Cape May County, N.J. - A new bill from Assemblymen Antwan McClellan and Erik Simonsen would rewrite New Jersey’s road-funding formula to finally count summer crowds and flooded roads, meaning better streets for the families who live here year-round.

Assembly Bill 1450, sponsored by Assemblymen Antwan McClellan and Erik Simonsen (both R-District 1, covering Atlantic, Cape May, and Cumberland), would overhaul how New Jersey divides hundreds of millions of dollars in road and bridge aid each year. The bill is co-sponsored by Assemblywoman Victoria Flynn and Assemblymen Michael Myhre, Don Guardian, and Gerry Scharfenberger.

The problem they’re tackling is rather simple. Under current law, the state hands out road aid using a blunt, decades-old formula based on just two things: permanent population and total road mileage. A town’s share depends largely on how many year-round residents it has and how many miles of road it maintains, a model that quietly ignores everything that makes shore town roads expensive to maintain.

McClellan and Simonsen’s bill replaces that with a smarter formula that weighs four factors: weighted county population, total road milage, evacuation-route mileage, and the number of road miles sitting insane a 100-year flood plain.

For the shore, the win is obvious. The new “weighted county population” measure counts not just permanent residents but seasonal visitors, averaged month by month across the year. That’s a long-overdue acknowledgement that towns like Ocean City and Wildwood serve crowds many times their winter size every summer, and that the roads carrying all that traffic wear out faster because of it. The current formula pretends that surge doesn’t exist.

The flood-plain and evacuation-route factors cut the same way. Communities with large stretches of road in FEMA-designated flood zones, or roads serving as official evacuation routes, would finally see those miles counted toward their funding share.

Taken together, these changes are designed to direct existing state aid toward the communities that arguable need it most, without raising taxes or increasing the overall budget. The total pool stays the same; the bill simply rewrites how it’s divided. For year-round residents, the payoff would be better-maintained streets, safer evacuation routes, and less strain on local budgets that currently shoulder the cost of roads worn down by seasonal traffic and flooding. For the visitors who fuel the shore economy, it would mean smoother, safer drives to the coast.