"I think it's inevitable," he said recently of implementing beach tags in Wildwood. "I always swore that God put that beach there for everybody to use, but when you sit on my side of the fence, every single night, it's different."
Wildwood is among the municipalities that make up the Wildwoods, and the towns market their "free" beaches heavily. Collectively, North Wildwood, Wildwood and Wildwood Crest took the top spot in a recent state survey of its best beaches, and none requires beach tags, a rarity at the Jersey shore.
"Are you free this summer?" an announcer asks in a commercial made for the resort. "The Wildwoods are. Free as in free, award-winning beaches that stretch for miles."
Wildwood is also facing serious budget issues, and Troiano, who once looked into closing the city's small high school, said that he has to look at every available source of revenue.
"There's no secret, every community is in financial straits," he said.
Keeping the beaches clean costs the city about $1.5 million per year, Troiano said. Crews are on the beach before sunrise to rake through the sand every morning with machinery, but Troiano said that because so many day-trippers are leaving their garbage behind, it takes longer to clean.
"If everybody picked their trash up at the end of the day, I could probably eliminate four to five people," he said.
Although no "hard plans" have been made, Troiano said that he was looking into how much a beach-tag program, complete with taggers to sell and check for scofflaws, would cost the city. He believed that the program could generate $1 million to $2 million per year. In Ocean City, beach tags brought in approximately $3.4 million in fees last summer, but total operating costs for the beach were about $4 million, said Frank Donato, the city's director of financial management. That gap prompted the city to raise the price of seasonal tags by $5.
