Northern Wisconsin: Ground zero to prevent complete government control of our land
Northern Wisconsin: Ground zero to prevent complete government control of our land
It’s time to put the Stewardship Fund permanently out to pasture
“The purchase of land north of Hwy. 64 has got to stop if we are ever going to see economic vitality up here. The towns can’t afford EMS services. Our schools have declining enrollment.”—Wisconsin state Sen. Mary Felzkowski (R-Irma)
A titanic battle over the government’s control of land is ongoing right now in northern Wisconsin’s Oneida County and the outcome will have enormous consequences not just for the North but for all residents of the state.
The issue is simply this, the state of Wisconsin, via the DNR, has purchased vast tracts of land and is continuing to purchase conservation easements that will block any development on those lands forever—so much so that the ability of some of the poorest Wisconsin counties are in danger of being forever locked in a rural ghetto where opportunities will be few for the many and dreams for the future will be fewer still.
It is not hyperbole to say that we are in crisis, and most of the state doesn’t even know about it.
The specific skirmish involves the DNR’s attempted purchase of a conservation easement on 55,000 acres of the Pelican River Forest. The purchase—from the land’s private owner, the Conservation Fund—would cast 70,000 acres total into a conservation easement. That would be in perpetuity. As in forever. As in no development ever.
So far, the purchase has been blocked by at least four state senators who have lodged objections with the Joint Finance Committee, including state Sen. Mary Felzkowski (R-Irma)—the only thing holding it up. But the JFC could approve the purchase at any time. It is imperative that it does not.
The reason is pretty simple and straightforward: These purchases of land and easements have reached the point where they pose an existential threat to life in the Northwoods. This purchase alone would place more than 80 percent of the land in the town of Monico under government ownership and/or control, obliterating any chance the town would have to develop economically in the future. Just over 30 percent of all of Oneida County is owned by government—state, county, federal—and as the number of privately-held or controlled acres dwindles, so does any realistic chance to diversify and grow vibrant economies and robust, cohesive communities.
Speaking to the Oneida County board of supervisors this past week, Felzkowski put it this way:
The purchase of land north of Hwy. 64 has got to stop if we are ever going to see economic vitality up here. The towns can’t afford EMS services. Our schools have declining enrollment.
The senator offered up some shocking statistics to underscore how extensive and far-reaching these land control schemes have become. All totaled, Felzkowski said, about 5.9 million acres of land in Wisconsin are publicly held:
Those 5.9 million acres of land are larger than the state of Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island and is equal to the state of Vermont.
The counties of Forest, Florence, Langlade, Lincoln, Oneida and Vilas—some of the poorest counties in the state—have 1.3 million acres of public land, Felzkowski said:
Florence County is 45.7 percent publicly owned, or 32 acres per resident. Forest County is 59.7 percent publicly owned, or 42 acres per resident. Langlade County is 32.6 percent publicly owned, or 9 acres per resident. Oneida County is 30 percent publicly owned, which equates out to 6 acres per resident.
By contrast, Dane County is 3.8 percent public land, which is less than one half of 1 percent per resident, Felzkowski said.
It’s not just a growing threat to the ability of northern Wisconsin to have a sustainable economy, it is an onerous and growing burden to taxpayers across the state. The bottom line is, each one these purchases, whether it is from the state’s forestry account, as this particular purchase would be, or is paid for by borrowing through the Knowles Nelson Stewardship Fund, increases spending and, most often, debt.
Indeed, the vast majority of purchases are bonded through the Stewardship Fund. And what’s the status of that program?
According to Felzkowski’s office, as of December 2022, the Stewardship Fund has accumulated $452,995,930 of debt, which would cost taxpayers $579 million with interest if carried to maturity. In 2022-23, the state will pay a total of $63,975,932 in stewardship-related debt service, including $44.1 million in principal and $19.8 million in interest. That includes $26.4 million in principal and interest that had been paid as of December, 2022 and an additional $37.6 million that is scheduled to be paid in May 2023.
