PROVIDENCE — The conference room was already populated with applicants and members of the public when an attorney representing the state’s coastal regulators announced the semi-monthly meeting was canceled.

The agenda for the Aug. 26 meeting of the Coastal Resources Management Council was a full one. It included a number of new pier ramps and dredging projects for the Port of Davisville and revisions to CRMC’s internal procedures and regulations to align with newly passed state laws.

But none of that agenda was heard. Anthony DeSisto, attorney for CRMC’s 10-member executive panel, announced the meeting was canceled, and all agenda items scheduled for consideration would be tabled to the following meeting.

The cause? Only five members of CRMC showed up that night, and the council needs a minimum of six to take any votes. As a result, anyone seeking a council decision that night would have to wait until the next meeting in September to, possibly, get it.

“CRMC has been having trouble making quorum since I became a baykeeper,” said Chris Dodge, who has worked for the nonprofit Save The Bay since last year, in a phone interview with ecoRI News.

Dodge noted the irony in the Aug. 26 CRMC meeting that never happened — which Save The Bay and other environmental advocates had attended to testify — was that one of the agenda items the council was going to vote on would have lowered its minimum quorum requirements from six to four.

The rule change would have also lowered the total number of council members from 10 to seven, making six members politically appointed, with one Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management designee as the seventh.

The membership and quorum change stems from a new state law that reduced the number of seats on the council. Lawmakers on Smith Hill had, not uncontroversially, chosen to tweak the council membership this year instead of ditching the appointed council altogether.

“I don’t see how it’s solved by reducing the number of people on the council and its quorum,” Dodge said. “It’s still a volunteer council, all with lives and jobs of their own.”

The August meeting wasn’t the first time CRMC had to cancel a meeting with people in the room because of quorum issues. This reporter has attended at least one other instance of the agency sending everyone home and tabling the issues until the following meeting because council members wouldn’t be making the meeting that night.

Since June 2022, CRMC has had to cancel 11 semi-monthly meetings, a 16.6% cancellation rate of total meetings scheduled, roughly one out of every six scheduled meetings. The council traditionally has two meetings a month, except in July and August when it schedules one each.

Laura Dwyer, public educator and information coordinator for CRMC, didn’t comment on the 11 missed meetings over the last three years but said last month’s abrupt meeting cancellation was unplanned.

“We poll the council members before each meeting to ensure we have a quorum,” Dwyer said. “[The council member’s] absence was unexpected.”

ecoRI News originally reported the council was having serious quorum issues in early summer 2022 when CRMC failed to meet between April 12 and June 30, leading to a backlog of applications that needed a final decision by the council, including projects to connect Eagle Square in Providence to downtown via a multiuse trail, a dredging project proposed for Ballard’s Wharf in Newport, and updates to the state’s freshwater wetlands regulations.

 At the time, CRMC attributed the repeated missed meetings to excused absences for “health reasons.”

During CRMC’s five-year evaluation by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, federal evaluators said the agency, the governor, and the Legislature “must ensure that additional members are appointed to the Council to achieve the legislatively mandated membership of 10 council members as soon as possible.”

The agency rescheduled all of the August agenda items to the Sept. 9 meeting, including the rule change lowering the number of members to seven and the quorum to six, as well as qualifications for council members. The rule change for quorum is something of a formality, as lawmakers have already made the required changes in state law.

Gov. Dan McKee will have until next March to appoint seven new council members, of which one must be an engineer, one must be a coastal biologist, and one must represent an environmental organization, among other qualifications written into the new law.