Deep Waters

The Coastal Resources Management Council affects everyone who works or plays on the water, but this powerful government agency can’t get its act together.

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The lines of the shoreline here are distinctly unnatural. The forty-five acres jut at right angles into the Providence River beneath the bluff of East Providence, just south of Providence’s downtown skyline.

Called the South Quay, it was originally going to be a bustling port terminal run by the Providence & Worcester Railroad. More than thirty years ago, the company dumped gravel and grime into the river and then failed to build the complex. The fallow land is both an urban desert and a wildlife preserve that draws musk-rats, sandpipers, herons, egrets and migratory birds.

Today we have rules and regulators who would probably prevent a private company from filling in and taking control of public waterways.

Or do we?

The state agency responsible for protecting Rhode Island’s 420 miles of shoreline is the little-known Coastal Resources Management Council (CRMC). That’s the same regulator that in 1974 gave the P&W permission to create the South Quay.

It is impossible to predict, based on the track record of the eleven-member council, what the CRMC would do given another chance to vote on this same project.

The CRMC’s thirty-six-year history is a tangle of accomplishments and failures. The agency has become the envy of many other coastal states for its sweeping powers to manage its coastline, and its staff has won national praise. Yet the council that makes the key permitting decisions has rendered some highly questionable rulings and has been mired in controversy.

There is no debate that the CRMC plays a critical role in protecting Rhode Island’s most valuable treasure: its coastline. With two out of three Rhode Islanders now living in shoreline communities, an estimated $1 billion is expected to be spent in the next decade on coastal development. Builders want to convert urban, aging warehouses and industrial eyesores into new townhouses and restaurants, and they are eyeing pristine barrier beaches for everything from upscale resorts to wind turbine farms. The competition will only increase as the expected rise in sea levels reduces the available land in future decades.

Rhode Island’s coast has often faced development pressure, and it was extremely strong from energy companies in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Businesses wanted to construct an oil refinery in Tiverton, natural and liquefied gas tanks on Prudence Island and Jamestown, and nuclear power plants in North Kingstown and later Charlestown. Local and state officials realized that they had common interests in deciding what should be built on Rhode Island’s shores.

The Natural Resources Group — an informal collection of peo- ple from the fields of business, environment, government and academia — proposed the CRMC in 1969. Two years later, their idea was embraced and adopted by the General Assembly.

Designed as a super zoning board with seventeen members appointed by the governor, legislature and local communities, the CRMC would determine what could be built on the coast. Its mission, according to state law, was “to preserve, protect, develop and where possible restore the coastal resources of the state.” That conflicting mission still in the law has posed problems for the agency.

From its beginning, the council’s role in issuing permits to allow construction along the Rhode Island coast has been its more important function. Virtually everyone who wants to do work on the shore — whether building million-dollar resorts and beach house decks or creating breakwaters and dredging channels — must seek the permission of the CRMC.

The South Quay project was one of the CRMC’s first important decisions. The agency had no staff and no plan to guide development. It held a series of public hearings and then ruled that filling in forty-five acres would “bring about desirable economic activity in an area which is presently in a state of deterioration and decay.”

The council in its early years often approved permits, when it could find them. A 1979 study reported that the CRMC had only denied 2 percent of the permit requests it received while approving 80 percent. The other 18 percent were never acted on because apparently the files were lost.

In 1986 the state finally came up with money to staff the CRMC, and it hired Grover Fugate, who is still the executive director. He found a two-year backlog in the cases that he could find. “The whole situation was in a shambles,” he says. “It took us three years to straighten the whole mess.”

Today the CRMC has a staff of thirty and an annual budget of $4.7 million. While the council remains controversial, much of the inner workings of the CRMC operate unseen and with few apparent problems. Indeed, some of its activities not only go well, they go very well.

The stench on Cedar Tree Point in Warwick on the morning of August 20, 2003, was overwhelming. Sprawled dead and rotting on the Greenwich Bay beach were menhaden, silversides, crabs, shrimp and eels. The dead sea life stretched in the sand as far as one could see. There were thousands of casualties.