The state typically makes two debt service payments each year, in May and November, the senator’s office states. Averaging the $64 million debt service payment the state is scheduled to make in 2022-23 over 52 weeks, as Felzkowski’s office calculated and pointed out in looking at the debt picture, the state will pay $1,230,306 in debt service every week, including $848,379 in principal and $381,927 in interest.
As for the Pelican River Forest land, in April 2022, the DNR purchased conservation and access easements on 12,410 acres but the Joint Finance Committee stopped that purchase, and Gov. Tony Evers used $4.5 million dollars in other state monies to end-run the JFC and fund the cancelled purchase, removing 12,410 acres in Oneida County from land available for future growth and tax base.
When you consider that the state is already paying more than $1.2 million a week to service the debt of this program, a program that is strangling the life out of northern Wisconsin, it is time not just to oppose this specific purchase but to shut down the Stewardship Fund altogether.
Now I realize that the Stewardship Fund is a popular program—we’re saving precious natural resources!—but let’s take a quick look at why it makes sense to shutter this bureaucratic behemoth.
The sun never sets in a government paradise …
First off, this is not about private property rights, as some supporters of the purchase maintain (that is, as property owners they should be able to seek to protect it forever). Certainly the owners of the land have a right not to develop their property and to sell their land to whomever they wish. They have a right to try and set up a protective easement through a land trust if they can. Their property rights do not offend me. My concern is that the state of Wisconsin and its taxpayers should not partner with them in a scheme that will block economic development within the area forever. While the property owners have every right to not develop their own land, the state should not assist them in restricting the property rights of future owners through easements, especially when the state already has taken control of so much land in northern Wisconsin. Feigning support for the property rights of the current owners is an attempt to distract from the real mission, which is to extirpate those rights for future owners, using the state as a handmaiden.
And, as is the true nature of the DNR, they try to pull off the deal in underhanded ways. For one thing, Oneida County board chairman Scott Holewinski, who is helping to lead the fight on the issue, received only short notice about the pending deal and was given a tiny window to raise objections and mobilize any opponents. Here’s how Holewinski put it to the DNR at last month’s county board meeting:
There was no notification. In about September, the DNR sent me a letter that I had 30 days to submit an approval or disapproval. They gave me a DNR telephone number to call. I called that number five times and left messages and never got a return call until after I submitted a resolution objecting to it. Then everybody came out of the woodwork. The DNR didn’t do anything. They kind of hid on this thing. All we wanted was simple questions answered and we couldn’t get an answer.
Holewinski also pointed out that the DNR publicized to the media and to the NRB resolutions passed by towns such as Schoepke supporting the easement, while never mentioning towns that passed resolutions opposing it, such as Monico and Sugar Camp.
All the foregoing notwithstanding, I am not against the conservation of sensitive natural resources nor I am against a robust network of public lands available for hunting and fishing and other public recreation. But at some point, enough is enough. At some point, there’s no land left for private economic development.
And we have reached that point. Already, as Felzkowski said recently, some towns are so squeezed that they are trying to unload public lands. What is needed is balance, the senator said:
The legislature needs to find a balance between conservation, outdoor recreation and local economic development. When I did listening sessions last month, one of the top issues was townships who actually want to sell some of the state land within their boundaries so they have future opportunities to expand their taxable footprint, increase their local revenues and have the necessary funds to provide critical services like fire, EMS, public safety and roads.
To which I would add, as a conservative who has often called for tight controls over local government spending, it is one thing to place strict levy limits on local governments to prevent them from overspending, but it’s quite another to forever rob them of their tax base so they are snuffed out of existence. The public can pass an increase over the levy limit through referendum; it cannot repeal an easement in perpetuity through referendum. Through these easements, the state gives local governments a Hobbesian choice: Do without essential services, or make your taxable residents pay extraordinarily high and absolutely unreasonable taxes because the state has taken so much property off the tax rolls.
(Proponents of easements will squeal right about here that most of these lands are in the Managed Forest Law program and do pay taxes, but everyone knows they are taxed at much lower rates and provide inadequate compensation from the loss of the property tax.)
