The Rhode Island coastal property permit lawsuit is a case brought by South Kingstown owner David Welch, through his company Stilts, LLC, against the state’s Coastal Resources Management Council (CRMC) over permit conditions that would have required him to open a strip of his private beachfront to the public and submit to unlimited government inspections as the price of repairing storm damage. In October 2025, a Washington County Superior Court judge granted a preliminary injunction blocking those conditions, and in December 2025 issued a final order confirming the injunction. The state has appealed to the Rhode Island Supreme Court.
The Property and the Permit
Welch and his family own four parcels along Charlestown Beach Road in South Kingstown, including a small home that has sat on stilts for roughly 30 years. A January 2023 storm damaged a stairway, displaced support boulders, and tore up dunes and fencing.
The CRMC granted an initial permit, called an “assent” in Rhode Island, in February 2023. It then issued a cease-and-desist order after complaints that dune restoration, snow fencing, and boulder work went beyond what was authorized. In June 2024, the two sides settled: the CRMC withdrew the order and waived fines, and Welch agreed to apply for a new assent covering the disputed work. That new assent, issued in December 2024, carried the conditions that became the heart of the lawsuit.
The Two Conditions Being Challenged
The first condition required that “any area up to ten feet landward of the recent recognizable high tide line shall remain in the public trust” after the work was finished. In practice, Welch would have had to record a public beach easement across his land, and the complaint alleged the requirement applied to all of the property, including parcels where no repair work was being done at all.
The second condition gave the CRMC and its agents the right “to inspect said project at all times including, but not limited to, the construction, completion, and all times thereafter.” Welch’s lawyers read that as authorizing warrantless entry onto private property, with no end date and no judicial oversight.
The Constitutional Claims
Stilts filed suit in Washington County Superior Court on June 27, 2025, raising Fourth and Fifth Amendment claims.
The Fifth Amendment claim argues that forcing an owner to surrender a strip of private land to public use, as a condition of getting a routine repair permit, is a taking without just compensation. The Fourth Amendment claim targets the open-ended inspection provision as an unreasonable seizure of private property.
The complaint also invokes the unconstitutional conditions doctrine, which bars the government from coercing people into giving up constitutional rights in exchange for a permit or benefit the government controls. Without the assent, Welch said he could not finish the repairs without risking substantial CRMC fines.
The legal framework underlying the case is the Nollan/Dolan doctrine, drawn from two U.S. Supreme Court decisions from 1987 and 1994. Under that doctrine, when a permit is conditioned on the owner giving up a property right, the condition must have an “essential nexus” to the impact of the proposed project and must be roughly proportional to it. Welch’s position is that repairing a stairway and dunes does not justify a permanent public easement or open-ended inspections. He is represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation, with senior attorney J. David Breemer as counsel.
What the Court Decided
Stilts moved for a preliminary injunction on July 21, 2025. Oral arguments were held September 26, and on October 22, 2025, the Superior Court granted the injunction, blocking enforcement of both the public access mandate and the unlimited inspection provision.
The court held that the CRMC cannot impose generic, one-size-fits-all conditions on coastal property owners. Any conditions must come from an individualized assessment and be “roughly proportional to the impact of the proposed project.” Judge Sarah Taft-Carter characterized the CRMC’s conduct as “offensive to the judicial process” and described it as an apparent attempt to “bypass” an earlier court decision striking down a related state law. She issued a final order confirming the injunction on December 15, 2025.
The state has appealed that ruling to the Rhode Island Supreme Court. The injunction lets Welch hold the permit without complying with the contested conditions, but the case has not been resolved on the merits.
The Connection to the 2023 Shoreline Access Law
The 10-foot public access condition in Welch’s permit tracks a 2023 state law that tried to redraw the boundary between public beach and private land along the entire Rhode Island coast. That parallel is why the two cases are moving through the courts together.
For decades, the boundary was set at the “mean high tide line,” a scientifically calculated average based on 18.6 years of tidal data, under the Rhode Island Supreme Court’s 1982 decision in State v. Ibbison. The line was often submerged and hard to identify on the sand, which fueled repeated trespass disputes. After Charlestown resident Scott Keeley was arrested in 2019 for gathering seaweed on a beach (the charges were dropped and he received a $25,000 settlement from the town), State Representative Terri Cortvriend chaired a legislative study commission that produced House Bill 5174.
Governor Dan McKee signed the bill on June 26, 2023. It replaced the mean high tide line with a visible marker: the public access boundary was set at 10 feet landward of the “recognizable high tide line,” identified by seaweed, shells, or debris left as the water recedes. Supporters called it a clarification of rights already in the Rhode Island Constitution, which since 1843 has protected the public’s right to “enjoy and freely exercise all the rights of fishery, and the privileges of the shore.” Critics said the new line pushed 50 to 70 feet further inland than the old one, effectively seizing private beachfront without compensation.
On July 12, 2024, Judge Taft-Carter ruled in two consolidated Superior Court cases (one brought by Stilts, the other by Westerly owners David and Linda Roth) that the 2023 law was an unconstitutional taking. She wrote that the legislature had “appropriated a public right of access onto private property” and “confiscated the Plaintiff’s property,” and she called the 10-foot boundary “whimsical and inconsistent” compared to the standard it replaced. She also held the law violated separation of powers by intruding on the state Supreme Court’s authority to interpret the state constitution.
The state appealed. As of early 2026, that appeal is pending before the Rhode Island Supreme Court, with briefing scheduled for spring 2026. The Surfrider Foundation and Backcountry Hunters & Anglers filed an amicus brief in March 2026 urging the court to uphold the law. The state’s appeal of the December 2025 Stilts injunction will be considered alongside the shoreline law appeal.
What It Means for Other Coastal Owners
If the injunction survives on appeal, the CRMC will need to make individualized findings tying any permit condition to the specific impact of a proposed project, rather than attaching standard public access or inspection language across the board. The agency continues to issue coastal permits statewide in the meantime.
A separate Barrington case exposed a related risk for owners: old, unrecorded assents. Holly and Lance Sheffield bought a $4.5-million Nayatt Road home in 2021 after a title search turned up no restrictions. When they installed a fence and “No Trespassing” signs along a seawall, the CRMC issued cease-and-desist orders citing a 1982 permit, never recorded in the town’s land records, that it said required public access along the seawall. Council member Catherine Robinson Hall told the CRMC in December 2023 that “we have hundreds of thousands of assents that were never recorded.” The agency did not require recording until 1988, and the requirement was not retroactive.
On August 9, 2024, Associate Justice Kristen Rodgers held the 1982 permit unenforceable against the Sheffields, finding they were bona fide purchasers without actual or constructive notice. She warned that the CRMC’s position “would mandate that every unrecorded interest in property will ultimately become enforceable against a bona fide purchaser for value whenever that unrecorded interest surfaces.” An unknown number of other coastal owners could face similar disputes over decades-old permits they never knew existed.
A boundary worth noting: none of these rulings resolves where the public trust line actually lies in Rhode Island. The Ibbison mean high tide standard remains the last word from the state Supreme Court, and the pending appeals will decide whether the 2023 law’s visible 10-foot boundary, and permit conditions built on it, can stand.