For more than half a century, Don Whiteman and his family led a secessionist movement.
This week, they finally won.
The moment his victory was secured, Mr. Whiteman allowed himself a big smile and a single, loud clap of his hands. A little while later, a longtime adversary, Don McGrath, patted Mr. Whiteman on the shoulder.
“Don,” Mr. McGrath said, “your dad would be proud.”
The moment of triumph took place on Monday in Seaside Park, a borough of 1,400 year-round residents on Barnegat Peninsula, a barrier island off the coast of New Jersey, south of Asbury Park. The borough council of Seaside Park voted to annex the tiny neighborhood of South Seaside Park, a bungalow community of 450 people, among them Don Whiteman and his family.
South Seaside Park has been asking to join Seaside Park (the wealthier neighboring town on the peninsula) for more than 50 years. But until this week, it was legally — and somewhat confusingly — part of Berkeley Township, a municipality located on the mainland of New Jersey.
It has always been an awkward arrangement. South Seaside Park residents wanting to visit their town hall had to drive through Seaside Park and five other towns to get there. In summer, it can be a 60-minute trip.
It took the colonists a little more than eight years to break away from Britain. Mr. Whiteman and his band of secessionists have been at it quite a bit longer.
“Fifty-three years is a long time for this kind of thing,” said Ryan Griffiths, a political scientist at Syracuse University and the author of “The Disunited States: Threats of Secession in Red and Blue America and Why They Won’t Work.”
Despite Mr. Whiteman’s big win, the cessation of hostilities in the civil war of the Jersey Shore may yet be years away. Across the water in Berkeley, township leaders concede they’ve lost the fight to keep the 168 acres of South Seaside Park. When it comes to how Berkley should be compensated for its lost sliver of territory, however, John Bacchione, the mayor of Berkeley, concedes nothing.
“We can still appeal up to the State Supreme Court,” Mr. Bacchione said after the vote. “It would be long and drawn-out.”
Mr. Whiteman’s movement started in 1973 when his father — also Don Whiteman — started a petition to secede. More than five decades of bureaucratic fits and starts later, the complaints from South Seaside Park residents remain the same.
Seaside Park keeps its ocean beach pristine, but Berkeley often allowed the beach in South Seaside to become littered with trash, Mr. Whiteman said. After a snowstorm, plows from Berkeley may take three days to arrive. When a crime is reported, the police from Seaside Park respond in minutes, Mr. Whiteman said, but an officer from Berkeley may not show up till the following day. (Mr. Bacchione pointed out that the township now stations two police officers on the island.)
The distance between the two communities is cultural as well as geographic. Residents of Barnegat Peninsula tend to stick to restaurants and grocery stores on the island rather than drive to the mainland, many said.
People in Berkeley get stuck in traffic on Route 9, a busy two-lane highway lined by a growing number of strip malls and housing subdivisions. People in South Seaside Park prefer to ride around on beach cruiser bicycles, said John A. Peterson Jr., the mayor of Seaside Park.
Peninsula people just stick together, the mayor said. The Seaside Park Volunteer Fire Department has people from South Seaside Park pitching in.
“When the fire sirens go off, everybody responds on the island,” Mr. Peterson said. “People in Berkley wouldn’t hear that.”
There is also the sticky matter of finances. South Seaside Park accounts for just 1 percent of Berkeley’s population, but property tax revenue from the neighborhood covered more than 10 percent of Berkeley’s $62 million annual budget, according to a 2022 decision by a superior court judge in Ocean County, N.J.
This the crux of the matter: Most residents in South Seaside Park believed they paid too much money in taxes and received too few services in return.
“We were the cash cow,” Mr. Whiteman said.
The complaints may be obvious, but the fight to secede was anything but. The first effort began in the early 1970s, when South Seaside Park residents took their complaints to Berkeley Township. When Berkeley’s leaders refused to let them go, the secessionists pursued a legal battle all the way to the New Jersey Supreme Court, where they won, and then to their neighbors in Seaside Park, where they lost. (In 1981, the borough’s mayor and council voted 4-3 to reject them.)
For the next 33 years, the same resentments simmered. Then, in 2014, the younger Mr. Whiteman circulated a petition of his own. It went to Berkeley’s planning board, which met 38 times over five years before voting no. Another court case followed, rising again to the state supreme court.
This second stab at secession took another 12 years. It ended this week, when Seaside Park council members welcomed their neighbors with a 5-to-0 vote. (One councilman abstained.)
“I feel fine about it,” Bobby Ring, who is 65 and a South Seaside Park resident, said of finally leaving Berkeley behind.
But this is only the beginning of the disentanglement. First, the leaders of Seaside Park must figure out how to run their enlarged town. Garbage in Berkeley is collected by trucks equipped with robotic arms, Mr. Bacchione said, but the trash bins are too big to be lifted by sanitation workers in Seaside Park, whose trucks don’t have robotic arms. How much will that cost to fix?
The lifeguards on the beaches at South Seaside Park were paid by the township. Will they keep their jobs? Or will Seaside Park need to hire all new lifeguards? If so, how many? Nobody knows, Mr. Peterson, Seaside Park’s mayor, said.
Berkeley’s mayor also said his town must be compensated for its losses. Just how much money should Seaside Park pay for a remote section of sand just half a mile long, three blocks wide and covered mostly by humble one-story bungalows?
On this issue, Mr. Bacchione takes a maximalist position: Seaside Park must pay Berkeley for every public road, every sewer pipe, every inch of sandy beach.
“Our assets are our assets,” Mr. Bacchione said. Four days after declaring victory, Mr. Whiteman said on Thursday that he was happy to keep fighting the issue. Berkeley owns many nice things, including roads, sidewalks and parks.
So Mr. Whiteman’s counteroffer is succinct: “Give us 10 percent of it,” he said.
After 53 years, the mayor of Berkeley isn’t ready to back down, either.
“It’s not over,” Mr. Bacchione said.
Christopher Maag is a reporter covering the New York City region for The Times.
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