March 24, 2022 at 1:40 p.m.
Did Dennis Lawrence violate the Hatch Act?
Did Dennis Lawrence violate the Hatch Act?
What most people don't know is that Wisconsin has its own state-level deep state, in which agencies and state actors make decisions and carry out governmental functions that have enormous impacts on the daily lives of residents, but who also act without direct accountability.
There is the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands, for instance, a little backwater of an agency that has more than $1.2 billion of your money sitting in a bank account. That's a whole other story, but we can only focus on one deep agency at a time.
Today's focus is on the North Central Regional Planning Commission (NCRPC), one of nine regional planning commissions around the state.
And what are those? you ask.
It's a great question with no really good answer. The one thing we know for sure is that they are "public agencies," as the NCRPC itself acknowledges. So they are creatures of government, scary enough right there.
Beyond that, though, it gets murky. They are public agencies created by executive order of the governor but eventually authorized by state law upon petition by local governments. The law directs these commissions to hire staff and to make and adopt "a master plan for the physical development of the region."
Pretty heady stuff for unelected bureaucrats. But none of that make these commissions a state agency. Their employees are certainly not state employees. Their governing boards are composed of people appointed by local government boards or the governor, and so the planning commission is a kind of super local agency that local governments have been allowed to form to serve them all.
Only thing is, when it comes to comprehensive planning, which is a major state-directed function of these commissions, the statutes refer to regional planning commissions as a "local governmental unit" all their own, with the power, under certain conditions, to adopt for a county a comprehensive plan the county hasn't approved.
So on the one hand the regional planning commission is a free-floating public agency in the service of local government, while on the other hand it is a local government itself, with power to impose plans on those other local governments.
This is the quintessential example of a deep state at work.
This makes for a curious governance structure. We have the "formal" government, you know, the one elected by the people - on the local level, our elected town boards, elected village boards, elected city councils, and elected county boards, plus the agencies accountable to them; on the state level, our elected state representatives and elected senators, and the elected governor, plus the agencies directly accountable to them.
Then there are the regional planning commissions, sometimes called agencies but that are directly accountable to no single elected body and that, like Cinderella at the stroke of midnight, suddenly transform into local governments themselves.
This is what happens when liberals and establishment Republicans control things for any longer than 10 seconds.
Now along comes the North Central Regional Planning Commission's executive director, Dennis Lawrence, who decided this past week, at the behest of Oneida County supervisor Ted Cushing, to inject himself into the spring Oneida County board elections.
Seems we asked candidates whether they would support terminating the county's membership in this hybrid Jekyll and Hyde government ogre, and that got Lawrence to dancing with the deep state stars.
So he sent out an email extolling the virtues of the NCRPC to "supervisors." We're not quite sure whether he sent the email just to supervisors or to all county board candidates, but what we do know is that he suggested that his talking points in favor of the planning commission could be used to answer the newspaper's question.
That's political campaigning, folks, and it could be illegal, specifically, it could be a violation of the federal Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in certain forms of political activity.
To be sure, Lawrence is not a federal employee, but the regional planning commission does take significant federal dollars and works with federal programs, so the provisions could apply. To cite just one example, the NCRPC received a U.S. Department of Commerce grant in 2021 of $543,600 for a CREATE Your Community program, which is described as a regional ecosystem-building effort. In other words, more liberal waste of taxpayer dollars.
We couldn't find any NCRPC documents relating to employees' engagement in politics - as one might imagine, finding access to many of their documents is like trying to find the needle in the haystack - but we did find guidance provided by the Southwest Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission, one of the other like organizations in the state. Here is what its employee personnel policies handbook, revised in 2005, stated:
"As an agency which receives a large percentage of its funding from the federal government, the Commission is subject to the provisions of the Hatch Act which restricts the political activity of persons employed in connection with federally supported projects."
The manual goes on to state that employees must recognize the closeness of the commission's relationship to political officials throughout the region and its dependence on good working relationships with those officials to achieve the implementation of its plans and policies.
"Thus, its effectiveness depends in part on the prudence with which its employees exercise their political rights," the manual states. "Any staff member may, of course, express his opinion on state or national legislation. However, his position must be clearly stated as his own as representing in no way a position of the Commission unless the Commission has instructed the staff member to take a position on its behalf."
Even if Lawrence's email did not specifically violate the Act, the email was a political act in a political campaign, and thus is as close to a violation as one can get. By sending candidates talking points and then encouraging them to use those talking points to answer a candidate survey that will be read by the public is an attempt by a deep state bureaucrat not merely to influence the candidates but to try and manipulate the electorate.
Lawrence was campaigning, and it was sleazy.
None of which is to say the NCRPC can never blow its own horn. But there is a time and a place for that - at county meetings when no election is at stake, when it is pitching its specific projects to member governments, or when it is promoting itself and the virtues of its existence at budget time.
By all means, the NCRPC should make its case, as should those who would end the county's affiliation with it.
As for the latter case, this past week Lawrence added one more arrow to the arsenal, by not merely exposing the naked political mission of this unelected "local government" and its shapeshifting legislative and executive functions but by revealing the need to dig for all those records to see what is truly going on within the deep reaches of the deep state.
Expect those records requests to be forthcoming.
Comments:
You must login to comment.