Avalon Mansion

Avalon group to rally against building of Dune Drive mansion

By BRIAN IANIERI Staff Writer, (609) 463-6713
Press of Atlantic City
Published: Friday, June 16, 2006
Updated: Friday, June 16, 2006

AVALON — A newly formed group called Save Avalon's Dunes is planning a rally today to protest a beachfront mansion that will become the island's largest.

Construction on the nine-bedroom mansion — complete with maid's quarters — started along Dune Drive several months ago on an upscale block in a town of millionaires.

Save Avalon's Dunes member Elaine E. Scattergood said the construction at 5299 Dune Drive cuts through the high dunes and should not have been developed in an environmentally sensitive area.

“We're going to try to fight any more desecration of the dunes,” Scattergood said Thursday. “If you've been an old-timer down here, it's discouraging. I've seen little by little things that are done wrong.”

Avalon officials said the building site has all the proper state and environmental permits. Officials, however, did not want the construction to take place and opposed plans as early as 1999.

“It is a very difficult problem, one in which the borough has very little control. We've exercised every piece of control we have,” said Neil Hensel, chairman of the borough's Planning and Zoning boards.

Schematics of the mansion indicate it will be a sight to see, even by Avalon's standards of luxurious, spacious homes with views of the ocean and bay.

Besides bedrooms and bathrooms, it will have an elevator, media room, game room and servants' quarters.

Its 15,000 square feet would make it almost one-third larger than Avalon's largest current residence — a 10,576-square-foot structure on the bay in Avalon's northern end, said Jeffrey Hesley, the borough's tax assessor.

The land is valued at $7.36 million. And that's without a house on it.

With its wooded surroundings east of Dune Drive, the property offers a glimpse of peace and isolation hard to come by in resort towns where sometimes people opt for rocks instead of grass on lawns.

According to property records, the owner is Michael W. Rice, the president of Utz Quality Foods Inc. in Hanover, Pa.

Rice could not be reached at his office Thursday afternoon.

Brian Reynolds, chairman of Avalon's environmental commission, said the commission held a public hearing in January 1999 relating to the construction there. The commission objected to the size of the project, as well as its effect on the dunes, plants and wildlife, Reynolds said.

Reynolds said the state Department of Environmental Protection initially rejected the property owner's plan. The property owner took the matter to court, where it was mediated, and both sides negotiated a settlement, Reynolds said.

But Avalon officials said they knew nothing of these negotiations until several years ago.

“I think that if people want to change the regulations, then they need to change them in Trenton and not by protesting here,” Reynolds said.

Scattergood plastered posters around Avalon advertising a protest to the construction this morning.

This protest is meant to be a message.

“What the townspeople want is no development at all in the area, but the problem is these people own an acre of ground in the high dunes, which they paid dearly for,” Hensel said. “If we tried to tell them not to build, I don't know how we would do, we'd probably lose a lot of money. But we can't. What they've done is legal in respect to what they're building.”