Projo — Opinion: My Turn: Sean Lyness: Preserve public access to RI shore

Jun 23, 2018

By Sean Lyness Mooney — Rhode Island is a place of many quirks — a landmass demonstrably larger at low tide, a curious political history, and a warped sense of distance (“You work in Providence and live in Coventry? Do you stay at a hotel during the week?”).

Among these idiosyncrasies is perhaps its oldest: a codified public trust doctrine.

This ancient doctrine places an affirmative duty on the government to care for and provide access to important natural resources for the benefit of the public. Just a handful of states have their commitment to preservation of the state’s natural resources directly in their constitution. Rhode Island not only has such a constitutional provision, but it dates all the way back to the colony’s 1663 Charter. The state public trust doctrine was then re-codified in the 1843 state constitution and renewed and modified in the various constitutional amendments since.

This constitutional guarantee of the “privileges of the shore” was changed significantly in 1986 as a result of that year’s Constitutional Convention. Responding to a 1982 Rhode Island Supreme Court decision that limited public access to the mean high tide line (which effectively placed public access underwater), delegates to the 1986 Constitutional Convention added language to the state constitution designed to provide a public right “passage along the shore.”

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