VI. Getting It Done

Changing a community’s approach to its shoreline is hard, but it can be done

For all the reasons mentioned in the first section, even the most comprehensive and innovative set of technical tools is not enough to solve the coastal conundrum. Relieving shoreline flooding and erosion by shifting from a management approach to a resilience perspective is a long game with many players. Techniques only work if they’re used. This section touches on the human and organizational context that supports the often simple but rarely easy act of implementing regulation designed to give the lakes space to move and a naturalized shoreline.

The case studies presented with each tool and in the Appendix show that it can certainly be done. One example of a particularly comprehensive approach is the Lake Huron Forever initiative. Using Lake Huron as a unifying force, the organization brings together advocates inside a community and connects communities by offering a common structure and a consistent message of a clean and healthy Lake. The communities then work through this alignment to establish a vision, goals, and tangible action steps—including developing plans and changing zoning, but also raising funding, dedicating time and attention, talking with the individuals and organizations, and accomplishing public projects. It’s this rich and deep approach that helps overcome sticky obstacles like defeatism and resistance to change.

Community engagement approaches

Community engagement is the link that connects decision-makers’ actions to the priorities of residents, businesses, visitors, and other stakeholders. In most cases, the formal activity is initiated by the decision-makers, because they are the ones with the official responsibility—community engagement is a request for help and advice in carrying out the leadership responsibilities that they have taken on. 

Standard approaches to community engagement have often taken the following format: leaders invite “the public” to participate; they deliver information, usually about a problem, to the self-selected group; and then ask participants to state their preferences about what the leaders should do in response to that problem. This approach makes sense, but its effectiveness is limited. The leaders and staff who are tasked with these activities often report low participation, participation by the same few people across all issues and events, and receiving suggestions that are difficult to implement with the resources available. 

Two strategies to break through these impasses of apathy and stagnation are storytelling and stewardship. Storytelling uses the brain’s natural affinity for narrative to engage emotions as well as logic. By presenting decisions about the future as shaping the community’s story, rather than as selecting a correct answer, there is more room for connection and cooperation. Moving out of the “agree/disagree” framework allows for co-creation. The idea of stewardship places the participants inside the story as a caretaker from the beginning. It puts to use research by environmental communicators showing that people want to know what they can do, how it will help, what others are doing, and how they are faring. In many cases, engagement asks “what should we do?” when that is already known; the real question is “how can we marshal our resources to do what we already know should be done?” 

The following community engagement tools lend themselves to coastal decision-making. 

Beach walks

Beach walks are an engagement technique that takes place on the coast itself. Their content may vary, depending on the needs of the project or process the engagement is supporting: the key feature is the location.

Why it supports resilience

Beach walks support resilience by connecting people physically with the resource that the event is intended to benefit. This connection helps spur positive action, and it increases people’s familiarity with the resource so that they can offer more tailored feedback. 

How it is used

Beach walks can be used for a variety of purposes. For example, they may be educational in nature; they may be used to gather information about people’s experiences on the coast; or they may be designed to take feedback on a proposed project.

Possible obstacles to implementation

Logistics and communications can present obstacles to a successful beach walk. Care should be taken to ensure that the activities are as physically accessible as possible. Communications should include written materials such as signs, since the lack of amplification may make it difficult to hear a speaker. 

Example

Lake Huron Summer Beach Walk with EGLE

The Michigan Coastal Management Program and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers collaborated to conduct a series of Beach Walks on eight sites along Lake Michigan, Huron, and Superior coastlines. According to the Michigan Coastal Management Program, “the events highlighted the dynamics and effects of the Great Lakes water levels, storm intensities, coastal processes, and coastal hazards at each respective beach site. The intent of the Beach Walks is to increase knowledge of coastal hazards to increase community resilience and provide opportunity for the public to interface with state and federal coastal experts.”

Shoreline Resident Guides

Shoreline Resident Guides compile shoreline management information in an easy-to-understand format that residential property owners can use. They may include official regulations like setbacks, as well as best practices like limiting fertilizer application. 

