Initial Court Ruling Tosses Sand on R.I.’s Year-Old Beach Access Law
July 15, 2024
PROVIDENCE — It’s looking like the Ocean State’s new shoreline access law might meet the same fate as a beachside sandcastle this summer.
On Friday, Rhode Island Superior Court Judge Sarah Taft-Carter issued a preliminary decision, siding with private property owners who seek to overturn the state’s new shoreline access legislation passed last year by the General Assembly and signed into law by Gov. Dan McKee.
The plaintiff in the case, Stilts LLC of Charlestown, a private company that owns the part-time beachfront home of David Welch, argued successfully before the judge that the new law amounted to an unconstitutional takings of private property. It was Stilts LLC’s second lawsuit challenging the law.
In her initial decision, Taft-Carter wrote that by changing the boundary of public access, lawmakers permanently extended a right of access and prohibited private property owners’ right to exclude the public from their property.
“The Act reduced the Plaintiff’s ‘bundle of rights’ inherent in the ownership of property,” she wrote. “By expanding the preexisting boundary line to ten feet landward of the recognizable high tide line and confiscating the Plaintiff’s property resulting in an unconstitutional taking.”
Not mentioned in the decision was what kind of compensation Stilts LLC and other waterfront property owners can expect. A key argument in the plaintiff’s lawsuit was that without just compensation, the new law was an unconstitutional taking of private property by the government.
The judge’s final decision is expected later this summer.
It was Stilts LLC’s second attempt at overturning the shoreline access law. Last summer, the first lawsuit was brought by the Rhode Island Association of Coastal Taxpayers (RIACT), an anti-shoreline access group led by Welch, who owns four residential lots along Charlestown Beach in South Kingstown. That lawsuit, filed in Rhode Island District Court, was dismissed last September by Judge William Smith for lack of standing.
Last year’s passage of the shoreline access law was hailed as a great victory by advocates, and a signal that the Rhode Island shore would no longer be privatized. Tensions over shoreline access had been building up since the COVID-19 pandemic, as private property owners erected signs, fences, barriers, and hired security guards to keep members of the public off what they viewed as private beaches.
The Rhode Island Constitution outlines shoreline access protections, but those rights were dramatically winnowed in the 1980s, when the state Supreme Court in State v. Ibbison affixed the public boundary to the mean high tide line.
Advocates argued for years, backed up with coastal science, that the mean high tide line was unworkable; impossible to discern by a casual beachgoer without sophisticated equipment, and when investigated by scientists, often underwater, away from the shoreline.
RIACT filed its original lawsuit less than a month after McKee signed the shoreline access law in June 2023. The law expanded the definition of public access and overrode the decades-old State v. Ibbison decision.
The Pacific Legal Foundation, a national legal nonprofit, represented Stilts LLC pro bono in the case.
“Our clients are gratified that the court agreed with what they have said from the start — the beach access law violates their rights,” senior attorney J. David Breemer wrote in a statement. “As the court recognized, the beach access law infringed on our client’s property rights by moving the existing public beach boundary line ten feet landward, effectively confiscating our client’s property.”
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha’s office defended the new law for the state.
“We respectfully disagree with the Superior Court’s decision to deny the State’s motion for summary judgment in two cases regarding recent shoreline access legislation,” AG spokesperson Brian Hodge wrote in an email to ecoRI News. “The Attorney General will continue to rigorously defend Rhode Islanders’ access to the shoreline and the litigation team is currently evaluating all options for moving forward. As this is pending litigation, the Office offers no further comment.”
A win for all Rhode Island coastline property owners! Time to get our property back that was unconstitutionally taken away from us. Not to mention all the yearly property taxes that we pay which are supporting many public school and town workings.
Another kick in the teeth for public access. But don’t worry it appears we may have the worst hurricane season in 100 years. Barrier beaches should not be built on but they have been hence the increased erosion. The public has a right to access the beach . The beach itself has eroded so much in the past 50 years that it has been reduced in some spot to a 15 foot stretch of sand at high tide.
