February 15, 2021 at 10:53 a.m.
Rogue bureaucrats are riding roughshod over property rights again
Rogue bureaucrats are riding roughshod over property rights again
You know, standard practice, bureaucracy 101.
After all, the last time a Democrat ran the executive branch, in the Jim Doyle era, DNR bureaucrats literally ran amok, rewriting laws on a whim, devising ever more restrictions on reasonable property rights, threatening superseding ordinances, and generally making life miserable for everyone who did not agreed with their radical agenda.
Then, too, the Evers administration brought back one of the biggest culprits and social engineers from that time, Todd Ambs, and placed him in a high position of authority in the DNR. So the red flags were flying, in more ways than one.
For the most part, though, the bureaucrats have been silent, or seemingly so, but we knew it was just a matter of time before the other shoe dropped.
Well, the other show dropped, this past month, right here in Oneida County.
On and around January 20, a small group of people, "the team," as they call themselves (at least they didn't call themselves "the squad"), surfaced with entirely new ordinance language they wanted adopted concerning such things as vegetative buffer zones and viewing corridors.
Oh, did we mention that this new ordinance would be far more restrictive than the current ordinance? Did we mention that this team spent months working on the ordinance language without any public input and without any input from the zoning committee?
And did we mention that the team was actually a small den of DNR and county bureaucrats (DNR shoreland policy coordinator Kay Lutze and the DNR's James Yach, zoning director Karl Jennrich, assistant director Pete Wegner and corporation counsel Brian Desmond), along with a few ideological partisans - in other words, a very special interest group that at one time we used to call radical aestheticists.
To their credit, zoning committee chairman Scott Holewinski and supervisor Mike Timmons objected loudly to the back-room shenanigans. After all, they pointed out, the current ordinance was the product of years and years of very public meetings, involving diverse constituencies and stakeholders, and had survived multiple public hearings.
The same thing happened on the state level with the rewrite of NR115. These were the work products of democracy.
On the other hand, the current ordinance attempt is the result of a self-appointed avant-guard, the majority of which are county bureaucrats and a liberated-under-Evers radicalized DNR, with a small ideological-driven sliver of the public thrown in. This is the work product of a very special interest.
But wait! say supervisors Ted Cushing and Jack Sorensen. These are just citizens petitioning their government. It happens all the time, Cushing said, and Sorensen chalked it up to being good old America.
But, as Timmons pointed out, when citizens petition their government for change, they very seldom have been meeting privately with bureaucrats and legal counsel plotting how to get their changes past elected officials - elected officials whom all of them chose not to inform.
Mr. Sorensen was partly right. This is America, folks, but it's America when it is controlled by Democrats.
During the days of Gov. Jim Doyle, when DNR bureaucrats were last going rogue, this was a popular scenario. Special interest groups would hold extensive months-long meetings with DNR staff to hammer out new administrative rules, much of it designed to subvert the very statutes they were supposed to implement.
They got away with a lot of it, too. The unelected Natural Resources Board was merely a rubber stamp, and the Legislature was handcuffed by a passive rule review process that made it virtually impossible to overturn all but the most egregious rules.
And all those special-interest meetings were quite legal, the special interests sang, just like corporation counsel Brian Desmond sang last week, a little too loudly, about his current team effort to subvert years of work by county citizens.
Besides, Mr. Sorensen said, as did Mr. Desmond, the public has a kick at the can now. The proposed language will be vetted by the committee and by the public at a public hearing. So what's the problem?
The problem is the intent of those merry band of vigilante lawmakers. Yes, to his credit, Mr. Holewinski is slowing the process down and demanding that the public be involved on a much wider scale.
The problem is, that wasn't the intent of the vigilantes. They spent months researching and writing - getting their ducks in a row, as Mike Timmons called it - and hoped to go to a quick public hearing, where they would have a decided advantage over those who might oppose them, who would have had little notice and little time to prepare.
That they might not get away with it is beside the point. The point is, as Mr. Holewinski said, Bob Thome - the one elected supervisor of the vigilante team - could have come to the committee, explained the group's problems with the ordinance, and involved the public from the get-go.
That he chose to go the back-room route speaks volumes, and so does the aggressive and even enthusiastic involvement of zoning staff and the corporation counsel.
For one thing, as stated, Mr. Desmond said no laws were broken, no policies violated. And those kind of special meetings happen all the time, he said. Yes, they do, and that scares us quite a bit.
