CRMC continues decline as coastal watchdog
By Rob Smith / ecoRI News
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The Coastal Resources Management Council quietly announced
last month that longtime council member and Little Compton resident Donald
Gomez was resigning. Gomez, who prior to his professional retirement worked as
an electric engineer for the Navy in Newport, had been serving in some capacity
on CRMC’s executive panel since 2007.
“For me it’s a bad day if I don’t learn something,” Gomez
said at CRMC’s Dec. 10 meeting. “I learned a lot in my 17 years here.”
“Don has been a great Council member and friend, and we
thank him for his many years of service to the CRMC and State of Rhode Island,”
CRMC board chair Raymond Coia said in a statement. “Don always brought
analytical thinking and pragmatism to our proceedings. We wish him the best in
his retirement from the Council and know we’ll most likely see him in the
audience in the future.”
A spokesperson for CRMC didn’t specify an effective date for his resignation.
Gomez’s resignation represents problems for the coastal agency. Unlike other state departments, where final decision-making power rests with an appointed executive director, CRMC instead has an all-volunteer, politically appointed 10-member executive council filling the same function, voting on permits and overseeing agency staff.
CRMC’s executive director, Jeff
Willis, and other agency staff report to the council — chosen by the governor
and approved by the Senate — whose members aren’t required to have expertise in
coastal issues. It makes Rhode Island something of an outlier; California is
the only other state that runs its coastal management program with a
politically appointed council.
It’s a job that’s going to become harder in the next few
months. Gomez’s resignation brings the total number of council members down to
just six, the bare minimum required for the council to meet quorum. In layman’s
terms, if any council member is absent from a meeting going forward, the
council can take no legal action, delaying decisions on permits submitted to
the agency.
Gov. Dan McKee’s office couldn’t be reached for comment on
whether a replacement appointee for Gomez was forthcoming. CRMC board members
over the years have included a dental hygienist, a labor official, a renewable
energy executive, a retired Navy undersea technician, and the CEO of a chain of
physical therapy offices. McKee in the past two years has chosen more qualified
appointees, including a land-use attorney and coastal policy professor and
former DEM staff attorney.
Having enough members is a perennial problem for the agency.
Since 2020 the council has rarely had more than eight members serving at one
time, leading to final agency decisions being delayed for often months at a
time because of canceled meetings due to quorum issues.
The last time CRMC had this few members on its council,
it struggled to
meet basic quorum requirements as outlined in state law. In spring 2022, the
agency had to cancel three council meetings in a row due to absent members. For
three and a half months — from April 12 to June 30 — the council didn’t meet at
all, a period when the council should be meeting twice a month.
For critics of the council, its quorum issues are a
structural flaw within the agency that needs to be addressed. Environmental
groups such as Save The Bay, the New England chapter of Backcountry Hunters
& Anglers, and others have long advocated for state officials to ditch the
council and replace the agency’s authority with its executive director, like
most other state departments.
Much of the agency’s controversies, advocates argue, would
be resolved if the politically appointed council was abolished. And critics
have a laundry list of controversial decisions made by the council in the past
10 years alone.
In 2021 the council approved a backroom deal to expand
Champlin’s Marina on Block Island’s Great Salt Pond. The deal deliberately
excluded the intervenors in the case, including the town of New Shoreham and
the Conservation Law Foundation that had long opposed the marina’s expansion.
The council’s deal to expand the marina ultimately ended in
failure. A Rhode Island Superior Court judge denied the plan in June 2021, a
decision that was later affirmed by the
state’s Supreme Court.
Since the dust settled over the Champlin decision, a flurry
of reform bills have
been considered in the General Assembly. A study commission created and chaired
by then-Rep. Deb Ruggiero, D-Jamestown, presented lawmakers with a list of
recommendations on reforming the agency.
Few of those recommendations have been enacted. Other
legislation proposed at overhauling the agency has ranged from term limits for
council members, to transforming the agency into a Department of Coastal
Resources, with the executive council nerfed into a mere advisory body.
