This year’s 25th Annual Crystal Apple Award ceremony with be the last, Columbia County Chamber of Commerce director David Colby told me this week.
While there have been a few worthy winners in the past (such as FACE Stockholm and Camphill Ghent), the award has a spotty past of picking longterm success stories. As reported previously here, “nearly 40% of the 1992-2013 award winners either defunct, disappeared, or discredited.”
At times, the winner seemed to be whichever business had received the most government backing. A particularly weak pick of this type was the Chamber’s 2010 award to as-yet-unproven Local Ocean, which within a few years defaulted on its County PILOT plan, then then went out of business.
