Bonnet Shores voting rights cabana drama keeps on rolling

The General Assembly went home for the summer without taking action on these questions.

“Regrettably, the General Assembly failed to act and so, for the third year running, the voters in Bonnet Shores will again be denied the right to conduct elections and choose their Council members,” Robert Patterson, a Bonnet Shores resident on one side of the dispute, said in a lengthy statement decrying the inaction.

Some in the fire district, like its governing body’s chair, Carol O’Donnell, took issue with the changes that were before the General Assembly, which would have removed swaths of non-resident property owners from the voting rolls.

“Personally, I can’t understand why this fire district can’t decide to include people instead of exclude them,” O’Donnell said.

The Bonnet Shores Fire District is a General Assembly-created body with taxing and other governmental powers (but no fire department). For years, its charter limited the right to vote to property owners — even if they didn’t live there. Corporate entities with property also had votes under the charter.

Residents sued over the voting rules in state court. In 2022, a state judge ruled that the fire district, because of the governmental powers it wielded, could not prevent otherwise eligible residents from voting in its elections just because they didn’t own property.

But what about the opposite case? Under the charter, eligible voters included owners of second homes, or even owners of cabanas and bathhouses at the Bonnet Shores Beach Club, whether or not they lived in Bonnet Shores. That, some Bonnet Shores residents said in the lawsuit, unconstitutionally diluted their votes.

The lawsuit ended with a settlement in May 2022, but that didn’t end the dispute — it just started a new one about what the settlement actually meant.

What the settlement and judge’s order unambiguously did do was have the fire district to convene a charter revision committee. That committee would address the issues raised in the the lawsuit and propose amendments to the fire district’s charter.

But changing a charter is as complicated as changing out of a bathing suit in a beach cabana with the lights out. For the new rules to go into effect, they’d have to go to the General Assembly for approval, and then back to the voters of Bonnet Shores for a final vote.

The charter review committee came forward with a proposal: All people living in the Bonnet Shores Fire District who were registered to vote in Narragansett could vote, as could adult citizens who’d resided in a “seasonal residence” for at least 60 days in the 12 months before an election. It removed corporate entities, like property-owning trusts, and other non-residents from the voting rolls.

That went before the General Assembly, which didn’t take action before going home last week.

Some supporters of the changes blamed Democratic state Representative Carol Hagan McEntee, who lives in South Kingstown but owns a home in the district and has a bathhouse at the beach club.

“She sabotaged this,” said Melissa Jenkins Mangili, who’d successfully sued over the denial of her right to vote because she wasn’t on her property’s deed. “There’s no doubt about it.”

McEntee denied she was an impediment and said she’d approached the issue fairly. She said the proposal didn’t have the support among legislators to advance. McEntee said some legislators had questions about the 60-day “seasonal” residents voting, while some were apparently receptive to arguments that non-property owners had a substantial interest and should be allowed to continue to vote in some form. McEntee said she herself believed owners at the beach club or non-resident homeowners may indeed have such an interest.

“They do a lot for the community,” McEntee said.

Critics have pointed to McEntee’s friendship with O’Donnell, the chair of the Bonnet Shores Fire District Council, and McEntee’s ownership of a beach club bathhouse.

McEntee said she’s friends with people on both sides of the divide, and pointed out that she got an ethics advisory opinion clearing her to participate.

“I think the two parties should get together and come up with something they can compromise and can both live with,” McEntee said.

A majority of the Bonnet Shores Fire District council members opposed the changes in the charter revision committee’s proposal. An alternative proposal would have allowed property owners, including beach club units, to continue to vote, but with some limits that hadn’t existed before.

Of course, that council was elected under old rules that have come under so much scrutiny. And the settlement didn’t envision a role for the council in crafting the new ones, besides convening a charter revision committee. That committee’s ideas have now failed to win favor in the General Assembly, and , it’s unclear what comes next.

State Senator Alana DiMario introduced the bill in the Senate, where it also stalled.

Another tricky issue at play was what voting rules you’d use for the final election before Bonnet Shores voters to ratify the changes, although the proposal got stuck on the more basic substantive issues, too.

The passions that the issue has engendered might seem incongruous with the actual stakes in a district with only a few hundred voters, but it does involve two cornerstone issues: voting rights, and Rhode Island shoreline fire districts that don’t actually fight fires.

“The continuing voting rights debacle in the Bonnet Shores Fire District provides perhaps the strongest argument for the dissolution of these outdated political entities across the state,” Steven Brown, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island, said in an e-mail. “In the meantime, however, the current standoff undermines the democratic process and suggests that follow-up litigation by residents may be the only avenue for definitively resolving this very muddled situation.”

Brian Amaral can be reached at brian.amaral@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @bamaral44.