Why it supports resilience

Much of the actual, day-to-day management of the shoreline is done by residential property owners. This tool gets information directly into the hands of a group of people who have an enormous cumulative impact on coastal conditions. 

How it is used

A Shoreline Resident Guide is most likely to be compiled by a group with particular knowledge about good shoreline practices and an interest in promoting them, such as a local government, a county, or a special interest group. It can be mailed to property owners and made available online. It is also helpful to distribute a Shoreline Resident Guide to private-sector interests such as realtors, landscapers, marine contractors, and lawn care professionals. These groups may integrate the practices into their own businesses and/or pass the resource and knowledge on to their clients.  

Possible obstacles to implementation

Getting a Shoreline Resident Guide into the hands of every residential property owner is a big task, and one that has a maintenance component as property ownership changes hands. Since the non-regulatory practices in the guide are optional, achieving compliance may require additional education efforts and, possibly, some kind of incentive. 

Example

Living in Sensitive Areas: A Homeowners Guide for Residents of Grand Haven

This toolkit equips homeowners along the coast, in the dunes, in a floodplain, and near wetlands with best management practices for their home and lawn to minimize damage to these ecosystems. Maps are included to show which homes are in each sensitive area. 

Charettes

Charrettes are a design-centered, multi-day meeting sequence with feedback loops that are designed to bring a community to enough consensus for action within an established timeframe. 

Why it supports resilience

The visual nature and multiple meeting format of charrettes support resilience by illustrating tradeoffs and the physical needs of various interests. Allowing everyone to develop, see, and comment on a proposed solution within a defined time frame helps manage the complexity that is inherent in coastal management. 

How it is used

Charrettes are especially suited to project design, because they result in a professionally vetted illustration. But they can be used to gather information and come to consensus on a variety of issues. A community determines the project goal, secures times and locations, and then brings together an extensive team of professionals and support staff (for example, watershed scientists, landscape architects, developers, graphics renderers, facilitators)  to run the meetings and produce the design products.  

Possible obstacles to implementation

Charrettes require extensive preparation and intense management. The up-front costs generally appear to be greater than with other engagement techniques. However, they often represent the same amount that would otherwise be spread over a longer time-frame, and when the time savings are included, may in fact be a better value. 

Example

Sustainable Small Harbors  Charrettes

Charrettes focused on the design of small harbors and their surrounding areas have been held in more than a half-dozen communities over the past ten years through Michigan Sea Grant.  Over the course of three visits, the Sea Grant team collects information, hosts a series of public input opportunities, and presents a summary report with preferred alternatives to the status quo. 

Visualization 

Virtual tools can help illustrate existing and projected damage due to flooding and erosion. These include data tools such as the shoreline and lake level viewers; map-based analyses that show the relationship between future conditions and existing development; and frameworks like the ESRI StoryMaps that arrange narrative, images, and spatial data in a sequence for users to scroll through. 

Why it supports resilience

Visualization tools help overcome the difficulty of making changes to a system that appears to be working today by showing the harm that is in tomorrow’s path. 

How it is used

Visualization tools are effectively used as part of educational materials. They can clarify and emphasize data findings. They are especially suited to showing possible futures. 

Possible obstacles to implementation

Some technical expertise is required to craft compelling and accurate visualizations. 

Example

Coastal Hazards of the Western Upper Peninsula Storymap

The Western Upper Peninsula Planning and Development Region produced a comprehensive StoryMap with visual resources about coastal flooding and erosion alongside contextual information about Lake Superior and the culture and geology of the Keweenaw Peninsula. The tool embeds images, videos, and links to data tools to create a compelling invitation to learn. 

Watershed Game

The Watershed Game is a hands-on simulation activity for up to 25 people, created by the Minnesota Sea Grant. It allows complex relationships between actions and conditions in a watershed to be shown in a compressed, experiential format.

Why it supports resilience

The design of the game illustrates the tradeoffs and the effects of decisions made in watershed management. It allows players to consider a wide range of options and to see the results generated by different approaches. The fun aspect of it supports ongoing engagement with watershed issues.

