PROVIDENCE — Rhode Island’s controversial coastal regulatory council will live to fight another day, much to the consternation of the state’s reform advocates.

Spokespersons for House Speaker Joe Shekarchi, D-Warwick, and Senate President Valerie Lawson, D-East Providence, told ecoRI News on Monday night that both lawmakers were supporting legislation that would shrink the size of the Coastal Resources Management Council’s executive body from 10 politically appointed members to seven.

H6126 and S0998, introduced, respectively, by Rep. Alex Finkelman, D-Jamestown, and Sen. V. Susan Sosnowski, D-South Kingstown, was one of a number of competing bills this year aimed at fixing the state’s embattled coastal agency, which has come under scrutiny in recent years for long delays and, at times, erratic decision-making.

The two bills are scheduled to be voted out of their respective committees Wednesday night, and with chamber leadership backing the proposals, its final passage is almost certain.

In an email to ecoRI News, Finkeleman heralded the passage of his bill, saying it would mark a major step forward in restoring the public’s trust in CRMC.

“Once fully implemented, CRMC will operate in a smaller, more specialized council — including engineers, coastal biologists, and environmental advocates — supported by strong public oversight and a transparent permitting process,” Finkelman wrote. “There is more work to do but this reform lays the foundation for a CRMC that is accountable and prepared for the environmental challenges ahead.”

The key change in Finkelman’s bill, separate from the other CRMC reform bills, is it reduces the executive council by three members, and accordingly, ratchets down the number of members required to be present to reach quorum — an issue the council has struggled with for years.

Last year the council canceled nearly 30% of its meetings due to quorum issues, more simply, due to members being unable to show up to regular meetings. It’s far from the first time quorum has been an issue. In 2022, CRMC’s executive body didn’t meet for a three-month period, delaying a number of important final permitting decisions. The reason cited was quorum issues. A sitting governor hasn’t filled every position on CRMC’s executive body since 2019.

CRMC’s current makeup fills out at seven members, including the Department of Environment Management designee, allowing only for two members to absent for the council to take action on anything on its agenda.

“We find ourselves at the end of yet another legislative session where council membership is barely above the statutory quorum with no new appointees in sight, which has crippled our coastal program for years,” Mike Woods, chair of the New England chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers (BHA) said Tuesday.

Finkelman’s bill in the House has an amended version posted for Wednesday. The original proposal, still intact as of this writing in the Senate version, changed the seat designated for the DEM director or its designee for an appointment chosen by the attorney general.

Gov. Dan McKee strongly opposed the change, arguing it took the governor’s constitutional right to appointments away from the office. The amended version slated for a vote Wednesday reverts it back to a DEM designee.

Lawmakers are expected to finalize the state budget and conclude this year’s legislative session as soon as the end of this week. The last-minute addition of a weaker CRMC reform bill took advocates off guard. As late as last week’s budget briefing to the press, Shekarchi publicly stated all the CRMC bills were “very much alive.”

“We’re surprised and disappointed at the apparent path forward that appears to have been chosen,” Woods said. “BHA has spent years, alongside a considerable number of organizations, individuals and recently, former council members, working to educate lawmakers on our preferred path forward which is and remains eliminating the politically appointed council.”

Backcountry Hunters and Anglers and other environmental groups such as Save The Bay, as well as Attorney General Peter Neronha, put their support behind S0775/H5706, which would have eliminated the council and turned its powers over to the agency’s executive director. It’s not an uncommon structure for a state department, it’s how DEM operates, with a director at the top making final decisions.

The legislation, which has been introduced in its current form for the past two legislative sessions, received a bevy of support from the public, waterfront homeowners, former CRMC board members, and environmental groups and little to no public opponents. Meanwhile, Finkelman and Sosonowski’s legislation received little support.

“It is unclear what opposing interests had been negotiated against to arrive at this point, because they have not participated in the legislature’s public process,” Woods said.

For reform supporters, it’s the council that represents the rot at the core of the state’s coastal program. The council, whose required expertise for the job has always been loose at best, has included among its membership in the past labor officials, a dental hygienist, and a liquor store owner. Its most recent appointee, Dr. Mark Reuter, is a foot doctor with a practice in East Providence and no prior education or credentials in coastal policy.

The council itself has made a raft of controversial decisions over the past five years, with little repercussions. Council members authorized a secret backroom deal to expand Champlin’s Marina on Block Island, voted to circumvent the authority of the General Assembly to approve submerged land leases, and neglected to follow its own internal procedures for contested cases such as the Jamestown Boat Yard decision. Many of these decisions have ended up in court, where they were overturned and remanded back to CRMC to correct, a waste of taxpayer time and money.

The legislation introduced by Finkelman and Sosnowski to reduce the council size meanwhile does implement some qualifications on appointees. According to the current bills’ language, there must be one engineer, one coastal biologist, and one representative from an environmental organization.

The bill also includes language that past service on CRMC’s executive body doesn’t exclude people from serving as council members under the new structure.

While H6126 and S0998 are scheduled to go into effect as soon as next year, even if the legislation passes them, the state must get authorization from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration before any structural changes to CRMC can be made.

Story update, June 23: Late Friday night, both chambers of the General Assembly approved both bills to shrink the Coastal Resources Management Council. The House bill showed to be one of the few, final divisive votes of the session; H6126 garnered 19 no votes in the House and 10 no votes in the Senate, while S0998 had 17 no votes in the House with another eight representatives not voting at all. In the Senate, S0998 only picked up 10 no votes, with two senators declining to vote.

Gov. Dan McKee will now have eight months, until March 1 2026, to appoint new council members that meet the qualifications laid out in the new law.