PROVIDENCE — It looks like state lawmakers aren’t quite ready to get into the business of writing the state’s coastal regulations.

Thanks to an 11^th-hour delay Thursday night, confirmed by a House leadership spokesperson just minutes before the legislation was scheduled for a vote, the answer looks like not yet.

The House Committee on State Government and Elections was originally scheduled to vote H8216 out of committee, typically a clear sign a bill has the backing of legislative leaders and enough votes to pass onto the chamber floor.

The bill prompts the Coastal Resources Management Council to review its water type designations and climate change adaptation regulations.

But lawmakers said they were delaying the vote pending some additional amendments to the legislation; traditionally a sign in the General Assembly that the legislation might not have enough votes to pass.

A spokesperson for House Speaker Joe Shekarchi, D-Warwick, told ecoRI News just minutes before the legislation’s House vote that the bill was “being delayed while potential amendments are being worked on.”

“The amendments are still being worked on,” said Larry Berman, director of communications for the speaker’s office, when ecoRI News asked for details on potential amendments.

The legislation includes a new, seven-member, politically appointed advisory committee to review the water designations. It would include a representative from the Rhode Island Commerce Corporation, a representative from the building trades, two municipal planners from coastal communities (to be appointed by the head of each General Assembly chamber), an environmental organization, a Department of Environmental Management designee, and a CRMC chairperson designee.

Environmental groups oppose the legislation, seeing no need to revise the water types, especially when the question of agency reform and CRMC dysfunction remain unresolved.

Jed Thorp, director of advocacy for Save The Bay, told ecoRI News that the bill was unnecessary.

“This is going to create a ton of work for an already understaffed and under-resourced agency, at a time when you know they have bigger issues to be focused on right now,” Thorp said in a rercent phone interview. “I would say this is legislative overreach.”

The legislation was introduced by Rep. Pat Serpa, D-West Warwick, who represents inland municipalities and who announced earlier this year she was retiring at the end of the legislative session. Serpa, in an unusual move for a legislator, wasn’t present to answer questions on her bill from the House committee during its hearing in March and wasn’t present at its second vote on Thursday.

CRMC’s politically appointed executive body isn’t a stranger to legislative overreach. Up until the passage of the separation of powers constitutional amendment in 2004, lawmakers regularly served as council members making decisions on behalf of the agency. But even after the amendment, it would still take years, and a Supreme Court case, before the executive body was on the same page as the state Constitution.

John Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island, said the proposed law doesn’t create any issues under separation of powers.

“The CRMC is created by the Legislature, like all similar boards, and the Legislature can direct by statute what work it should perform,” Marion said. “If the Legislature were giving itself the power to veto a decision made by the CRMC that would violate the separation of powers.

“Likewise, if the Legislature were making appointments to the CRMC, or if legislators were serving on the CRMC — both of which happened prior to the separation of powers amendments passed in 2004 — that would violate the separation of powers.”

In most years, water type designations are an obscure and niche facet of state policy. The designations, drawn up and approved by CRMC’s coastal policy experts, divide the 400-plus miles of Rhode Island’s coastline into one of five different water types.

These types are similar to zoning ordinances, as they dictate what CRMC says a property owner or developer can build along a specific part of Narragansett Bay or the south shore facing the Atlantic Ocean.

They have been a hot topic in recent years, thanks to the controversy surrounding the Quidnessett Country Club in North Kingstown. The club, whose waterfront acreage is designated as Type 1 conservation waters, installed an illegal seawall with no CRMC permits three years ago.

Hardened structures, such as seawalls, are outright forbidden in Type 1 waters. The designation usually includes conservation areas, near wildlife refuges or other fragile habitats. But they also are typically areas of the coastline exposed to severe wave action, flooding, and erosion. Hardened structures like seawalls, while designed to protect property from coastal erosion, can in the long run make the problem worse.

What do CRMC staff think? Executive director Jeff Willis, during the bill’s hearing in March, said neither he nor the agency was taking an official stance on the legislation, but said that it was “premature.”

“We have processes to do that already,” Willis told committee members. “We have a great working relationship with municipalities that ask us to take another look at the water types along their shoreline and the activities associated with those water types, but we have a process to do that.”

Willis also said the agency already had tools to handle regulation updates and climate change adaptation through STORMTOOLs, which maps storm inundation around the state, and permit requirements in the Shoreline Change Special Area Management Plan, more commonly known as the Beach SAMP.

Willis’ characterization puts him on the opposite side of the issue from his predecessor, Grover Fugate, the only other executive director CRMC has had. Fugate, a 34-year veteran of the agency who retired in 2020, didn’t testify in person when the bill came up for its March hearing, but he did submit written testimony to committee members saying he was supporting the bill to reexamine water types.

In his letter to lawmakers, Fugate wrote that “it is now time to go back and look at the water types and make sure they are matching up to our current understanding of how our coastal areas have progressed and verify that the water types are still meeting the needs of the state.”

It’s an opinion with few bedfellows; the only other testimony supporting the legislation came from David Caldwell, vice president of Caldwell and Johnson, a home construction firm, and managing director of Caldwell Realty LLC.

Caldwell and Fugate are both listed on the website for Caldwell Coastal Solutions, which describes itself to homeowners as their “expert residential coastal building resource.”

Caldwell, representing the Rhode Island Builders Association, said he was supporting the bill because the data CRMC relied on was from the early 1980s.

“We’re building things right now that we know, even with the one extra foot, is from a standard from 1984,” Caldwell noted. “I can tell you in 1984 Ocean Mist used to have a very big beach in front of it that’s now gone. The world’s changing, the climate is changing, things are changing.”

H8216 was, again, held for further study.