PROVIDENCE — The state transit authority has its troubles: big and growing budget deficits, too little money to pay for more service for its increasing number of riders and too few friends at the State House.

What it didn’t need was a bitter dispute with the Newport tourist industry.

Happily for the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority, the Newport trolley war, which since February has pitted the authority against some of its best-organized natural allies, is over.

In a nutshell, the trouble was this:

RIPTA’s general manager, Alfred J. Moscola, wanted to replace the authority’s trolleys, including the five serving Newport, because they’re a miserable and expensive problem to maintain and operate. Forcing the issue was the impending impossibility of fueling them — with compressed natural gas — without driving all the way to Providence.

The probable replacements, however, weren’t trolleys, or as trolley-like as RIPTA’s trolley buses, but rather buses thinly disguised to look like trolleys.

That may seem a small thing. But it prompted a furious reaction from groups, including the Preservation Society of Newport County (which operates the Newport mansions) and other Newport tourist attractions, hotels and other businesses, the local newspaper and golf course and tourism groups across the state.

To the tourism industry, the trolleys are much more than the transportation system that ties them together, important as that is.

The trolleys, they said, are a critical part of Newport’s attraction, something that adds novelty to the chore of getting around while giving some relief to the city’s tight parking. They’re something special to remember Newport by.

The Preservation Society’s marketing director, John Rodman, explained it this way: “Newport is an adventure” and RIPTA’s trolleys are an important part of that. On the other hand, “a bus is a bus is a bus.”

How do they know the trolleys are important? A lot of people use them. Trudy Coxe, the Preservation Society’s executive director, says that after the trolleys arrived in the spring of 2000, transit use in Newport went up 25 to 30 percent.

The Newport groups were upset enough to buy advertising space — on the sides of the trolleys themselves — to urge RIPTA to “Save the Trolleys.”

Moscola, on the other hand, couldn’t wait to get rid of the trolleys. They’re not standardized and durable like the authority’s diesel buses, he said. They’re terrible to maintain, right down to the exterior wood trim that needs varnishing like the brightwork on a yacht. The only available refueling facility short of Providence, in Middletown, needs major repairs that would be too expensive to make sense.

Moscola had his sights set on the Gillig Corp.’s “Trolley Bus Replica.” The Newporters tracked down pictures of that vehicle on the Internet and penetrated the disguise immediately.

Rodman dismissed the Gillig vehicle as “a city bus painted brown with a pagoda on top,” and the group called it a phony, “pseudo-trolley bus” that wouldn’t fool tourists any more than it fooled them. The Newporters suspected that Moscola was putting in the fix by writing bid specifications that no real trolley could meet.

The apparent solution to this impasse emerged at a RIPTA board meeting Monday: refit the five trolleys with diesel engines.

After being bombarded with calls and petitions from Newport, RIPTA board Chairman Robert Batting said the dispute is now “totally” settled.

“We’re very, very pleased,” agreed Coxe.

Moscola now seems just as eager to refit the trolleys as he was to get rid of them. He said he has ordered five engines, five transmissions and five rear ends, and is already at work on the changeover.

“We didn’t even wait for the parts before we started taking them apart,” he said.

blandis@projo.com