"Knowledge, experience, diligence, creativity, focus and teamwork...all are necessary elements to successfully deliver a major project or complete a complex transaction."
Practices
see more ▼Head of Burns & Levinson’s Providence Office, senior environmental attorney and founding member of the Infrastructure & Public-Private Partnerships (P3) Group, Sean Coffey works with private developers, financial institutions, municipal and state governments and quasi-public agencies. His clients include developers and institutional investors in major energy projects, including hydro-power and off-shore wind energy facilities, transportation and intermodal facilities, as well as major commercial, residential and mixed-use projects, involving environmental, land use, and transactional representation for the remediation and adaptive reuse of brownfield sites throughout Rhode Island.
Sean has experience working on major projects—private, public, and both. After working to establish the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management and its environmental programs in the beginning of his career, merging the largest waste water treatment systems in Rhode Island and crafting one of Rhode Island’s first P3 to significantly upgrade a regional waste water treatment facility, Sean has been instrumental in working with public and private clients to deliver major complex projects throughout Rhode Island and the country.
For more than twenty years, Sean has led the development of P3s to assist state and local governments to build new and upgraded water and wastewater plants, specialized higher education facilities, public and charter schools, and transportation and energy facilities.
Sean served the former Rhode Island Department of Natural Resources as staff counsel and assisted in the development of legislation creating the Department of Environmental Management where he served as legal counsel and chief legal counsel from 1977 to 1983. He drafted many of the existing environmental laws in Rhode Island, including statutes dealing with hazardous waste management, solid waste disposal, wetlands protection, air pollution control, water pollution control and groundwater protection. He served as a Rhode Island State Senator from
Practices
- Projects & Infrastructure
- Government Relations
- Real Estate
- Energy & Clean-Tech
- Environmental
- Infrastructure & Public-Private Partnerships
- Design & Construction
Education
J.D., Boston University School of Law, 1976
B.S.F.S., International Relations, Georgetown University, 1972
Admissions
Massachusetts
Rhode Island
American Bar Association
Rhode Island Bar Association
U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island
U.S. District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit
U.S. Supreme Court