Great Salt Pond battle goes on

Block Island, with the Great Salt Pond the body of water with many boats in the top middle.

— Photo by Timothy J. Quill

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

One look at an aerial photo of Block Island’s Champlin’s Marina, on ecologically fragile Great Salt Pond, shows  that it’s already too big. And now, through a highly dubious mediated settlement that’s an (illegal?) end run around an earlier denial of the project, the business could build 170 feet further into the pond (which serves as a harbor). Champlin’s campaign to take over more of the Great Salt Pond sometimes seems to have gone on for centuries but it’s only been since 2003!

While affluent folks from the region might love having more places to tie up on the island, adding more boats would inevitably increase pollution in the Great Salt Pond.

Retired Rhode Island Supreme Court Chief Justice FrankWilliams brokered this deal in secret negotiations involving the state Coastal Resources Management Council and Champlin’s. State Atty. Gen. Peter Neronha is rightly looking into this suspicious agreement.