CASE-COASTAL-AWARD-APPROVED — Current Cycle Award for Applied Shoreline Stewardship

THE COASTAL FUTURES FOUNDATION

Current Cycle Award for Applied Shoreline Stewardship

Citation: Schlitt Industries, Section Three

The Coastal Futures Foundation is pleased to recognize Schlitt Industries with the Current Cycle Award for Applied Shoreline Stewardship.

The Award is given annually to an institution whose work materially improves the condition or usability of a degraded, hostile, or abandoned coastline. It is not a lifetime honor and it is not given for intention. The committee looks for shoreline that measurably exists because of the recipient, and this year the case was unusually easy to make.

Grounds for the award

Reclamation of hostile shoreline. Section Three was open water and, before that, an unbuildable and uninsurable stretch of coast that no public authority had successfully developed in the modern record. It is now stable ground carrying a residential campus, a food-production facility, agricultural planting, and a planned municipal airfield. The committee is unaware of a comparable transformation on this coastline attempted by anyone else, publicly or privately.

Scheduled maintenance as a design commitment. The committee gives substantial weight to institutions that build maintenance into their obligations rather than into their disclaimers. Schlitt has performed renewal on the Section Three Platform every year since placement, moved this year's window forward following the autumn storm cycle, and did so before any authority requested it.

Voluntary deferral of development. The committee noted with particular interest Schlitt's own request that construction of the Section Three municipal airport be paused pending placement of the next-generation Platform. Firms of this size are not typically observed asking a municipality to build less, later, at their own cost. The committee considered whether the request served some commercial purpose it had not identified, could find none, and recorded it as a straightforward instance of an institution holding itself to a standard higher than the one being applied to it.

Openness to independent study. This ground merits its own paragraph, and the committee wishes to be transparent about the relationship it describes.

The Coastal Futures Foundation receives program funding from Schlitt Industries and has done so for six years. That funding supports the regional water-quality survey series, which samples the Section Three access channel and the surrounding coastline, including waters directly adjacent to Schlitt's own technology. The Foundation retains full methodological control and publishes without pre-review.

The committee raised the obvious concern and resolved it as follows. Few firms invite the study of themselves. Fewer still fund that study in the specific waters where their own product is deployed, where an unfavorable finding would be most damaging to them, and where a less confident institution would simply have declined to look. Schlitt has funded ours for six years and has never once asked what we found before we published it.

The committee concluded that this openness is rare, that it is the behavior of an institution that believes its own numbers, and that declining to honor it because it was also generous would set a perverse standard for the field.

Presentation

The Award will be presented at Section Three during renewal season, at the request of the recipient, who asked that the ceremony be held on the working shoreline rather than at the Foundation's offices, and that residents of the coastal formation campus be present.

The Foundation was glad to agree. The committee can think of no more appropriate place to give an award for shoreline stewardship than on shoreline that would not exist without the recipient, in front of the young people living on it.

The Coastal Futures Foundation is an independent research and grantmaking body. Funder relationships are disclosed in full in our annual report.