December 2, 2023 — Trudy Coxe relentlessly pursued funding to preserve Newport’s acclaimed mansions. She helped bring the city’s “Gilded Age” icons before a national TV audience through the HBO series by the same name.
Now, she’s turning that single-minded focus to protecting Newport’s cultural and historic identity, including its iconic landmarks, against the perceived threat of offshore wind.
The 25-year leader of the Preservation Society of Newport County is defending the decision to wage a court battle against the federal agency that approved offshore wind farms off Rhode Island’s coastline.
“I would think people would be lauding us for stepping forward,” she said in an interview on Tuesday. “We are the only entity that has stepped forward and said, ‘the law is the law and we should follow the law.’ I can’t believe there isn’t general respect for that.”
The appeal filed the day before Thanksgiving in federal court in the District of Columbia alleges that Newport’s historic coastal landmarks will be ruined by the silhouettes of hundreds of skyscraper-size turbines off the coastline. The lawsuit, along with a nearly identical complaint filed separately by the Southeast Lighthouse Foundation of Block Island, argues that the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) broke federal laws in approving wind farms without properly accounting for or mitigating against the harms to historic sites. U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland and the U.S. Department of the Interior are also named as defendants.