The judge just sided with the rich screwing all of us again. Sometimes the law is good and the judge is blinded by class allegiance. Until we stop playing this game of priviledging the rich, we shall never rid the state of inequality, nor create an economy that will work in the time of the climate disaster.
its really exactly the opposite, the rich shoreline owners have “taken” constitutional rights away from ordinary RIers, rendering our state constitutional rights to be almost worthless.
And I’m shocked. shocked, that the judiciary is on the side of the powerful.
No use appealing, the Supreme Court majority is bought by the barons.
One thing we can do is, since by nullifying our constitutional rights and denying public access, presumably their property is worth more so their property taxes should skyrocket
When a shoreline property owner is allowed (by the CRMC) to put in structural shoreline protection that accelerates erosion, and results in the subsequent loss of lateral access by the public, why aren’t these owners held liable? Mr. Feely, the law that was passed benefitted both the public and private landowners. If the judges ruling for the private property owners holds, I’ll be looking forward to a “big rinse” in the future, where natural processes restore public access.
What most shoreline property owners were never informed about when they purchased their coastal property in Rhode Island is that all shoreline property, from the nearest public road to the shore, is subject to a right of access to the shore and a right of access along the shore. This constitutional right of all RI residents is imbedded in our RI Constitution, Aritical I, Section 17. It is not a complicated provisional right; it is plain and simple. Shorefront property owners do not own the shore and are subject to these rights of way. A RI statute cannot simply take shore front property from its owner as a substitute for pre-established rights of access. The property owner cannot extinguish the public’s right of access in his desire for complete private ownership. If you want to own shorefront property not subject to constitutional rights of access, buy shorefront property in Massachusetts, Connecticut, or New York, not in Rhode Island.
It’s clearly not plain and simple…the Supreme Court clearly stated otherwise. I don’t disagree with public access to shoreline hence the 1982 RI article. I do however, have an issue when the state decides to take private land (10 feet above the high tide mark) with no payment to the property owners. We also pay yearly property taxes for this land. You are also incorrect on constitutional rights of access in Massachusetts. Public access is below the mean high tide line, not 10 feet above. This land was never pre-established rights of access; again refer to the 1982 Supreme Court statute.
First and foremost, unless your deeded property lines extend to the mean high water line, you have no claim to that shore anyhow. You are an abutter. Show me a deed that defines boundaries to or below the mean high water line. Then, if you find one, show me the permanent markers designating the lot corners. One commenter hit it, this is the courts backing the rich. You may own waterfront property but someplace, along some line, that property ends. You cannot impose or infringe upon property you don’t own and you can’t buy shoreline.
I am surprised that the coastal municipalities are not more keyed in on the rights of their citizens that own oceanfront property. As the judge said, the shoreline access law is unquestionably the taking of private property rights and as a result unquestionably reduces the value of said oceanfront property. Therefore it will unquestionably lead to the reduction in property taxes that are linked to that value.
The state and individual communities have the power of eminent domain to take property for public benefit. Nothing is stopping Charlestown or Westerly from using it to provide greater access to the shore. Instead of actually compensating those owners, they instead tried to take it by legislative fiat.
Plain and simple.
1. The state does not have the right to take the private property of shorefront property owners accept through the legal process of eminent domain.
2. Shorefront property owners do not have the right to extinguish the right of easement to the shore and the right of easement along the shore that is placed upon all Rhode Island shorefront property.
3. The easement (right of access) was historically recognized and imbedded in the Rhode Island Constitution as a right for all RI residents long before the present shorefront property owners obtained their ownership.
Mr. Feely,
The property taxes that you refer to are collected by the towns where respective coastal properties are located. The collected taxes do not benefit public trust use in any way. The shoreline property owners seeking exclusivity all the way to tidally submerged land have purchased property in the wrong state (even before the recent rulings and laws were implemented). There is no “taking”. Only wealthy pursuit of exclusivity at the expense of the public trust.