The truth is, the Stewardship Fund was never meant to be a permanent fund, and ending it does not mean that no more land will ever be protected by the state. The original law actually sunset the program after 10 years, but, as is the usual practice with government, lawmakers made what was supposed to be a temporary program a permanent one.
The sunset still makes good sense. The plan was to take a decade, inventory the lands the state needed to protect, protect them through purchase or easement, and then get out of the land-buying business, which is not government’s business anyway. After the program hit its sunset, any new parcels proposed for conservation would have to be taken up on a case-by-case basis, the merits of which would be debated by the legislature, with legislation necessary to enact it.
All of which is reasonable and accountable, but a permanent fund run by a giant bureaucracy to buy land and conservation easements means only one thing—the government will keep buying land and purchasing easements forever. That is not necessary or rational, and it is not sustainable, especially for the North. When 80 percent of a town is owned by government, it’s effectively a government town. The private sector withers and dies, and the town withers and dies with it. The Northwoods would become a pristine but empty wilderness devoted entirely to wildlife and elite humans—the affluent bureaucrats and progressives who will, and have, used this as their private playgrounds.
For average families, there would be housing, no jobs, no schools, no room for them.
Unfortunately, Gov. Evers’s proposals regarding the Stewardship Fund would fast-track us toward that dystopian future. Under his budget proposal, Stewardship purchases north of Hwy. 64 would no longer automatically be subject to legislative review as they are now—such review is exactly how the Pelican River Forest purchase is being blocked—and the threshold for legislative review of any Stewardship project would rise from $250,000 to $500,000. His budget would also reauthorize the program for another full decade, along with a new infusion of cash totaling $70 million a year.
Taxpayers statewide should howl right along with the residents of northern Wisconsin.
Finally, it’s always fun to close with a conspiracy theory or two, especially because virtually all the right-wing conspiracy theories of the past three years have proven to be true. You know, that the government and Twitter were conspiring to censor and cancel conservatives; that the FBI interfered in the 2020 presidential election; that the vaccines weren’t safe and effective; that masks and lockdowns don’t work; and that the pandemic began as a leak of a modified virus out of a Chinese lab funded in part by the U.S.
Yeah, that last one is pretty wild, but they have all turned out to be true, so here’s another.
Operation Agenda2030: Depopulate northern Wisconsin …
For years, the Democrats, the DNR, and various corporatists have carried out an aggressive campaign to depopulate northern Wisconsin, and to a great extent it has worked, except for the most recent years when the pandemic boosted the northern population, likely only temporarily.
It’s not just happenstance. The bosses of the government-corporate bureaucracy have a very real goal, which happens to be a central plank in the globalists’ march toward Agenda30–herding populations into dense urban settings and away from rural areas. More people in dense urban areas makes rules and regulations more easily enforceable; it makes dependence on government more likely; it corrals the population into contained encampments that are easily watched and surveilled. Over time, private transportation is displaced by public transportation, and, ultimately , as Danish MP Ida Auken said in 2016 (which was then recirculated by the World Economic Forum): “You will own nothing, and you will be happy.” Moving everyone to the cities is a useful tool toward that goal.
So how does the herding take place? Well, by policy. For instance, rather than cutting taxes across the board so every region of the state can compete, officials have insistently funneled corporate welfare in the form of economic development subsidies to southern and southeastern Wisconsin to encourage companies to start, expand, or relocate there. Think Foxconn.
Then, too, particularly in the Doyle years, the state followed an industrial policy known as cluster development, in which the state was divided into distinct regions, with each region assigned an industrial sector that would be targeted for incentivized growth: manufacturing, agriculture, technology, health care, and so on. Some regions got more than one. But northern Wisconsin was assigned only tourism—the industry with the lowest wages and most seasonal employment. That was to be our niche, and our only niche. (Logging was mentioned, I should point out, but Democrats had ideas about destroying that industry so it really wasn’t a thing with them.) The clustering idea really gained momentum when Doyle was governor. I remembering hearing then Department of Administration secretary Michael Morgan tell us peasants how great it was going to be. Nothing but tourism, no filthy manufacturing to spoil our beautiful woods. The thing is, it is rare that a tourism-only economy can thrive or even survive without other industrial sectors to provide a stable and adequate tax base, not to mention people to fill the tourism jobs.