How it is used

Any group with interest in or responsibility for watershed management decisions could play the Watershed Game in order to gain a baseline familiarity with the issues at hand, and to provide a common vocabulary among participants in future conversations. 

Possible obstacles to implementation

One trained facilitator is needed to successfully run the Watershed Game. 

Example

The Michigan Association of Planning (MAP) and the Michigan Coastal Management Program jointly sponsored a session of the Watershed Game at a Coastal Resilience Summit attended by planners, planning commissioners, and other land use decision-makers. The Game is now available to communities as an on-site workshop through MAP to educate community leaders and supplement their planning process.  

Planning is the link between engagement and implementation

Community engagement is generally, and ideally, conducted as part of a planning process. Data determines the possible set of actions that a community can take, and engagement findings determine the preferred course. These recommended actions are described and formalized in the plan and then adopted by leadership. As described in Section I, this plan forms the required legal policy basis for regulation, and the purpose of that regulation is to shape investments, property, buildings, and systems so that they avoid harm to public health, safety, and welfare. This chain of processes is what translates community desires and experiences into the community they wish to see around them.

But it bears pointing out that the process doesn’t have to start at the beginning, and in fact it rarely does. Often, it is only when something goes awry in the investment phase that we look to see how far upstream a change must be made in order to produce a different outcome. “That should have been regulated” means “we needed to plan for that.” And that, in turn, means “we needed to research and engage.” This is why the “planning process” is often depicted as a cycle. Everything is iterative.

Implementation resources

Every allocation contains a tradeoff. The equitable distribution of resources, especially scarce ones, are a distinct responsibility of the public sector. A dollar spent on a coastal study supporting a new setback is a dollar not spent on maintaining the public beach, and it’s also hopefully a dollar that doesn’t need to be spent on removing an abandoned property on the brink of immersion. Capacity and funding are perpetual challenges, and it seems unlikely that there will ever be enough of both to do everything. Acknowledging both the public responsibility and the fundamental limitations allows us to go straight to the next question: “OK then, what CAN we do?”

Existing processes

Master / comprehensive plans, zoning ordinances, hazard mitigation plans, and capital improvement plans are projects in every community, whether coastal or not; park and recreation plans, sustainability plans, and tax increment finance plans like DDA plans are also not necessarily connected to the presence of a coast. But a portion of the investment made in them can be shaped so that it directly benefits shoreline management. Wherever land use, water quality, or infrastructure are discussed, specific and direct attention to coastal issues can be carved out for little to no extra cost. 

Funding 

Budget allocations; assessments

Budget allocation is an expression of the taxing authority of a unit of government. A special assessment is a budget allocated directly related to a special project, where the funds must be used in a highly specific way related to the request for the assessment. 

Millages

Residents have the option of passing a millage to use the public funding process to achieve a specific aim. Parks, including parks containing shorelines, are frequently supported by millages. A community could pass a millage to support a coastal project or to create coastal management capacity. 

Crowdfunding

In some instances, an appeal has been made to collect funding directly, often to pay for a specific project. The Public Space, Community Places program is a partnership between the Michigan Economic Development Corporation and Patronicity that has used crowdfunding and a match to fund over 400 projects, including some along Great Lakes coasts. These can serve public access goals. 

Grants

The Michigan Coastal Management Program disburses about $700,000 of funds annually to coastal units of government in partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). These funds support planning and projects that are focused on promoting healthy ecosystems, preventing damage to them, creating shoreline access, and encouraging environmental stewardship. They must be matched by the recipient in cash, in-kind services, or donations.  

Michigan Sea Grant has made a dedicated effort to compile and maintain a comprehensive list of funding sources in its Coastal Resilience Resource Hub. The Funding landing page also points to other resource compilations. 

Free money is, of course, never free. At a minimum, it must be found and secured, and often it must be carefully managed and extensively reported on. In this way, funding is closely tied to capacity. 

