The battle over Champlin's Marina is growing more heated as lawyers file briefs accusing Champlin's and three dissident members of the Coastal Resources Management Council of orchestrating a "shameful charade" to win council permission to expand the marina on Block Island.

The briefs, due to be filed in Superior Court by today, seek to put an end to Champlin's efforts to expand in Block Island's Great Salt Pond by convincing a judge that the coastal council's 5-5 vote last February amounted to rejection.

They also strongly argue against Champlin's request for a court hearing on the process followed by the council before the Champlin's vote.

One brief said that the legal arguments used by Champlin's lawyer Robert Goldberg were full of "hyperbolic language and purple prose."

A lawyer for Block Islanders opposed Champlin's, but also added more criticism of coastal council practices, arguing that council officials initially ignored their own rules and procedures to give favorable consideration to Champlin's.

The outcome of the dispute is important because how the council conducted itself -- in what many agree is the biggest and most controversial coastal case in a decade -- is certain to be reviewed later this year as Governor Carcieri and the General Assembly negotiate the process of appointing new council members.

The case also is concerning many because it has disrupted routine business by the coastal council and turned council members against one another. The council meets twice a month and rules on virtually every development on Rhode Island's coastline.

Three meetings were canceled this summer due to a lack of a quorum, so dozens of projects are backed up, awaiting permits.

Three of the council's own members have been enlisted in the legal battle -- against the council.

The three had formed the majority of a subcommittee that voted to give Champlin's much of the new pier space it was requesting. Later, they signed affidavits suggesting "irregularities" in the way council Chairman Michael Tikoian led the council to the 5-5 vote.

In the short run, Champlin's has asked Superior Court Judge Stephen Fortunato to schedule an evidentiary hearing into what Goldberg describes as "shocking revelations of misconduct by the council." Goldberg is also arguing that the 3-1 subcommittee vote should prevail over the 5-5 vote of the full council.

Fortunato, according to memos by some of the lawyers, privately informed all parties recently that he intended to recuse himself because of relationships with several people involved in the case.

So the next steps in the legal battle will be for Fortunato to turn the case over to another judge, and for that judge to decide on whether to conduct a full evidentiary hearing.

How the courts finally rule on this case will have a major impact on Champlin's and could create legal precedents that will guide how coastal council goes about its business.

Coastal council lawyer Brian A. Goldman and Assistant Attorney General Michael Rubin, in their brief, cited numerous court decisions supporting the notion that a tie vote amounts to denial.

The also rejected Goldberg's contention that the tie vote throws the case back to the 3-1 subcommittee recommendation. Only the full council, with a quorum of seven, can grant permits, they wrote.

The Conservation Law Foundation, which intervened on behalf of Block Islanders, supported the state and sharply criticized Goldberg and his legal arguments.

"While such overblown language may have a place in certain genres of pulp fiction, it has no place in court memoranda," wrote CLF lawyers Cynthia Giles and Jerry Elmer.

The CLF also criticized affidavits signed by council members Gerald Zarrella, Jerry Sahagian and Thomas Ricci that described Tikoian's efforts to get them to vote for a smaller expansion by Champlin's.

"Instead of reciting facts, the affiants describe at some length their feelings. The affidavits are not based on first-hand knowledge but contain hearsay," argued CLF.

R. Daniel Prentiss, representing the Committee for Great Salt Pond and the Block Island Land Trust, attacked Champlin's and the three dissident council members.

"It is richly ironic that it should be Champlin that decries its treatment at the hands of the CRMC," Prentiss wrote. "'Champlin, and the subcommittee members it now champions, orchestrated a process for review of its application that was a shameful charade, and a manifest abuse of the due process rights of the Intervenors [and the public]."

Prentiss said the town had submitted to the coastal council in 1999 a harbor management plan that included a town mooring field adjacent to Champlin's.

"For no apparent reason other than inefficiency," he wrote, the council didn't begin review the plan until 2003.

Prentiss said Champlin's exploited the situation by filing plans to expand into the town mooring field while no harbor management plan was in effect.

The council agreed to consolidate its review of the harbor management plan with Champlin's plans, Prentiss wrote, and then moved forward with "unseemly dispatch."

Prentiss said the council scheduled a hearing for Champlin's in December 2003 even though reviews by its own staff and by outside agencies were incomplete.

When Block Islanders successfully had the case referred to a subcommittee, Prentiss said, Tikoian ignored the island's recommended appointment to the subcommittee and instead appointed Zarrella, a builder who has a vacation home on the island.

Prentiss said the subcommittee refused to hear important evidence or allow a staff engineer to testify how he had been ordered to expedite his review of the application.

After it won the subcommittee vote, Prentiss said, Champlin's tried to persuade the governor to influence the full council vote in its favor.

Despite the council's unusual actions early in the process, Prentiss said, there is no substance to Champlin's claims of improprieties by the council or the governor in the final vote.

He said it is permissible for members of a regulatory agency to discuss the merits of a pending decision.

In the final vote, Prentiss said, opponents on the council still had issues with water-quality problems, inefficient use of the present marina space, negative impacts on navigation and concerns about the marina's desire to make use of four acres of the pond held in public trust.

The subcommittee's report, he said, had no meaningful connection to the record and amounted to a preordained decision.

plord@projo.com / (401) 277-8036