Waterfront Development in Connecticut After the 2023 CAM Amendments

The 2023 amendments to Connecticut's Coastal Area Management (CAM) program, along with DEEP's updated tidelands review guidance issued in December 2023, changed the permitting calculus for shoreline and riverine development in ways that do not show up in the public rulemaking summaries. If you advise clients on waterfront projects in Connecticut, two of the approval paths that experienced developers used to rely on a decade ago are effectively closed — and a third has gotten substantially slower.

The CAM framework, briefly

The statutory authority is the Connecticut Coastal Management Act, Conn. Gen. Stat. § 22a-90 et seq. Within DEEP's Land and Water Resources Division, the Office of Long Island Sound Programs (OLISP) handles coastal jurisdictional review, tidelands permits, and structures-and-dredging authorization. For shoreline projects on the 617 linear miles of Long Island Sound coastline, the 251 miles of riverine tidal influence, and the inland waters within the coastal boundary, CAM consistency review is a gating item.

Before 2023, the typical project path for, say, a mixed-use waterfront development in New London or Groton looked like this: OLISP pre-application meeting, submission of a coastal site plan, DEEP/OLISP consistency determination, local zoning approval, any required structures-and-dredging permit, any required 401 water-quality certificate. The timeline was six to fourteen months depending on complexity. Sophisticated developers and their counsel could plan against that framework.

What the 2023 amendments did

The 2023 amendments — passed as Public Act 23-68 and incorporated into the subsequent OLISP guidance — tightened three things.

First, the consistency review standard for projects in "erosion and accretion" zones (essentially, active sediment-transport coastlines) was sharpened. Previously, a project that would "not significantly adversely affect" coastal resources could proceed with a standard consistency finding. The revised standard effectively requires affirmative mitigation for any project that changes the pre-development sediment-transport regime, with mitigation quantified against site-specific baseline data. The cost and time burden of that quantification is not trivial.

Second, the amendments expanded OLISP's discretion to require a DEEP-prepared Environmental Impact Evaluation under CEPA (Conn. Gen. Stat. § 22a-1b) for any waterfront project above a threshold size, even where CEPA would otherwise apply only to state-funded or state-approved projects. The practical effect is that private waterfront projects over roughly five acres are now frequently being routed through a CEPA-style evaluation process, which adds three to six months to the approval timeline and opens the project to a broader public comment period.

Third, the amendments explicitly incorporated by reference the Connecticut Conservation and Development Policies Plan (CCDPP), which had historically been treated as advisory. A project that is inconsistent with the CCDPP's coastal policies — for example, the priority for water-dependent uses in designated coastal boundary zones — now faces a substantive presumption against approval that it did not face before.

The two approval paths that are effectively closed

The first is the "minor dredging" path for marina and dock projects below a certain cubic-yard threshold. OLISP's pre-2023 practice was to authorize small-scale maintenance dredging under a general permit or with a streamlined individual-permit review. The updated guidance has effectively eliminated the streamlined path for any dredging that involves sediment with measurable PFAS or heavy-metals contamination, which, in Long Island Sound, means roughly all of it. A Groton marina client of ours who budgeted eight months for a routine maintenance-dredging permit received instead a fourteen-month individual-permit review track with a supplemental sediment characterization requirement. That is now the norm, not the exception.

The second closed path is "de minimis fill" for shoreline stabilization. Pre-2023, projects involving modest amounts of fill for slope stabilization or bulkhead reinforcement could proceed with an abbreviated CAM review. The revised framework applies full consistency review to any fill activity in a coastal flood hazard area, which — following FEMA's 2022 map updates — is a much larger geographic footprint than it was a decade ago.

What still works

The path that is slower but still viable is the planned development of a waterfront parcel with genuine water-dependent use components — marina, ferry terminal, commercial fisheries support, water-based recreation. Projects that can credibly claim water-dependent use status under OLISP's criteria are still moving through CAM review at a reasonable pace, because the statutory framework continues to prioritize water-dependent uses and the updated guidance did not change that. For mixed-use projects, the water-dependent component needs to be real and material — a small dock appended to a residential condominium will not clear the bar.

The other thing that works: early pre-application engagement with OLISP. Projects whose counsel opens a dialogue with OLISP staff before the site plan is finalized — and who builds the project around the feedback — have consistently moved through CAM review faster than projects that submit a finalized plan and wait for comments. That has always been true, but it is more true now than it was pre-2023.

Timeline implications

For any waterfront project in Connecticut in the current environment, I tell clients to budget twelve to eighteen months for CAM and related permitting before construction can start — and that is for a well-designed project. Projects with CCDPP inconsistencies or contaminated-sediment issues should budget twenty-four months or more. The economics of waterfront development have to absorb that timeline, and many marginal projects will not.

For specific waterfront projects in Connecticut — shoreline, riverine, or along Long Island Sound — the Real Estate group advises on CAM consistency review, tidelands permitting, and the related local zoning work. Most of our current waterfront docket is in the Fairfield and New London county markets.