Capacity

Watershed organizations

Known by a variety of names such as watershed councils, coalitions, and “friends of” a specific waterbody, these locally organized and nonregulatory groups generally bring together various stakeholders to protect water quality. They may be involved in watershed planning, permitting, moving projects along, educating the public, and coordinating information across jurisdictions. Members and staff of these organizations can often provide access to detailed expertise with minimal direct cost.

Regions

Michigan’s 14 Planning and Development Regions, known also as Councils of Government (COGs), are purposely designed to help address capacity challenges: they “help local governments resolve issues of overlapping services, help fill gaps in services through service sharing arrangements, and help find resources from the federal and state governments to address unmet needs.” Ten of the regions serve Michigan’s coastal areas. 

Michigan’s COGs provide various services, which may range from administering federal programs to providing direct technical assistance to communities, and they vary widely in staff capacity themselves. However, these formal structures already exist as a mechanism for delivering support to individual communities, as well as to counties. Increasing resources to the regional COGs is a way to increase the capacity of many jurisdictions at once. A dedicated coastal planner at each COG could begin to truly move the needle on helping communities develop the plans, ordinances, and strategies that support wise coastal protection, restoration, and development.

Shared  positions

Communities can also decide independently to consolidate capacity by sharing positions. Especially among adjacent communities that effectively function as a single market, these arrangements allow for greater consistency between jurisdictions. Cost savings and access to more specialized expertise are also benefits.

MEDC technical assistance

The Michigan Economic Development Corporation provides funding that communities engaged in its Redevelopment Ready Communities program may use to contract for technical assistance services from the provider or consultant of their choice. The RRC program focuses on planning, zoning, and capacity building  activities. 

Where do we go from here? 

Community of Coastal Practice

The 272 local jurisdictions and 41 counties in Michigan that abut a Great Lake all face similar challenges. Shared information, efforts, and solutions benefit not only the communities, but the Lakes as well.

A formalized Community of Coastal Practice would allow communities to learn from each other, pool resources, and achieve economies of scale. More than that, it could increase effectiveness within the community by serving the goal outlined by environmental communicators: it helps people act in their own spheres when they know what others are doing and how they are faring. Regular events, communications, and education can help integrate coastal management into more community processes, easing the burden. Support is a soft input, and its benefits are often overlooked—but they can be quite substantial. 

The next right thing

The basic requirement of pursuing any improvement is to keep moving toward it. Wherever your community is in its coastal management journey, the same question applies: what’s the next right thing we can do? If you are moving toward a goal, keep swimming, and try to keep one eye on connecting this task to the next one. If your efforts have stalled, pick up a small piece of the plan or project to dislodge the stationary momentum without getting overwhelmed. If you’ve hit a roadblock, reach out—help, a new perspective, and encouragement all defuse barriers. And if you don’t know where to start, look around for a problem to solve. There’s never any shortage of those, and it puts a sharp focus on the effort. 

Further out (for now)

There are coastal land use problems that the tools here will not solve. Planning and zoning are forward-looking tools, more in the realm of prevention than adaptation, but of course they intersect with existing conditions. 

A major feature of zoning is that it applies only to new development, allowing what was done under previous regulations to stand relatively undisturbed. The Great Lakes, however, are not a party to this agreement and are not bound by it. They are their own regulating force, and what we build is subject to them on their own terms. Where we are in their right-of-way, they claim eminent domain thoroughly and without due compensation. We are welcome to attempt structures of resistance, for which the lakes exact continuous payment until the day they claim those, too. 

None of this fits within our established legal and economic frameworks around development. This is why conversations around concepts like insurance reform and managed retreat are so difficult, unappealing, and downright hostile: they represent a defeat under our own rules. Yet the truth that must be contended with is that the economic boon of the waterfront can, and does, turn to economic loss—both public and private. The less orderly our departure from lakes’ right-of-way is, the costlier it will be. And the most orderly departure likely requires the enormous task of adjusting those legal and economic frameworks to account for reality. This is what will make insurance reforms and managed retreat possible. The force of the lakes will make them necessary.