PROVIDENCE — It looks like state coastal regulators and the Quidnessett Country Club are still stuck at square one when it comes to the club’s illegally built seawall.

This week marks three months since members of the Coastal Resources Management Council gave the country club 30 days to submit an acceptable plan to take down the seawall the club illegally constructed in 2023.

The club never submitted an acceptable restoration plan to state regulators and missed its first 30-day deadline in July. Next month, in early October, the larger 120-day stay against enforcement — the original date of completion by which club officials were supposed to have the wall removed — will run out.

As council members convene for their first September meeting, scheduled for Sept. 9, it’s unclear if the club will meet the second deadline either.

“As of today, the country club has not yet submitted an acceptable restoration plan,” Laura Dwyer, a spokesperson for CRMC, said Sept. 4.

Attorney Robin Main, who has been representing Quidnessett Country Club before the CRMC, didn’t return a request for comment.

It’s been a long, strange saga for the club’s seawall. CRMC regulations prohibit fortified structures like seawalls from being constructed in Type 1 waters, which is what much of the coastline around Quidnessett Country Club’s North Kingstown grounds are classified as.

Sometime in early 2023, the club installed the seawall, a permanent pile of rocks designed to prevent erosion around the club’s golf course. The wall went unnoticed until someone tipped off CRMC the club had built a wall without the agency’s permission or permits. Quidnessett also failed to get permits from the Army Corps of Engineers, who issued their own violation notice to the club last year.

But enforcement action against the club has been delayed repeatedly. The club last year petitioned CRMC to change the water type in front of the golf course, from one that prohibited structures to one that would allow it. The petition process ate up more than six months of the agency’s time last year, with regulators ultimately voting late last year to deny the petition.

For environmental advocates and longtime critics of CMC’s executive body, the Quidnessett Country Club saga has given them plenty of ammo.

“The council needs to stop giving violators enough room to wriggle their way out of it,” said Chris Dodge, baykeeper for Save The Bay. “There should have been no rule change petition; it’s mind-boggling to break the law and then petition the council to change the law you broke.”

For Save The Bay, acting against a seawall is natural. CRMC discourages property owners from building seawalls anymore, to the point of putting in prohibitions against it in many parts of Narragansett Bay.

Seawalls deflect wave action, redirecting it instead at the land that surrounds the seawall. While in the short term it can help land withstand coastal erosion forces, in the long term it will just erode the nearby land that isn’t protected by a seawall, as well as eroding the land in front of it.

Dodge said it would be too soon to tell what kind of impact the seawall would have on the environment. Those kinds of forces and time scales are geologic, but Dodge did express concern the sea would start to cut in and erode land at the southern portion of the wall, close to Tibbets Creek.

“Any big storm could push waves into that pretty vulnerable marshland,” he said.

Wetlands can absorb pollution and carbon, retain floodwaters, and provide key habitats for many marine species. A future storm wiping out the coastal wetlands by Tibbets Creek would also likely worsen coastal erosion in the area.

But the real issue at play with the Quidnessett Country Club seawall, said Dodge, is it shows how ineffective CRMC is at enforcing its own regulations. The agency isn’t given enough staff or funding to pursue bigger violators like the country club. To date, the agency only has two enforcement officers to ensure compliance with agency permits, regulations, and state laws covering more than 400 miles of the Ocean State coastline.

“The agency needs to be able to follow through with real teeth on these enforcement issues,” Dodge said.