This presentation is part of the Supporting Sediment Transport organized session.
Because of a confluence of development pressures and irrepressible physical dynamics, growing numbers of Great Lakes shoreland properties and structures, built on shifting sandy shores, are at heightened risk of loss from coastal storm surge, inundation, erosion, and shoreline recession—a phenomenon akin to sea level rise on ocean coasts. In response, property owners often install (or seek to install) extensive hardened shoreline armoring structures like seawalls and revetments to arrest those erosional processes. Those structures, however, substantially impair, if not ultimately destroy, natural coastal beaches and other shoreland resources, as well as accelerate erosion of neighboring shoreland properties. The clash of imperatives to protect shoreland properties versus conserving coastal resources signifies a wicked dilemma that Great Lakes coastal states and communities cannot avoid: armor or withdraw? More precisely, should a state or locality allow the continued armoring of Great Lakes shorelines in an attempt to fix in place shoreland properties, at great and ongoing private and public expense, and ultimately risk the loss of public trust resources? Or alternatively should it allow—and should it compel shoreland property owners to allow—natural processes to proceed, even though doing so will result in the natural conversion of privately owned shorelands into state-owned submerged bottomlands sooner than would otherwise occur? In many places, states and communities cannot hope to simultaneously protect both the beach and the beach house along naturally receding Great Lakes shorelines; they must choose which interest to prioritize first, recognizing the cost of doing so by losing the other. Given that conundrum, this presentation will provide a survey overview of the institutional arrangements that shape federal, state, and local management of Great Lakes coastal shorelands; key planning methods and policy options that states and localities can employ to reconcile competing demands between development pressures, public and private investments, property rights, and natural systems; and legal doctrines that authorize and constrain state and local actions, including especially the public trust doctrine. The presentation will also briefly identify and consider litigation that will likely arise given growing pressures to armor and—potentially—enhanced natural shoreline protection efforts that states and localities might undertake in response, along with the potential adjudication of those claims.
