PROVIDENCE — For the third year in a row, environmental groups, good government advocates, and the attorney general are lobbying lawmakers to overhaul the state’s coastal regulatory agency.

It’s no secret to frequent readers of ecoRI News that the Coastal Resources Management Council, Rhode Island’s main coastal regulator, is in trouble.

The state’s share of the agency’s budget is a paltry $3.5 million, and the agency’s staff have just enough in numbers to count as a skeleton crew when compared to the 420 miles of coastline CRMC is expected to oversee.

Despite these obstacles, agency staff manage to stay national leaders in coastal development and planning, and in recent years have shepherded the first utility-scale offshore wind project through a regulatory gamut.

But it’s also an agency with deep structural problems. Instead of an appointed executive director calling the final shots, it’s a 10-member, volunteer, politically appointed council voting on any final matters before the agency, none of whom are bound by law to have expertise or a background in coastal matters.

Final decisions on aquaculture permits and other issues can take years, and council members are free to ignore — or rule against — any recommendations made by CRMC staff. And it’s not uncommon for controversial decisions made by the council to be thrown out by the courts, often for going against CRMC’s own internal policies and procedures.

Reform advocates showed up strong March 26 to the Senate’s Environment and Agriculture Committee hearing to remind lawmakers what’s at stake and ask them to back a bill (S775) to abolish the CRMC executive council altogether.

“No one has ever come to you and asked for the director of the Department of Environmental Management to be replaced by a 10-member, volunteer council,” Jed Thorp, director of advocacy for Save The Bay, told lawmakers. “That is not the best way to run a regulatory agency.”

The bill, sponsored by Sen. Mark McKenney, D-Warwick, would strip CRMC’s executive body of its decision-making authority, handing it over instead to the agency’s appointed executive director. It would transform the agency into a Department of Coastal Resources, a more conventional agency in line with other state departments at the cabinet level in Rhode Island.

The bill is aimed at passing a number of the recommendations advised by the 2022 legislative study commission, and at fixing a number of other long-standing issues with the agency. The council would be nerfed into an advisory committee that would have members with appropriate knowledge of coastal law, coastal policy, or coastal ecology, to provide community input into agency policy.

The bill also mandates the governor appoint at least one hearing officer and an attorney to represent the CRMC staff. Both are long-standing vacancies in the agency’s structure and a longtime ask from environmental groups. Gov. Dan McKee appointed CRMC’s first hearing officer in living memory last year, and allocated money for a staff attorney, although no attorney has been hired by the agency yet.

If approved, the bill would only be the first step in overhauling CRMC. State officials would have to petition the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the federal coastal zone management program, to approve any structural changes to the agency.

Catherine Robinson Hall, a former DEM staff attorney with coastal policy experience who currently works as an attorney for Save The Bay, was appointed to CRMC’s executive board in 2022. Hall served on the body for two years before turning in her resignation in 2024, citing time constraints.

Hall told lawmakers the council structure inhibited the decision-making process and enforcement capacity of CRMC, leaving it with a massive backlog of cases and permits waiting years for hearings. In her two years on the council, said Hall, the agency only heard one contested case.

“That’s all we had time for with the vacancies, with not having a quorum, having cancellations of meetings, we had people constantly in the backlog,” Hall said. “One enforcement case in just two full years is just unacceptable for an environmental agency to operate.”

How often do council meetings get canceled? A good chunk of them as it turns out. Mike Woods, chair of the New England chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, went back and counted how many meetings the CRMC council missed last year. According to his testimony to the committee on Thursday, the council missed or canceled nearly 30% of its regularly scheduled meetings. (CRMC has a running schedule of two meetings a month for most of the year.)

That number is actually higher if you include the past few years the council had all 10 members. According to Woods’ count, the council missed one-third of all of its meetings in 2017, 19% in 2018, and 27% of its meetings in 2019.

“I’m afraid this is a function of the structure,” Woods said. “No amount of finagling with the appointments or qualifications is going to address the fact that when volunteers are the ones in charge, they have their own priorities and lives, things that take precedence over their roles in public service.”

As a result, getting permitting decisions, enforcement decisions, or any decisions from CRMC takes far longer than it would with an agency with a single executive director calling the shots.

It’s a problem with real-world impacts. In 2023, the Quidnessett Country Club, which owns and operates a golf club in North Kingstown, illegally built a seawall along its shoreline. CRMC issued multiple notices of violation that year and ultimately ordered the country club to take the wall down.

The club didn’t comply, instead petitioning the council to consider allowing it to change its water type — a development classification not unlike zoning — and legitimize the seawall after the fact. The council agreed to hear Quidnessett Country Club’s petition and ultimately voted to deny the request, but the seawall remains.

It’s not been an easy road for CRMC reform. Despite a legislative commission outlining to lawmakers just what was going wrong with the agency in 2022, much of the reform efforts have stalled.

Last year came with a new rationale from leadership; a House Fiscal Office note estimated the bill would cost $1 million to $2 million every year to replace the CRMC council with a staff. Despite the plan to hand the council’s powers over to CRMC’s executive director, the fiscal note assumed the council would be replaced with 10 paid, full-time staff members.

The state Office of Management and Budget released similar numbers last month, when it issued its own fiscal estimates on reform legislation after the Senate passed a resolution asking the agency to write its own analysis.

McKenney’s bill to transform CRMC into the Department of Coastal Resources, according to OMB’s estimate, would cost another $1 million to $1.7 million a year.

“To assume the responsibilities previously managed by the governance council, DCR would require at least seven new full-time positions, including staff attorneys, policy analysts, administrative clerks, and a hearing officer,” wrote OMB in its report.

The report noted that by hiring legal counsel in-house (CRMC currently has Anthony DeSisto Law Associates LLC as legal counsel) the agency could save $200,000 annually.

McKenney and others said they were skeptical of how much money it would actually cost for CRMC reform.

“We’re talking about an existing agency; we’re really changing the name, having the director, who’s already in place, and hiring a staff attorney,” McKenney said. “Having looked at the fiscal note previously, I have no idea how they managed came up with that. We’re not talking about a significant cost.”

Thorp, of Save The Bay, said he is mystified as to why the General Assembly has shied away from overhauling the agency.

“My guess is it’s because change is hard, you’re dealing with a body that’s existed for 50 years,” he said. “People are used to things being done a certain way, and we’re not always a state that embraces big changes.”

S775 was held for further study.