Desautel Browning Law

10/06/2026

Plain English: many approvals expire unless construction has 'substantially begun' by a date certain. What counts as 'substantial' is often litigated — and assuming you're safe is how people lose an approval they already paid for. If a permit is aging, confirm the deadline and what actually satisfies it.

🔗 desautelbrowning.com | (401) 477-0023

10/06/2026

Developers and property owners: what's the single biggest permitting bottleneck you hit this year? Completeness reviews, agency backlogs, abutter objections, something else? We read every reply — and it often becomes a future post.

🔗 desautelbrowning.com | (401) 477-0023

10/04/2026

Autumn rain, bare fall soils, and construction racing to beat winter make October and November a high-scrutiny stretch for stormwater and erosion control. It's when a routine site visit turns into a notice.

Three things that draw attention this time of year:

1. Erosion controls that were installed in spring and never maintained. Silt fence that's blown out or buried counts as no control at all.
2. Discharge that's visibly leaving the site. Sediment reaching a wetland, a catch basin, or a neighbor's property is the fastest way to a complaint.
3. A stormwater plan on paper that doesn't match the ground. Inspectors compare the two.

The fix is almost always cheaper than the enforcement. A walk of your site now — before the next storm — is the highest-return hour you'll spend this fall.

🔗 desautelbrowning.com | (401) 477-0023
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10/02/2026

Here's a pattern most property owners learn the hard way: municipal boards and state agencies thin out their calendars from mid-November through the new year. A filing that lands in early October can be heard before the holidays. The same filing in late November often waits until spring.

If you want a decision this year, October is the month to act:

▪️ Get on a board agenda now — the fall slots fill fast.
▪️ File complete, not phased. Incomplete packages get re-queued.
▪️ Refresh any survey, wetlands, or engineering deliverable before staff flag it as stale.
▪️ If your project crosses jurisdictions, file in parallel, not in sequence.
▪️ Build in time for a continuance — one is common; two eats your timeline.

If a project needs a year-end decision and isn't filed yet, that's the call to make this week.

🔗 desautelbrowning.com | (401) 477-0023
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10/01/2026

▶️ EP128 - Environmentally Speaking 🎧

In this episode of Environmentally Speaking, environmental attorney Marisa Desautel and co-host Clarice Parsons unpack the concept of Marine Spatial Planning (MSP)—a legal and policy framework designed to organize human activities in the ocean while balancing conservation and economic growth.

Whether you’re an attorney, policymaker, or coastal advocate, this episode offers insight into the legal tools and policy discussions shaping the next generation of ocean management.

Listen now: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5fcEvqhsrTz98YxevQWdZg?si=JfTPi3JLQRmMabVktyoNFg

09/27/2026

09/24/2026

Denmark is testing seaweed farms in the space between offshore wind turbines. It sounds like a clean win: reuse the space, soak up nutrient pollution, grow a food crop.

But on this week's Environmentally Speaking, Marisa Desautel asks the question behind it. Rhode Island fishermen were told they could keep fishing between turbines. If that space is "unusable" in Denmark, what does that mean here?

Then Clarice and Marisa take on a bigger problem: "NIMBY" has become a way to dismiss conservation objections before anyone hears them.

🎧 Listen: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1dXi1OP4qIukR9KCjLHHKa?si=NUjIJ2tkTGON3wptxzlz_w

09/22/2026

More than seven years after the commercial fishing vessel F/V MISTRESS sank near Block Island, a Green Oceans-sponsored investigation has located and documented a wreck believed to be the missing vessel, along with apparent human remains, resting within just 50 feet of turbine #1: https://bwnews.pr/4xDXCSe.

09/22/2026

The Trump administration illegally terminated a $7 billion Solar for All program intended to make solar power accessible to more than 900,000 lower-income Americans, a federal judge in Rhode Island ruled Friday.

https://bit.ly/4yUHNb9

The Trump administration illegally terminated a $7 billion program intended to make solar power accessible to more than 900,000 lower-income Americans, a federal judge ruled Friday.

09/11/2026

Today, we pause to remember and honor the lives lost on September 11, 2001. This day serves as a reminder of the resilience of our communities and the strength we find in each other.

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