Far-Right law group kicks sand in our faces
By Rob Smith / ecoRI News staff
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.”
