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By Jim Hummel, The Hummel Report
PROVIDENCE A veteran lawmaker is renewing her call for a legislative commission to take a closer look at how the state’s Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council operates and whether the agency needs a reorganization.
“They’re making really important environmental decisions that are going to affect future generations beyond us,” said Rep. Deborah Ruggiero, a Democrat from Jamestown, who filed a bill late last week calling for a 15-member broad-based commission. Its mission would be to examine CRMC over the next year and bring back recommendations to the General Assembly.
Ruggiero filed the bill after two high-profile cases exposed by The Hummel Report, and published in the Providence Journal, over the past several months: one involving a controversial marina expansion on Block Island that was settled by CRMC out of the public view in December with no notice to opponents. The state Supreme Court - at the urging of Attorney Genera
Neronha slams CRMC over approval of Jamestown Boat Yard expansion
By Jim Hummel
PROVIDENCE For the second time in two months Attorney General Peter F. Neronha is questioning how the state’s Coastal Resources Management Council handled a request for a waterfront expansion, this time from a boatyard in Jamestown, saying the agency skipped required steps in the approval process.
In a strongly worded four-page letter Monday to the agency’s chairwoman, Jennifer Cervenka, Neronha said there were “inadequacies” in a draft decision, adding that the way CRMC made its decision “confused and frustrated the public’s trust in the structured and formal agency decision-making process designed to protect our environment.”