SEA ISLE CITY, N.J. - It's not a sashay on a pageant runway, but 14-year-old Tori Cookson treats her daily walk down a beach pathway to collect trash and sweep sand with just as much care.
At the end of each day, with her two younger brothers and under her mother's supervision, the current Miss Teen Gloucester County USA heads to the entrance of the 85th Street beach with a pair of work gloves.
The family, which lives in the Mickleton section of East Greenwich Township and summers in Sea Isle's Townsends Inlet section, scours the area for candy wrappers, cigarette butts, and other trash left by beachgoers or carried there on the near-constant breeze.
Then the family sweeps the light-blue, 40-foot portable pathway, known as a Mobi-Mat, that Sea Isle installed to make it easier for visitors to get to the waterfront.
"It's almost like welcoming people to your home," Cookson said of the pride she feels when the entrance is ready to greet visitors again the next day.
It's a drill being undertaken by families, service organizations, and other groups at 16 beach entrances on the barrier-island resort this summer. The volunteers are part of Sea Isle's new Beach Path Adoption Program to aid the public works crew in a time of declining municipal budgets, said Vicky Rutledge, a supervisor with the Public Works Department.
"This town is blessed with so many people who take pride in the beach and want to help," Rutledge said. "Now that we need the help because of a hiring freeze, it's the perfect way to keep our beaches in shape."
Officials said they didn't yet know how much the effort would save the municipality.
Volunteers don't do any heavy lifting; raking the beach and emptying trash barrels remain the job of public works employees. But they provide an additional service by looking for breaks in the dunes and fencing and reporting sand loss around the pathway.
Sea Isle created the program after placing the Mobi-Mats at 75 of the town's 94 beach entrances. Treading the scorching sand was painful, and the flexible, plastic runways make access easier for the handicapped and for those who cart their gear in wagons.
Sea Isle's Beach Path Adoption Program is part of a statewide network of antilitter "adopt" projects that put volunteer individuals and groups in charge of tidying beaches, roads, highways, or other public spaces, said Sandy Huber, executive director of the nonprofit New Jersey Clean Communities Council.
The state Department of Environmental Protection this year transferred administration of the programs to the council, which had been under contract to oversee the disbursement of antilitter grants to towns.
The shift has helped the DEP "maximize its resources during difficult economic times," Commissioner Bob Martin said during the recent opening of an adopt-a-beach office in Brigantine.
The Jersey Shore satellite office moved some of the council's expertise from Trenton to a location better suited to serve the beach-litter program, Hubers said. Thousands of groups and individuals are involved in beach cleanup drives statewide, she said.
"We think our new satellite office will spur an even greater spirit of volunteerism at the Shore," Huber said.
Getting volunteers for Sea Isle's beach-path effort hasn't been a problem. In fact, the town plans to enlarge it next year beyond the initial 16 locations, Rutledge said.
The project hasn't been without hiccups. A batch of signs, like the ones that acknowledge the kind souls responsible for keeping a roadside clean, have been made, but there's not enough public works manpower to install them at the beach entrances, Rutledge said.
That hasn't stopped volunteers like Tori Cookson or Susan and Steve Ahern from making their rounds.
"We've always picked up litter on the beach when we've spotted it, so this isn't such a stretch for us," said Susan Ahern, who has monitored the 90th Street beach pathway since the summer began. She and her husband volunteered on behalf of Sea Isle Terrapin Rescue, a group they organized to help save baby diamondbacks.
"But I love this program because with the new Mobi-Mats, it's like our town is welcoming visitors to our beach."