Every year, New Jersey shore towns get slammed by the sea and storms leading to beach erosion.

Tens of millions of dollars pour into the state each year to fund beach replenishment efforts.

Meanwhile, dredging of rivers like the Navesink and Shrewsbury are also ongoing to ensure safe passage by marine vessels.

But are these costly projects leaving the state swimming upstream when it comes to combating the impacts of climate change?

Ted Goldberg takes a closer look This pipe snaking its way through Monmouth Beach is taking sand from the Shrewsbury River and putting it back on the beach.

That's a pipe or whatever that goes from the river into this hole and then to the other side.

Congressman Frank Pallone stopped by Monmouth Beach today, bringing attention to a $26 million federal project, dredging parts of the Shrewsbury and Navesink Rivers.

If you don't dredge the rivers, people can't boat anymore.

Or fish and you know, over the last few years, we've had a lot of complaints about showing people not being able to get their boats in and out.

Those funds come from the 2023 federal spending bill.

The project aims to make it safer for boats to move around these rivers and build up the beach in front of the seawall in Monmouth Beach and Sea Bright.

When you dredge, you get those muck so that's not the scientific name and you get sand.

And to the extent that they're saying that's what's being pumped here, this project is unbelievably important to the town of Monmouth Beach.

It helps with our resiliency.

Every bit of resiliency helps as Monmouth Beach can get pretty narrow between the ocean and the Shrewsbury River.

You're standing here, you can see the river right there.

And on the other side of the seawall is the ocean.

So it is of vital importance to us that this project happens.

The benefit, obviously, is to not have the damage that comes in a major storm, which costs literally billions of dollars to fix the utilities the roads.

Everything costs a lot more to fix than it does if you put the beach replenishment.

And we are doing it with the intent of preserving the economic usefulness of oceans on properties that are being built or being threatened by by erosion and shoreline migration sea-level rise and storm waves and so forth.

Andy Coburn is the associate director for the study of developed shorelines at Western Carolina University.

I still do not believe that New Jersey is working in a lot of places, especially if somebody else is paying to protect somebody else's property.

While he couldn't speak specifically on this project in Monmouth County, he disagrees with how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers determines if beach replenishment or beach nourishment is worth the price.

That methodology is flawed because it uses property value to determine the benefits of nourishment and our belief that our property values aren't the correct way to assess the utilization or the return on public funds.

A better way of doing that is looking at what are the public benefits of nourishment instead of value of property.

It would be the tax revenue that that value generates.

Pallone also announced a separate beach replenishment project in Monmouth Beach and Elberon which are scheduled to start next week.

Offshore sand pits will produce the sand needed in both places.

We've been working on these beach replenishment and dredging projects for years, and we'll continue to do so.

Federal funds will pay for 65% of that, even while some question if that's the best use of resources for protecting the shore.

In Monmouth Beach.

I'm Ted Goldberg, NJ Spotlight News