PROVIDENCE — Who should make the decisions about Rhode Island’s coastline?

It’s an important question lawmakers, advocates, and concerned residents have been arguing about over the last few years.

The Coastal Resources Management Council, Rhode Island’s lead agency governing its 400-plus miles of coastline, has a 10-member executive board consisting of nine political appointees, chosen by the governor and approved by the Senate. The 10th seat is filled by a Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management designee.

Environmental advocates have long complained CRMC’s eponymous council is unqualified, with a history of erratic decisions, frequently overturned or tossed out entirely by state judges. They want state officials to nix the council entirely.

State leadership, meanwhile, is hesitant to upset the current status quo. In recent years this has meant delaying decisions on legislation designed to reform the agency and punting the issue to be studied by a special commission. Most recently, the Legislature passed a bill reducing the number of council members and, by association, the number of members needed at meetings for it to reach quorum.

That new law requires Gov. Dan McKee to appoint six new members to CRMC’s executive board by March 1 of next year, with specific qualifications required for certain seats. The new council, under the law, should have “background, qualifications and expertise in environmental and coastal management matters,” with at least one coastal biologist, one engineer, and one representative from an environmental organization.

Any changes to CRMC’s structure typically have to get approved by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as CRMC was created and receives funding as part of the federal Coastal Zone Management Act, which NOAA oversees. Due to the ongoing federal government shutdown, ecoRI News was unable to obtain answers about whether Rhode Island received approval for the new reduced council membership law, or if the state even really needs it.

So what would the new council look like? Could CRMC see a whole new council membership next year?

McKee’s office declined to specify if the governor would replace the entire council or leave the current roster in place, but said he would make appointments next year prior to the new law’s deadline.

“The Governor is in the process of seeking qualified candidates in accordance with the new legislation and will make all appointments when the General Assembly is back in session, in advance of the March 1 statutory deadline,” McKee spokesperson Olivia DaRocha wrote in an email to ecoRI News.

Meanwhile, advocates and critics of the appointed council are skeptical of the changes going into effect next year.

“I think the qualifications as written are very light,” said Michael Woods, chair of the New England chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers and a longtime council-watcher and critic. “They’re not firm, they’re not binding. I think from a legal perspective the nature of having served on CRMC before probably fulfills the statutory requirement that they have some coastal background and expertise.”

Save The Bay’s Jed Thorp, another longtime council-watcher and critic, said he has no strong opinion whether the current members serving on CRMC by virtue of their past experience on the council alone would meet the new qualifications under the law.

“I think the original intent of the law was to do a systematic change-over of the council,” he said. “That’s how it was presented to us by the bill sponsor, and I think that’s what the governor should probably do, find seven new people to serve on the council.”

“I’m not holding my breath for the powers that be to track down the best people for the job,” Woods said.

Critics like Woods have noted, beyond controversial decisions made by the council, that on its face the council has struggled to succeed in its basic functions. Under the old law, CRMC has to have at least six of its 10 members show up to any given meeting in order to take an actionable vote. CRMC has had a history of canceling meetings due to a lack of quorum for years, and Woods noted the council hasn’t had its full appointment of members since 2019.

But the new law does make provisions for at least one coastal biologist and one representative from an environmental organization to serve as council members. Save The Bay is one of the few environmental nonprofits in Rhode Island that could potentially serve in both categories. But Thorp said the organization isn’t comfortable, or even interested, in having members serve on the council.

“We already have a seat at the table as advocates,” he said. “I appreciate what the intent of the new law was, but we’re already at the meetings, we make our voices heard. We’d really rather be on that side of the process.”

The workflow of the council is unsustainable and anathema to good decision-making, according to Thorp. Council members receive agenda and documents for a Tuesday meeting the Friday before. They have to review, and understand, thick folders full of documents, testimony, and exhibits submitted by applicants in a short period of time.

“It’s a lot of work to be on the council,” Thorp said. “We’re a nonprofit organization with limited resources, why would I ask one of my staff members to do all this work pro bono for the state? It’s really the work professional staff should be doing.”

It’s one of the many reasons Thorp, Woods, Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha, and others backed legislation this year abolishing CRMC and replacing it with a Department of Coastal Resources.

Thorp and Woods acknowledge their side lost the battle, when lawmakers instead passed the law reducing the size of CRMC’s executive board. But both also say their organizations are still committed to future legislation abolishing the council, but they are undecided what they’re going to introduce this year, and in what form.

The bill making CRMC into the Department of Coastal Resources was one of two major bills last session that would have abolished the council entirely. The other major bill would have merged CRMC into DEM, becoming simply a division within the much bigger, land-based environmental state agency. It was once a fringe solution to CRMC reform, but Thorp and Woods say they want to keep their options open.

Woods said he has concerns about increasing DEM’s workload, noting the department already has an expansive focus that it needs far more money and resources to execute. The work CRMC does, said Woods, really warrants a full, independent agency.

“I’m nervous if we put CRMC into DEM, it might get lost in the mix, so to speak,” Woods said. “Hypothetically, DEM then only has one person appointed and confirmed by the Senate. The person who oversees CRMC then becomes a bureau chief, which is another degree separated from the ability to provide public input.”

Thorp said a possible merger bill was “an attractive option,” but required far more study and planning on the part of advocates. Thorp said advocates have to decide how to write the bill, and figure out what the agency would look like structurally before they made a final decision on the future of CRMC reform.

“DEM only has around 430 employees; CRMC is quite small in comparison with only maybe 32 employees right now,” Thorp said. “Putting them under DEM, structurally speaking, would not be a huge merger.”

“There are a lot of overlapping resources,” Woods said. “There are a lot of common roles and common functions between the two agencies, there is a degree of logic to put the two together so some resources can be shared.”