For nearly six hours on Tuesday night, according to the Middletown Town Council's published meeting recording, residents lined up at a microphone to tell their elected officials the same thing over and over — that the town-owned land at the corner of West Main Road and Coddington Highway was supposed to become a walkable mixed-use town center of housing, retail, and public space, not a four-story hotel — and, at the end of it all, four members of a seven-member council agreed with them, voting down the three zoning and comprehensive-plan amendments the developer needed and, in effect, sending the whole project back to the drawing board.
The evening opened not with the public but with the developer. Gerard Galvin, the attorney for MCTC LLC, walked the council through fifteen years of history — a 2011 planning study, the 2014–2015 comprehensive plan, a 2020 request for information (an RFI, a document that solicits ideas from possible developers) reissued in June 2021 — to argue that the amendments before the council were, in his words, not a complicated request but the natural culmination of a vision the town itself had pursued for a decade and a half. He described the current, scaled-down proposal: a single 144-room hotel on lot 7, the former site of the Navy Lodge, with the remaining northern parcels left under town control for the town to decide later, an increase in the minimum affordable-housing threshold to 20 percent should the town build there, the removal of a drive-through bank, and — repeated so many times it became a refrain — the preservation of Pottsy Field in its current location. A professional planner testified that the comprehensive plan is, in his 30-plus years of experience, the most definitive documentation for redevelopment he had ever seen, reading long excerpts calling for a "walkable and attractive mixed-use center." The developer's team also produced a general manager of one of the family's existing hotels, a letter from a state senator, and, later, a letter attributed to a Navy commander attesting to a persistent need for extended-stay lodging near Naval Station Newport.
Then the public spoke, and the current turned decisively against the project. The through-line of more than two dozen speakers was that the plan on the table bore no resemblance to what residents had been promised. A representative of the town's affordable housing committee laid out the procedural heart of the objection: historically a municipality issues an RFI to shape a vision and then issues a request for proposals — an RFP — that lets multiple developers submit competing plans, but Middletown, he said, skipped that step and entered into an exclusive arrangement with a single developer, so that a project once envisioned as a mix of residential, commercial, recreational, and community amenities was "quietly discarded" and reduced to "the developer's four-story hotel and other profit-driven uses." A member of the affordable housing committee, speaking as a resident, hammered the same point from the developer agreement itself — the revised April 2026 agreement, she argued, replaced a five-lot mixed-use plan with a single-use build on one lot, replaced three ground leases with one, and shrank the development area from roughly 15.27 acres to about 3.24 acres — and concluded that such "very substantial revisions," a phrase she borrowed from the developer's own attorney, required the plan to return through the planning board and new public hearings before the council touched permanent zoning. A former planning board member who had reviewed the original proposal put it plainly: the plan before the council was not the plan the planning board reviewed, and so, in his opinion, the council did not have a favorable planning board recommendation for what was actually being proposed.
The testimony pressed on nearly every seam. Speaker after speaker described West Main Road traffic as already intolerable and warned that a hotel would make it worse. One resident detailed how a relative's quality of life near the Atlantic Beach District had deteriorated as hotels rose there. Several residents challenged the revenue math head-on, breaking the roughly $785,000-to-$850,000 annual figure down to a per-room, per-week trickle and arguing that once the cost of town services was subtracted — one speaker cited a 2014 Matrix Design Group analysis estimating that 49 to 76 cents of every revenue dollar goes back to services — the net gain was small against a town operating budget serving some 16,000 to 17,000 people. Another resident, invoking a 2020 federal conservation funding program, pledged to organize fundraising to rehabilitate Pottsy Field and build the community commons himself, and reported his own survey of local hotel occupancy suggesting a new hotel would merely redistribute existing tourists rather than fill new rooms. A veteran asked every veteran in the room to stand and argued that Pottsy Field, named for Staff Sergeant Christopher Pototts, is a memorial that cannot be reduced to a line on a zoning map. A binder of more than 2,000 notarized petition signatures, previously submitted, was invoked repeatedly, and one speaker tallied the tally of prior hearings — 42 council meetings and 13 planning board meetings, 55 in all — as evidence that the residents had done their listening and it was now the council's turn.
Support was scarce but present. The co-chair of the Middletown Center Citizens Advisory Committee, speaking personally, warned that a reflexive posture of saying no to everything risked leaving the town with "two empty buildings and a big vacant lot for years to come," and framed the developer's concessions — on building height, sign size, the corner park, the bank, and Pottsy Field — as compromises that had all so far come from one side. She and another speaker with Naval War College experience defended the genuine need for extended-stay lodging tied to the base's expanding missions.
When the public hearing finally closed and the seven members spoke, the split was stark and, in the president's own words, three-to-three heading into his remarks. The council vice president read a lengthy prepared statement defending the process, insisting he had accepted no money from any developer, explaining that hotel revenue could cover the payments on a new library without raising taxes, and declaring himself a yes; a colleague who supported the original project also stayed with it, and another councilor who had signaled a change of heart in early June ultimately said she now fully supported the revised proposal after concluding that roughly half the area's hotel rooms function as extended-stay housing the Navy relies upon. But four members broke the other way. One councilor who had campaigned against the project said the vast majority of residents he encountered did not want the hotel as the project's focal point and called for restarting the process. Another urged the council to table the decision and reopen the question to the community. A third — a Marine Corps veteran who acknowledged deep personal investment in the project from its start and who once said he felt he "threw his wallet out the window" driving past the idle parcel — said he could not support an overlay stretching across the entire area for what had become a single-lot hotel, and proposed instead selling the corner parcel outright. And the council president, a lifelong resident who said he had played softball on that field for 22 years, concluded that including Pottsy Field in the overlay was inappropriate, that the favorable planning board recommendation no longer applied to the revised project, and that the town needed to go back to the drawing board — though he too said he might support a hotel if that single parcel were zoned separately.
All three amendments — a change to the comprehensive plan's future land use map, a change to the official zoning map, and the West Main Coddington Overlay District ordinance — required passage together for the project to proceed, the solicitor explained, and if they failed the process would end there. Each was moved and seconded on its second reading, and on each the ayes carried only the minority; the amendments failed. "It looks like we're going to go back to the drawing board here," the president said, before the council adjourned. He closed by conceding the council is not perfect — "we're humans and we make mistakes along the way" — and by insisting that whatever the disagreements, the town center land still has to be developed, and the community will have to find a way to do it together, the way a good sauce only comes together when the ingredients are left to simmer rather than rushed to the plate.