January 24, 2018 at 4:24 p.m.
Environmental elites and the coming housing tragedy
Environmental elites and the coming housing tragedy
The vote was 12-6 to bring the county's shoreland ordinance into state compliance, a proper vote. The state no longer allows counties, in general, to be more restrictive than the state shoreland zoning rule known as NR115.
But environmental elites packed the board room, and what they wanted was the board to reject the ordinance because it wasn't restrictive enough. Since it is state-compliant, that means they think the state isn't restrictive enough.
So the elites wanted to defy the state, and that's the first reason our taxpayers should be offended and upset. To refuse to adopt a state-compliant ordinance would give the state the right to adopt, enact, and enforce a superseding ordinance that would be state-compliant, and all at taxpayers' cost.
That cost might not bother a millionaire environmentalist elite, but a struggling middle-class homeowner in Rhinelander or Minocqua would probably think otherwise.
Of course, as environmental radical Bob Martini - otherwise known as The Regulator - pointed out, the DNR probably wouldn't take such a drastic step. Which means, as corporation counsel Brian Desmond observed, aggrieved homeowners probably would.
That is to say, they would sue the buckets out of the county as soon as they were denied a permit for something the state allows but the county does not. All that litigation would cost a lot of money, and taxpayers would foot the bill.
It would be one thing, we suppose, if the elites wanted to defy the state on principled grounds, but they do not. It would be one thing if they wanted to defy the state because they truly believe the current standards do not protect the resources as the Public Trust Doctrine requires. But they do not.
They want to defy the state not because they want the resources protected, but because they want themselves protected - they and their aesthetically pristine estates.
How do we know this, besides the fact that one lake property owner implored supervisors to "protect us" rather than "protect the resource?"
For one thing, they are bellyaching for larger lots and greater frontage minimum requirements when these have nothing to do with water quality. We all know what degrades water quality - that would be too much impervious surface (IS) coverage - and we already have regulations that restrict the amount of IS coverage in the shoreland zone, regardless of lot size.
What larger lots do protect is aesthetic quality, and that's the real issue for the radical aestheticists.
Truth be told, we have more regulations than are really needed. With less than 2 percent of our watersheds developed, it would take hundreds of years of development for them to even begin to approach the 10 percent threshold at which water quality degrades.
What's more, the state projects little to no development for the region in the foreseeable future. In progressive Minnesota, regulations are relaxed in such regions, not tightened like a noose around the neck of economic prosperity.
So Oneida County's taxpayers and working middle-class families should be offended that these costly proposals are based on bogus scientific assertions. They should be offended by regulations that would not only lead to costly litigation but strangle reasonable economic growth and job creation by capping development when no cap is warranted. They should be offended even more by the hypocrisy by which the environmental elites argue their case.
They do so by asserting the right of local control, by bemoaning the loss of local control to the state. The best government is the one closest to the people, the radical aestheticists scream.
Never mind that the county's reason for being, by statute, is to enforce the laws and policies of the state. A county is nothing more than a legal instrument of the state, its administrative arm.
Never mind that indeed, but here's the hypocrisy: A decade ago, when the late supervisor Gary Baier was challenging the state's then restrictive shoreland code and attempting to fashion a more lenient county ordinance, it was many of these same elites who were screaming for the DNR to come in and impose a superseding ordinance.
Where was their devotion to local control then?
Ask any one of them a hypothetical question, namely, if the state had the shoreland ordinance of their dreams, and a new and popularly elected county board attempted to defy the state and enact a more lenient ordinance, would they support that attempt to undercut the state in the name of local control?
Just ask them, and you'll see the hypocrisy drip from their lips like thick maple syrup. A few - like supervisor Jack Sorensen did the other day - might hold their nose and stand on principle, but most would not.
If that hypocrisy ever gets its way, and six votes was six votes too many, it'll cost middle-class taxpayers plenty.
But there is another reason the property owners of Oneida County, as well as the renters among us, should be offended by the actions of the aestheticist elite.
That's because, thwarted by the state's new shoreland laws and now-compliant county ordinance, the radical aestheticists are urging the county to impose those larger lot sizes and minimum lot widths on all properties in the county, both in the shoreland zone and those outside it.
That the county could do, no question. The county cannot impose larger lot requirements on a property just because it's in the shoreland zone when it does not do so on inland properties - that's illegal and a violation of equal protection guarantees - but it can do so if it imposes those regulations on everybody.
At that point, it's not a shoreland regulation governed by NR115 but a general zoning ordinance or subdivision regulation, and it constitutionally passes muster.
So, to protect their aesthetic paradises with 200-foot minimum lake frontage regulations, the elites want to punish everybody by imposing 200-foot minimum widths on every property in the county.
Just imagine what that would do to housing prices. Not only would the cost of home ownership skyrocket, but so would rents as the number of potential properties dwindles in inverse proportion to lot size increases.
Affordable housing would be eviscerated, and in a county where the population is already being squeezed by housing costs. As of 2016, 46 percent of the county's rental population was already considered "housing burdened," that is, they already pay more than 30 percent of their income in rent.
Increasing minimum lot sizes countywide would push these and many more people, including homeowners, beyond the tipping point. What is now a housing crisis would quickly become a housing tragedy.
Radical aestheticists like to preach about how protecting water quality protects our tourist industry, but they don't seem to ever consider that these relatively lower-wage jobs must be filled by people who need affordable housing.
Just where are these people supposed to live in the thriving economy of the aestheticists' imagination? It's a disconnect the environmental elites never address.
Offended or not, both those who rent and middle-class property taxpayers ought to know what the radical aestheticists have planned for them: Class-based housing segregation.
That's what is already in place to a large degree, and, if the radical environmentalists have their way, a lot more is coming, and to a neighborhood near you.
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