The lawsuit: All systems are go for a lawsuit to soon be filed that takes Aim at Rhode Island’s recent housing mandates. Last evening the Portsmouth Town Council voted fund and serve as primary plaintiff along with the town of Hopkinton. With 13 municipalities passing a resolution calling for the General Assembly to repeal these laws, it is anticipated that other municipalities will also choose to join the action against the State of Rhode Island, Governor Daniel J. McKee, and Attorney General Peter F. Neronha.

At issue: Rhode Island’s cities and towns have spent years writing comprehensive plans, calibrating zoning maps, and arguing over parking, wetlands buffers, and neighborhood character. A draft complaint circulating among municipal officials will asks Rhode Island’s Superior Court to decide whether the General Assembly can simply impose those decisions upon them. The Ocean State Current has obtained a copy of that confidential draft that seeks a declaration that successive packages of 2024, 2025, and 2026 housing and land-use statutes violate the Home Rule Amendment and related constitutional and statutory limits. It also asks for an injunction blocking enforcement. The statutes challenged in the draft complaint were primarily the product of former House Speaker K. Joseph Shekarchi’s multi-year housing agenda.

The draft complaint frames the dispute as more than a policy disagreement over housing supply. Article XIII of the Rhode Island Constitution, it argues, gives every city and town “the right of self government in all local matters.” Planning, zoning, subdivision review, and local environmental rules have long been treated as local. The challenged statutes, the towns say, do not merely set statewide goals … they prescribe lot sizes for accessory dwelling units, cap inclusionary set-asides, dictate residential uses in commercial districts, limit parking requirements near transit, restrict local wetland buffers for housing projects, rewrite board procedures and deadlines, and alter how affordable units are counted.

Among the specific targets: a 2024 mandate requiring by-right ADUs on lots of at least 20,000 square feet without zoning-board review; preemption of stricter local wetland protections for housing; density and use entitlements inside urban-services boundaries where water and sewer exist; a requirement that towns allow attached townhouses where multi-family density is already permitted; and a 2026 parking preemption limiting off-street spaces for certain multi-family projects. Later technical and Low and Moderate Income Housing Act amendments further constrain local findings and review. The towns contend these measures operate unequally—hitting suburban and rural communities with limited infrastructure harder than denser cities already equipped with transit and utilities—and therefore fail Article XIII’s requirement that legislation affecting municipal affairs apply alike to all cities and towns.

The draft also highlights an internal contradiction. State law already requires municipalities to adopt comprehensive plans, obtain state approval, and conform zoning decisions to those plans. The new statutes, plaintiffs argue, force approvals at densities and in locations their own approved plans do not support. Towns are left violating one state command to obey another.

They further claim the package imposes unfunded mandates—new inventories, compressed review timelines, ordinance rewrites, and infrastructure absorption—without reimbursement required by state law. Portsmouth’s Town Council authorized the effort in a January 2026 resolution that called for collaboration with other municipalities and possible court action to protect home-rule powers and locally adopted plans. The complaint treats the 2024–2026 enactments as a single cumulative program rather than isolated bills.

Supporters of the state laws have described them as necessary responses to a documented housing shortage. The towns’ filing does not deny the shortage. It insists a generalized housing crisis does not convert every local permitting decision, parking standard, or wetland buffer into a matter of statewide concern. If it did, the complaint warns, little would remain of the Home Rule Amendment. The draft asks the court to declare the statutes void as applied to the plaintiff towns, enjoin their enforcement, or at least stay them until municipalities can amend their comprehensive plans and assess infrastructure impacts. Whether that request becomes a filed lawsuit, how many towns ultimately join, and how a Providence County judge views the line between statewide housing policy and local self-government will determine whether Rhode Island’s recent land-use overhaul survives its first major constitutional test.

Many of the specific measures listed in the complaint — the 2024 ADU-by-right mandate, wetlands preemption for housing, inclusionary-zoning caps, procedural rewrites, 2025 commercial-district residential requirements, urban-services-boundary density rules, townhouse entitlements, and later technical and Low and Moderate Income Housing Act amendments — originated in or were advanced as part of those Speaker-led packages.

In treating the 2024, 2025, and 2026 enactments as a single “cumulative legislative program,” the complaint’s framing aligns with how Shekarchi presented the work: each year’s bills built on the prior year’s. He was frequently the public face of the effort, announced the packages, and was widely identified in news coverage as the champion of the reforms. Other legislators (notably Rep. June Speakman on certain affordable-housing and LMIHA provisions) sponsored individual bills, and the Senate had to pass them, but the House Speaker’s office drove the agenda and the sequencing.