maintain and bad for wildlife.

Water, fish nutrients move throughout those systems.

And if you start to put walls in between and it's interchanged with the ocean and it's interchanged between different parts of the bay itself, you start to reduce the oxygen severely to marine life.

You start to retain pollutants that will come off the land.

The Corps says much of that money will be spent on getting homes off the ground and.

Elevating houses, elevating and perhaps hardening critical infrastructure like police stations and EMS stations, fire stations.

Those are the steps that the Corps say are implementable, can be done even though they're going to come with a high cost.

I do think that we'll have another type of catastrophic event in my future, and I worry about that all the time.

So I think that without starting these projects, without being able to help people or raise houses, I was lucky to be able to do it.

I kind of knew I was going to have to raise a house when I bought it.

But a lot of people don't have the financial flexibility to be able to raise a house, go, move out of it, go find another house to live in.

Amy Williams is a science teacher at the Ocean County Vocational Technical School and knows a thing or two about flooding near her home in ship bottom.

I experienced Sunny day flooding, all the nuisance flooding that you get.

I have to pay attention to the tide gauges and see when I can come home.

Sometimes coming home from work, sometimes I can't actually get down my street.

And depending on whether or not it's warm or cold out, I may or may not wade through water.

I have to keep waders in the back of my car to actually get to my house.

At times.

She's praised the somewhat less ambitious plan which the Army Corps calls more achievable.

I don't know the definition of achievable, as they were saying, but I do think that it's a little bit more of a reasonable approach right now in what they are trying to do and actually get something on the ground in a more reasonable time period.

Both pricey plans raise questions about if people should live in areas that are susceptible to catastrophic coastal flooding from the ocean or from bays.

But people like Dillingham are realistic and know New Jerseyans love their shore and want to live as close to it as possible.

The first thing we should do is not continue to build in high hazard areas and we should go back and try to mitigate some of the risk that people who live there now are facing through nature based solutions like the Corps is proposing.

The DEP has proposed new regulations for building along the coasts, but there has been significant opposition from local government and business groups.

In the meantime, the Army Corps is proposing razing about 6000 residential structures, down from 19,000.

In the original proposal and flood proofing nearly 300 infrastructure facilities like police and fire stations in Manasquan.

I'm Ted Goldberg.

NJ Spotlight News.