John Kuehne
When the devastating waters of Hurricane Sandy receded from Jersey shore towns, John Kuehne was left with the task of ensuring that beachfront properties were safe from storms in the future. Easy, right?
Don Quixote. Sisyphus. John Kuehne. Did you guess? They’re all people engaged in impossible tasks. For Kuehne ’12, the task involves trying to acquire 127 miles of New Jersey shoreline by asking owners to give up their beaches for free. In return, he’s offering them the state’s promise of greater protection against the devastating force of the next Hurricane Sandy.
Which is less likely: Getting hold of the land, or holding back the sea? Either way, Kuehne and the team with which he works are slowly but surely succeeding.
As a deputy attorney general in the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General, Kuehne’s present role effectively came into being when Congress funded the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act of 2013 to compensate Sandy victims and pay for a range of shore protection actions. This includes the acquisition of the beaches attached to some 4,500 properties in order to construct protective dune structures.
How to make that happen? This is where Kuehne’s experience earning a juris doctor from Drexel’s Kline School of Law comes in. “The greatest skillset I learned was the ability to listen, listening to what a person is telling you and then understanding what it is that might be in the best interests of the person,” he says. That is just how he has approached his present work. “It takes a person willing to talk with and communicate well with people. So much of my day is spent on the phone working through people’s problems and concerns and finding a good middle ground,” he says.
He and his colleagues have been remarkably successful, working through this personal-contact approach. The state has acquired all but 300 of the needed 4,500 properties. That is a big deal, as New Jersey is one of the few states that allow landowners to actu- ally hold title to the beach. Even more impressive is that all of those homeowners so far have voluntarily handed over the land without asking a penny in compensation from the state.
The process here is anything but cookie-cutter, Kuehne explains, since every property has its own particular features and facets. “There may be a party deck, and if that deck is a struc- ture, how do we compensate for that? With some properties there is a matter of access to the beach, for example, for a person with a disability. Then we have some properties where special access-ways need to be created to allow the public to get to the beach,” he explains.
Kuehne works with a multidisciplinary team to overcome these challenges. “Our position is to act as the liaison between the Army Corps of Engineers, the Governor’s Office, the municipalities and the individual property owners,” he says. “We have to work with all of these groups and we have to get everyone on a path forward, even when their interests don’t always align.”
Success here takes a lot of hands-on work. For a lawyer, Kuehne spends little time with law books and far more time wrangling with the tangible realities of a shoreline in need of long-term sup- port. This approach harkens right back to his time at Drexel. “I am an experiential learner; I work best by doing, and Drexel gave me that opportunity to learn in that hands-on way,” he says. — Adam Stone
