May 24, 2017 at 4:31 p.m.
Supervisor gone rogue
Supervisor gone rogue
We could say he's insane, but that would surely require us to have some type of government license. We could say his wheels have come off, but we cannot proclaim to be engineers.
However you say it, though, Oneida County supervisor Bob Mott has gone completely rogue, and the facts cannot be argued or ignored.
Simply put, Mott has openly called for the county to break state law by passing a shoreland zoning ordinance that is stricter than state minimum standards, which state law does not permit.
"I would like to challenge the planning and development committee to rewrite the county shoreland protection ordinance and include language that goes beyond the minimum in NR115," Mott said.
To do so, Mott said, would be in the best interests of the lakes and of the people.
Well, not so fast. For one thing, if the county did that, the state would simply step in with a superseding ordinance and replace the county's version. So it would be folly, and costly folly at that.
Then, too, let's be straight about what Mott wants the county to do, and about what he himself is up to.
First, he wants the county to defy its fundamental mission, its principal reason for being, which is to serve as an administrative arm of the state, that is to say, its very purpose is to administer many of the laws and regulations of the state.
By advocating that the county break the laws it was created to enforce, he is in effect declaring his desire to secede from the state of Wisconsin. How very confederate of him.
But there's more, for it is important to know why Mott wants the county to break state law. He wants a stricter ordinance, as he himself acknowledges. He wants to establish a little North Korea - a People's Republic of Oneida - in which he can punish people for doing something, anything, he and his cohorts don't like.
Even when the state itself says it is OK to do.
In other words, Mott wants the county to break laws so it can pass laws that you won't be able to break, or else.
Got that?
This is the height of hypocrisy, of course. Bob Mott is an elite who believes he and his fellow big-government friends should not have to follow state laws they have sworn to carry out. They want to break laws so they can exact more punitive blood from citizens.
It is important to remember that counties do not have home-rule authority. They are subject not merely to the state constitution but to legislative enactments, of which shoreland laws and the attendant administrative code are part and parcel. Here's how a Wisconsin Counties Association handbook put it in 2016: "More simply put, counties can only act as the state statutes and constitution allow."
But the elite Bob Mott does not think this should apply to him or to Oneida County.
This should hardly come as any surprise. As we have only recently pointed out, he doesn't much like following other state laws, either, especially the open-meetings law. It was only in April he was bellyaching about it.
Mott said then he should be able to break the law precisely because he's not an expert and might not know what's right or wrong.
"As a committee chairman, I am not an expert in the law and be able to look at an agenda and say, 'Yeah, by law, this is OK,'" Mott said at an administration committee meeting. "We can't even get the attorney general's office to give us an opinion. How am I, as an individual, as the head of a department - chair of a department - supposed to look at it and say by law, 'Are all things OK there?' We can't even get an opinion."
In the current instance at hand, Mott's elitism shines ever brighter. Instead of wanting to break the law because he might not know what it is, he wants the entire county to break the law because in fact he does know what it is and he doesn't like it.
Mott wants the county to enact "laws" that he says will better serve Oneida County's lakes and Oneida County's citizens. Apparently only Mott knows what is right and good for Oneida County, not the elected lawmakers who made the state law, not the planning and development committee members who followed state law, and certainly not the property owners who have been given more flexibility and reasonable use of their properties, and who have been freed to act as the good stewards of resources that virtually all of them are.
Instead, Mott swirls in the swivel of the dictator's chair. He has every right to express his displeasure over the zoning ordinance and the state law binding it, but it never occurs to him that, if he doesn't like the law, he should pursue having it changed through democratic and legal means.
He should work to mobilize voters to act at the ballot box, to lobby their lawmakers, to build public support for change.
Indeed, when the last group of Bob Mott types ran the county - headed by then county board chairman Bill Korrer and county corporation counsel Larry Heath - that's exactly what property rights advocates did.
They came by the hundreds to public meetings; they swept away Korrer and elected a new county board; they neutered Larry Heath's power, they elected new legislators, including Sen. Tom Tiffany, who stood up for them.
Then new supervisors such as the late Gary Baier, Scott Holewinski, and others began writing the ordinances the voters elected them to write, and Tiffany and other lawmakers began to write the state law that voters elected them to write, and that is why we have what we have today.
In other words, the state law and the county ordinance that Mott doesn't like are both products of a democratic rebellion against the very kind of politics and restrictions he is now advocating for.
But the concept of democracy is lost on Mott. He could counter-organize, but he would just prefer a cabal of like-minded group thinkers on the county board to pursue his will and way, no matter what the state law is, no matter his oath of office, no matter what the people think.
One final point. It could be argued that Baier did the same thing when he and his zoning committee crafted ordinance amendments that the state DNR threatened to replace with a superseding ordinance because the agency said they did not meet state standards.
We supported Baier's position then, and we certainly don't like politicians (or journalists) who change their position on an issue simply because it's now politically beneficial to take the other side. That goes on with both parties day and night in Madison, and it's sickening.
But there's a big difference between Baier's situation and now. For one thing, Baier felt the new county ordinances were in fact in compliance with state law and that the DNR was wrong, and he consulted an outside counsel who agreed with him. He also questioned the constitutionality of the DNR's interpretation and readied for a potential constitutional case on property rights.
Mott makes no such claims. He is not questioning the constitutionality of the state law. He is not suggesting that a new ordinance would in fact comply with that law.
He is simply saying the county should break the state law because he does not like it. The dictator's chair swivels again, and Mott pivots all the more comfortably in it.
Mott has abrogated his responsibilities as a supervisor; he has broken his oath of office to uphold the law.
He is a rogue supervisor, simple as that.
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