So as a matter of policy, the state was adopting a depopulation industrial policy. Rather than let the market work, the idea was to channel state subsidies to companies and projects who agreed to work in the favored regions. In other words, the state was picking winners and losers, and the North was a big loser.
Ditto with state railroad policy. Simply put, the North lacks the rail infrastructure needed to attract manufacturing and technology enterprises. Long ago the state and the railroads abandoned any notion of sustaining freight lines in the north. No one has made any move to do anything about it, and certainly not the state in its 2050 comprehensive rail plan, which is focused heavily on basing rail priorities on something called “the equity context.” We all know where that’s headed.
As it did with industrial policy, the state also implemented Smart Growth—compulsory land use planning—facilitated, if that is the right word, by unelected regional planning commissions. This actually began under Gov. Tommy Thompson. The thing is, by definition, Smart Growth is a commitment to principles and strategies designed to direct population growth to already developed areas—urban communities—and to curb growth in undeveloped areas—rural communities.
Here’s the principles the federal Environmental Protection Agency outlined in its February 2012 publication on essential rural Smart Growth “fixes” from the Smart Growth Network: “Create walkable communities”; “Preserve open space, farmland, natural beauty, and critical environmental areas”; and “Strengthen and direct development toward existing communities.”
All of this has always had the potential to have a significantly negative impact on rural communities, as a report by the nonprofit Housing Assistance Council warned in 2004, when it addressed what it called the specific goal of Smart Growth:
An increasing number of states have enacted comprehensive growth management initiatives that focus resources on existing cities and preserve open space in the country in order to curb outwardly sprawling development.
The result? The report concluded …
that rural housing affordability has been constrained by the way in which localities interpret and enact smart growth. The panelists expressed concern that smart growth legislation in their states rarely assesses the impact on the cost of rural housing, and that earmarking state funds for areas with established infrastructure can disadvantage rural communities.
The report also warned that “regional planning can also backfire against rural areas if rural developers are not brought to the table.”
Things really picked up steam when the Department of Natural Resources began rewriting shoreland zoning laws to drive away development from any waterbodies. That captured tens and tens of thousands of acres for the state. Meanwhile, the state assiduously exempted incorporated cities from those shoreland zoning laws, sparing them the deleterious effects on development. But that’s not all they did. The state began to actually claim ownership of tens of thousands of acres of land by simply waving a wand and redefining privately owned wetlands as state-owned lakebeds. The move was so egregious, and the popular outcry so loud, that it gave me the title of my 2009 book: How The DNR Stole Wisconsin. I am happy to report that the book tanked DNR morale for at least a spell.
Then, too, the state has encouraged (all but forced) local governments to enact rigid zoning restrictions that cripple affordable housing projects, further curtailing any hope of economic development. In Oneida County, as zoning director Karl Jennrich acknowledged at a county meeting a few weeks ago, building economically viable apartments is virtually impossible.
And finally there was the land-buying schemes launched by ending the Stewardship sunset provisions. Actual land-buying was curtailed during the Walker years, but, as we are witnessing now, the department simply shifted its strategy to purchasing easements to control the land, which accomplished the same thing as ownership. Every MFL land in northern Wisconsin—and it is substantial—has a target on its back.
Right now, we have plenty of pristine public land that can and should be preserved and maintained for all. These are precious resources and making their preservation a top priority has secured ample unspoiled lands for both a healthy environment and recreation . What we don’t have now is enough focus on preserving and growing healthy communities. There needs to be balance between the two. There is not.
There is one important point to remember as we go foward over this next year. Whoever controls the land controls our destiny. The people can control the land, and live free, or the government can control the land .. and the people.
It’s a straightforward choice.