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The Asbury Park City Council Wednesday voted to submit a grant application to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection to seek funds to dredge portions of Deal Lake.

The Deal Lake Commissioner paid for the cost of an engineering study and supplemental materials for the city’s $6.9 million request for funds to restore the lake to “better than pre-Sandy conditions,”, according to DLC Chairman Don Brockel.

The DEP recently announced $50 million in grant finds are available for shoreline resiliency projects in Sandy-affected areas, Brockel said.

“There is a rumor $10 million was set aside for coastal lakes,” he said.

Projects must be “shovel-ready” to obtain the funds, and Brockel believes it is. Commissioners have already secured just under $1 million to begin to dredge the lake from a separate grant through the Department of Agriculture National Resource Conservation Service [NRCS]. Engineering reports are finished and soil samples sent for preliminary dredging, Brockel said.

The NRCS  in February approved $769,500 in funds to remove roughly 19,000 cubic yards of post-Sandy sediment and debris from the most eastern portion of the lake. The NJDEP will give the 10 percent of matching funds required for the proposed project, bringing the total funds secured to $855,000. But that total fell significantly short of the total $6.9 million originally sought by the DLC and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.

Although $6.9 million seems a steep figure, Brockel’s estimated total cost to dredge the entire lake comes in around $38 million, he said.

Initial dredging was slated to be complete by the end of December but has not yet started. If the soil samples com back with a less than 90 percent sand content, the detritus cannot be placed back on the beach, he said, and will have to be carted away and disposed of.

In addition, limitations on the season from herring and shad runs that occur in spring and the state DEP’s reluctance to dredge in late summer due to lower oxygen content will probably delay the project another year, he said.

A separate $130,000 is also requested by the DLC from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for other post-Sandy debris and tree removal, he said.

The DLC hired a grant writer to assist with that proposal, which Brockel said is strong.

“We spent a little money on that, but it was money well spent,” he said.

Deal Lake is Monmouth County’s largest lake and the largest of New Jersey’s coastal lakes, and the seventh largest in the state. It encompasses 155 acres over 27 miles of shoreline along the borders of Asbury Park, Allenhurst, Deal, Interlaken, Lock Arbor, Neptune City and Ocean Township.

[CORRECTION: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the city gave permission for the Deal Lake Commission to submit the grant. In actuality, the grant was submitted by the city and the Commission paid for the cost of the engineering study to submit with the application. This version has been updated to reflect that change.]

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