In the first of several meeting focusing on public access to the shoreline, the Warwick Harbor Management Commission met with the public Monday to review the city’s Harbor Management Plan..

A draft of the plan, to receive its first update in 20 years next summer, was given to attendees as well as a list of rights-of-way (ROWs) to the shoreline.

The City of Warwick has 180 ROWs to its Narragansett Bay shoreline, with 141 maintained by the city and 39 by the Coastal Resources Management Council (CRMC).

Among proposals by Principal Planner Sean Henry are policies to identify public ROWs on a continuing basis, as well as making sure that there are usable ROWs in each area of the city.

Upkeep of the city’s ROWs proved to be a contentious topic, with multiple residents saying the city has not been doing a good enough job of maintaining public ROWs. Many attributed that to lack of personnel, with resident Bob Latour saying that the city had half of the staff to deal with this purpose than they did three years ago.

“They don’t even have the staff to take care of what they have now,” he said. “The city has to decide what they want to prioritize- people are already working Sundays to pick up trash, which should never be there in the first place.”

Harbor Management Commission chair Jody King concurred, saying that the right-of-way at the end of his street, Ottawa Avenue in Oakland Beach, was only usable when his neighbor, who has since passed, was “being the squeaky wheel.”

Resident George Shuster also raised the point of whether the city has too many ROWs for it to maintain, saying that the city’s maintenance seems to be outsourced to community members.

“The new draft Harbor Management plan will ask butters, community groups, et cetera to maintain ROWs, which is not much better- the city is saying its plan to maintain ROW as required is to ask others to do it, presumably for free,” Shuster said.

No parking signs on public ROWs were also brought up as an issue, with resident Richard Langseth saying that ones on rights of way like Sylvia Drive in Buttonwoods need to be addressed and removed by the city.

“Sylvia Drive is an extremely important right-of-way, and the no parking signs are still there,” Langseth said. “You can present a policy that if we have a CRMC right-of-way on a street that’s reasonably wide, that street should not have no parking signs on it.”

Councilman Ed Ladouceur said that the process of getting no parking signs requires a councilmember to request a traffic study, leading to a recommendation for or against placing a No Parking sign from the Warwick Police Department.

Anthony Palazzolo also brought up issues with shoreline access in his hometown of Westerly, saying that Warwick residents needed to make sure the city does not abandon any ROWs.

“These policies are going to be very important, because they can be understood by the general public and wielded by the general public before a council who may or may not actually support public access,” Palazzolo said.

Palazzolo said that it was also unlikely that the CRMC would take up a case about formalizing a new ROW if brought forward by a resident, but would initiate more cases if it was brought to them by a municipality.

Other residents also complained that there was a lack of transparency in the Harbor Management Commission’s operations. Official Harbor Management Commission meeting minutes have been posted consistently on the Rhode Island Secretary of State’s website, though they have not been on the city’s website since 2016.

According to Henry, notes and suggestions from the meeting may be incorporated into future drafts of the Harbor Management Plan, and there will be two more workshop-style meetings looking at drafts in the winter. Henry anticipates that a suggestion regarding adding language discouraging the city from getting rid of their ROWs and a suggestion about ADA access to ROWs will be added in the plan’s next draft.

The Harbor Management Commission’s next meeting, which will focus on water quality issues, will be held on Jan. 9 at a location to be determined.