Bulletin 14-C: Correspondence Practice, Section Three Renewal

SCHLITT INTRANET / COASTAL COMMUNICATIONS / BULLETINS

Bulletin 14-C: Correspondence Practice, Section Three Renewal

From: Coastal Communications To: All colleagues with resident, contractor, or municipal contact at Section Three Action required: Read and apply. No acknowledgment necessary.

Colleagues, three small reminders as the Section Three renewal window opens. None of these are new policy. All three are ordinary correspondence practice that becomes worth restating when a site is busy and a lot of us are writing to the same people at once.

1. Terminology

The approved description of the Section Three work is seasonal renewal. Please use it in all instances.

Repair, remediation, damage, and failure are not accurate descriptions of scheduled care, and using them invites residents to worry about something that is not happening. Accuracy is a kindness here.

This applies to formal correspondence, to informal correspondence, to text messages with contractors, and to your own working notes, which are records and are treated as records. Colleagues who have already sent correspondence using other terminology need take no action. Coastal Communications has been in touch with those recipients and the matter is closed.

Where a resident uses one of the other words in a question to you, answer the question. Do not adopt the word. Colleagues have found that simply restating the situation in the approved terms is enough, and that residents follow the lead of the person who sounds calmest.

2. Accompaniment

Colleagues receiving visitors at Section Three during the renewal window should arrange accompaniment through the site office rather than escorting visitors personally.

This is a safety matter. The access road carries equipment on working days, the north face is an active work area, and our crews are operating to the enclosed-application protective standard this season, which visitors will notice and will ask about. The site office has been briefed to answer that question and colleagues have not.

Accompaniment applies to all visitors without exception, including journalists, including municipal staff, including volunteer groups, and including family members of colleagues. Please do not make individual judgments about who requires it. The value of a uniform practice is that no one has to be told they are an exception.

3. Correspondence routing

Inbound correspondence about Section Three water quality, sampling, or the access channel should be routed to Coastal Community Affairs rather than answered directly.

Colleagues occasionally feel this is discourteous, particularly where the sender is a neighbor they know personally. It is the opposite. Community Affairs holds the current survey data, and a warm answer from a colleague working from last season's figures is worse for that neighbor than a slightly slower answer that is right. Forward it, and if you wish, tell them you have forwarded it. Every inquiry receives a response.

A note on tone

None of the above is about concealment, and colleagues who have asked whether it is should feel free to keep asking, because the answer is genuinely no.

Section Three is a working coastline with a campus on it, children on it, and a hundred residents who read everything we send them. Precision protects them from unnecessary alarm, and it protects our crews from being asked questions on the beach that they are not equipped to answer. That is all any of this is.

Thank you for your care with it. It has been a demanding season and Coastal Communications is grateful for how well colleagues have handled a difficult site.

Bulletin 14-C supersedes 14-B. Retain in the Section Three folder.