But there are two things wrong with this defense. First, though no laws or policies were broken, it's certainly nowhere near best practices in policy making. Just because something isn't illegal or in violation of policy doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.
The image of three county bureaucrats sitting with the DNR and a couple of environmental elites to write an ordinance in a back room is not just bad optics - conjuring up memories of Larry Heath - but a bad way to make policy and a dumb way, too, given the past shoreland zoning contention between the county and the DNR.
Maybe so, some say, but really Mr. Desmond, Mr. Jennrich, and Mr. Wegner had no ill intent. They were innocent bystanders, taking no part in the actual rewrite, or taking any position on the proposals. To listen to Mr. Jennrich, they did virtually no work and were there merely to provide "comments," as he wrote in an email to Mr. Holewinski.
That's absolutely nonsense. Mr. Jennrich's and Mr. Desmond's remarks are offensive, and more than that, their defense is defeated by Mr. Jennrich's own words.
First, it just stretches credulity to think that these three seasoned veterans of zoning wars would meet for months with a group hell bent on rewriting the ordinance and not think to once utter to anybody on the zoning committee what was going on. Not during discussions of work priorities at committee meetings, not during conversations with Mr. Holewinski about zoning department activities. Not one word. Not even with the DNR involved and talking nonsense about county noncompliance. Not anytime.
And pity the weak argument that the zoning staff didn't do any of the work or advocate for any position. Maybe they didn't do most of the work, but they spent hours of taxpayer time in meetings, and Mr. Jennrich's own words in that January 17 email to Mr. Holewinski exposes that indeed the staff was not only involved but supportive of specific things the vigilantes were proposing, and indeed making suggestions for ordinance language themselves.
Here's how Mt. Jennrich put it: "For me, it was a win/win from a simple perspective that they did most of the work. ..... The proposed language may help with issues staff is having regarding, grading/view corridor violations for boathouses, defining what is land disturbance and inconsistencies with, viewing area, viewing corridor, access and viewing corridor and some other minor fix ups."
And: "Staff did provide comments, suggestions and suggested ordinance changes (based on the work plan for zoning and problems with enforcement). Zoning staff also drafted the enclosed diagrams based on the proposed ordinance changes."
Does not all this entail work? Does not all this show aggressive support for specific ordinance changes? Sure it does, and without so much as a whisper to anyone.
At one point, Mr. Wegner said he was stunned ("you gotta be kidding me") when the DNR pointed to what it called a shoreland standard violation that would render the county's ordinance and practice on that issue noncompliant. That would seem to be a big deal, but still not a mention of it to the zoning committee.
The county zoning committee simply cannot ignore this rogue behavior from staff, and simply cannot let Brian Desmond assume the role of zoning directive in all but name, as Mr. Heath did all those years ago.
Finally, a word about the DNR. We are continuing to investigate the agency's role in all this, but but it is troubling to say the least, for once again the agency is using guidance documents and interpretations to twist the law in whatever manner it wishes and then impose the guidance or interpretation as law.
The Legislature tried to curb that practice, but the Supreme Court threw their law out, saying guidance was really nothing more than that, just guidance. Now we can see how disastrous that decision was, how it is so much more than guidance.
No sooner than the DNR issued its interpretation than we have Brian Desmond warning that if the county doesn't go along, the DNR could pull the trigger of the gun to our heads and write a superseding ordinance, all at taxpayer expense.
Funny how when liberals say they wish they could be more restrictive than the state in shoreland zoning, they call for local control over a dictatorial state. But, when they consider the ordinance too lenient, it's to hell with local control and a call for the dictatorial state.
The DNR is up to no good elsewhere, and reflecting a troubling trend in all state government, has decided to define words to mean exactly the opposite of what everyone else believes they mean, indeed, even substituting opposite words.
For instance, transparency opponents argue that the statute that says a records requests must contain a time limit or subject - the state argued this and lost in court - really means a time limit and a subject.
Here, similarly, the DNR is arguing that statutory language concerning viewing corridors that states "at least 35 feet" really means "at most 35 feet."
All this is Upside Down Land again. If the DNR, if crony Brian Desmond, if rogues such as Mr. Jennrich and Mr. Wegner succeed, our shoreland ordinance will live completely in Upside Down Land.
The zoning world will have been flipped onto its head, to a world in which liberty is defined as justified restrictions on freedom imposed by the state from on high, and where rogue bureaucrats ride roughshod in the dark over elected officials and the public.
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