PROVIDENCE — The state’s coastal regulating agency is already starting the new year on the wrong foot.

The Coastal Resources Management Council quietly announced last month that longtime council member and Little Compton resident Donald Gomez was resigning. Gomez, who prior to his professional retirement worked as an electric engineer for the Navy in Newport, had been serving in some capacity on CRMC’s executive panel since 2007.

“For me it’s a bad day if I don’t learn something,” Gomez said at CRMC’s Dec. 10 meeting. “I learned a lot in my 17 years here.”

“Don has been a great Council member and friend, and we thank him for his many years of service to the CRMC and State of Rhode Island,” CRMC board chair Raymond Coia said in a statement. “Don always brought analytical thinking and pragmatism to our proceedings. We wish him the best in his retirement from the Council and know we’ll most likely see him in the audience in the future.”

A spokesperson for CRMC didn’t specify an effective date for his resignation.

Gomez’s resignation represents problems for the coastal agency. Unlike other state departments, where final decision-making power rests with an appointed executive director, CRMC instead has an all-volunteer, politically appointed 10-member executive council filling the same function, voting on permits and overseeing agency staff. CRMC’s executive director, Jeff Willis, and other agency staff report to the council — chosen by the governor and approved by the Senate — whose members aren’t required to have expertise in coastal issues. It makes Rhode Island something of an outlier; California is the only other state that runs its coastal management program with a politically appointed council.

It’s a job that’s going to become harder in the next few months. Gomez’s resignation brings the total number of council members down to just six, the bare minimum required for the council to meet quorum. In layman’s terms, if any council member is absent from a meeting going forward, the council can take no legal action, delaying decisions on permits submitted to the agency.

Gov. Dan McKee’s office couldn’t be reached for comment on whether a replacement appointee for Gomez was forthcoming. CRMC board members over the years have included a dental hygienist, a labor official, a renewable energy executive, a retired Navy undersea technician, and the CEO of a chain of physical therapy offices. McKee in the past two years has chosen more qualified appointees, including a land-use attorney and coastal policy professor and former DEM staff attorney.

Having enough members is a perennial problem for the agency. Since 2020 the council has rarely had more than eight members serving at one time, leading to final agency decisions being delayed for often months at a time because of canceled meetings due to quorum issues.

The last time CRMC had this few members on its council, it struggled to meet basic quorum requirements as outlined in state law. In spring 2022, the agency had to cancel three council meetings in a row due to absent members. For three and a half months — from April 12 to June 30 — the council didn’t meet at all, a period when the council should be meeting twice a month.

For critics of the council, its quorum issues are a structural flaw within the agency that needs to be addressed. Environmental groups such as Save The Bay, the New England chapter of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, and others have long advocated for state officials to ditch the council and replace the agency’s authority with its executive director, like most other state departments.

Much of the agency’s controversies, advocates argue, would be resolved if the politically appointed council was abolished. And critics have a laundry list of controversial decisions made by the council in the past 10 years alone.

In 2021 the council approved a backroom deal to expand Champlin’s Marina on Block Island’s Great Salt Pond. The deal deliberately excluded the intervenors in the case, including the town of New Shoreham and the Conservation Law Foundation that had long opposed the marina’s expansion.

The council’s deal to expand the marina ultimately ended in failure. A Rhode Island Superior Court judge denied the plan in June 2021, a decision that was later affirmed by the state’s Supreme Court.

Since the dust settled over the Champlin decision, a flurry of reform bills have been considered in the General Assembly. A study commission created and chaired by then-Rep. Deb Ruggiero, D-Jamestown, presented lawmakers with a list of recommendations on reforming the agency.

Few of those recommendations have been enacted. Other legislation proposed at overhauling the agency has ranged from term limits for council members, to transforming the agency into a Department of Coastal Resources, with the executive council nerfed into a mere advisory body.