March 23, 2018 at 4:53 p.m.
Taking control of local control
Taking control of local control
OK, let's get real here. There's actually some things that are not so great about spring: potholes, mud, floods, taxes.
And let's not forget spring elections. Motivating someone to vote in a spring election takes all but threatening to taser them into jellyfish, and even then they might say no.
And on the face of it, who can blame them? While there are many good local officials - you know who you are - there's always a high proportion of candidates who just aren't qualified, or who have a special interest they want to push.
In addition, far too few women and younger people run, so the candidate pickings are usually slim. Voters generally have the option to vote for a rigid ideological activist or a knob or a log, or Uncle Bobby, who has nothing better to do, though he hasn't a clue.
Sometimes the choices are so scarce that the same guy - yes, it's almost always a guy - runs in four or five elections at once. It's a wonder they don't end up running against themselves.
And for all this, to get to the ballot box, voters have to contend with spring potholes, muds, and floods. At least there's no poll tax.
Why bother?
We've all been guilty of this kind of thinking on occasion, with slip-ups on election day. But, as our readers might expect, we strongly urge citizens to rethink this spring ritual and make the effort to vote - and to run the next time the opportunity presents itself.
That's because, as we have written before, local governments spend a lot of money, as in a lot of tax money, as in our money. Millions and millions and millions of dollars of our money, in fact.
Sometimes, as in Boulder Junction, they spend it illegally. So we better make sure Uncle Bobby knows what he's doing because he's helping to manage and spend all those public funds.
Then, too, it's not just the money. Local officials make important decisions about myriad issues that significantly affect our daily lives: Law enforcement staffing and oversight; road construction and repair; social services; public health; snowplowing; planning and zoning; land and deed information; and more.
These days, too, and perhaps most urgent and important, there is a growing infiltration of local politics by ideological partisans and organizations pushing statewide and nationalized political agendas. And they are aggressively pursuing these dogmatic platforms by clothing them innocently in the language of localism.
In the old days, meaning about 10 years ago, this wasn't much of a concern. As always, there were some pretty good elected officials - that's true today, too, we reiterate - and there were a few activists, but otherwise there were mostly the knobs on the log and retirees doing the best they could.
Mostly, the activists, particularly environmental and liberal activists, stayed away from local politics and focused their attention instead on passing legislation at the state level.
Then along came the 2010 conservative wave and Republicans captured control of the governorship and both chambers of the Legislature. They have maintained control ever since.
That, in turn, made it all but impossible for activists on the Left to have their will and way in Madison, and so they turned their attention to the local level. Suddenly local control became the issue of the day, and the liberal activists have had greater and greater success with it, given low voter turnouts and few good candidates.
Make no mistake about it, there's nothing wrong with true local control - where the state gives policy options to counties, recognizing that one size does not fit all, and lets the counties control their own destiny.
But that's not what the current brew of local control is all about. These days it's about defying state law, not choosing among options. Most of the state laws they want to defy are those designed to protect the constitutional property rights of homeowners and businesses.
The local controllers like to portray themselves as a grassroots swell of community activists but most often they are anything but. They are the same bad actors who used to work inside state agencies and for special-interest groups when they were trying to take away those same rights at the state level.
There's not that many of them, but it's easy to fill a room and look big, and win elections, when the rest of the community isn't paying attention. A sizable portion of them are NIMBYs - Not In My Back Yarders - who have joined forces with the ideologues to protect their own pieces of elite paradise.
So as the spring elections approach, put aside the inconvenience of flood, mud, and potholes, and vote, and, before you do, ask the candidates some pertinent questions:
Such as, how do they feel about local control? Oh and ask them to define it.
Ask them if they intend to follow their oath to uphold state laws and the state and federal constitutions.
Ask them if they support defying state law and implementing a county shoreland code that is more restrictive than state standards allow.
Ask them if they intend to support restrictive zoning policies, such as large lot zoning and low impervious surface caps for properties.
Most of all, ask them this very important question.
Ask them, if a new county board is elected that wants to make the county less restrictive than state shoreland standards allow, would they support that position in the name of local control, just as they support defying state law to be more restrictive than state law allows?
That last answer will tell you how they really feel about local control, whether they support local control as a true expression of the will of the people, or whether they favor or disfavor it based on the political position the people support.
These days, the local controllers only support local control if the people agree with them. Otherwise, not so much.
The bottom line is, the local control movement in Wisconsin is a small organized cadre of ideologues and activists following a convenient political strategy. It's a fake grassroots movement.
Fake grassroots movements are nothing new in society, just as fake news has been around as long as real news has. Indeed, fake grassroots movements have been around as long as potholes, mud, floods, and taxes.
Such movements are always hard to get rid of, but we can expose them to the sunshine of spring by asking questions and voting accordingly.
Never has true activism been so important on the local level. For we are talking about not just taxes, as important as they are; we are talking about much more than jails and roads and public health, as important as those things are.
We are talking about our constitutional rights - rights that, once surrendered, we will never get back.
So don't be a tasered jellyfish. Vote as if your freedom depends upon it. It does.
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