February 27, 2023 at 12:15 p.m.
Oneida County board holds off on resolution opposing certain easement purchases
Per the passed motion, the county will form a committee of not more than five supervisors to work on the resolution (authored by supervisor Robert Briggs, the town chairman of Monico) and return it to the county board at its meeting on May 16.
Presumably, supervisors will adjudge claims that some of the resolution's preamble contained inaccuracies, and will study and explore - both for county board members and the public - the issues surrounding the proposed Pelican River Forest purchase, as well as larger issues surrounding the state's ongoing use of the Knowles Nelson Stewardship Fund to buy land and conservation easements that prevent development in perpetuity.
One of the biggest concerns expressed by supervisors Tuesday was that they needed more time to study the issue. The resolution was only reviewed by the corporation counsel February 16, with supervisors finding out about it the following day, February 17, giving them only a three-day weekend to study the matter.
Both supporters and opponents of the resolution will now have about three months to deliberate, debate, and study the question.
Supporters of the resolution also found out about the resolution late last week, but they quickly mobilized. On February 17, Gary Dominski, president of the Pel-Cho Mudd Nutz ATV/UTV Club, sent an "urgent request" email to fellow ATV/UTV club presidents urging them to galvanize attendance at the county board meeting.
"Please feel free to share this email with your membership," Dominski wrote. "The more people we can have at the county board meeting on Tuesday the better."
The Gathering Waters conservation group sent out the same message.
"This is our chance to deliver a timely defeat to resolutions attacking public lands and the private-land conservation effort at Pelican River Forest," the message from Gathering Waters's Charles Carlin stated. "If the resolution passes, it will be used as a talking point by opponents of conservation and public land to say that Oneida County residents are opposed to the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program, to Pelican River Forest, and to acquisition of conservation land."
Supporters of the groups responded to the message, filling the county board room, as well as attending via Zoom. More than a score of citizens urged the board to kill the resolution, or at least table it.
But other board members said they believed the larger public would support the resolution, while state Sen. Mary Felzkowski (R-Irma) delivered a forceful argument for it on the county board floor.
All through the meeting, there was a tug-of-war, sometimes internally within certain supervisors themselves, between wanting more time to study the matter and to determine the wisdom of the resolution itself and wanting to send an immediate message to the state about the land and easement purchases.
All of which led to a first vote to postpone the resolution to May 16, giving the board time to study the issue, which lost 11-9. That led to the idea to form an actual committee to focus on the resolution and its issues and then bring it back May 16.
The resolution
The resolution itself observed that Oneida County has 791,413 acres of area that consist of 78,091 acres of public lakes and rivers, 11,183 acres of federal land, 129,322 acres of state, DNR and Commissioner of Public Lands, 81,733 acres of county forest, 1,703 acres of other county lands, 10,694 acres of towns, churches and school exempt lands, 124,502 acres of Managed Forest Land (MFL) open lands and 78,643 acres of MFL closed lands for a total of 515,911 acres.
The bottom line is, the resolution contended, Oneida County has less than 35 percent of its area to levy all state, county, all towns, schools and Nicolet College tax levies. That figure rises to close to 39 percent without public waters included. Excluding MFL lands, the developable land in the county rises to two-thirds, with one-third off the tax rolls.
That means, according to the resolution, that Oneida County's economic growth and growth of the tax base is "totally dependent on MFL property, which has been left in reserve for years with hardly any taxes paid on it."
The resolution pointed to the burdensome debt the Stewardship Fund already has accumulated: As of December 2022, it's almost $453 million, which would cost taxpayers $579 million with interest if carried to maturity.
According to figures provided by Felzkowski's office to the county, in 2022-23, the state will pay a total of $63,975,932 in stewardship-related debt service, including $44.1 million in principal and $19.8 million in interest. That includes $26.4 million in principal and interest that had been paid as of December, 2022, and an additional $37.6 million that is scheduled to be paid in May 2023.
The state typically makes two debt service payments each year, in May and November. Averaging the $64 million debt service payment the state is scheduled to make in 2022-23 over 52 weeks, the state will pay $1,230,306 in debt service, including $848,379 in principal and $381,927 in interest weekly, the figures provided show.
As for the Pelican River Forest land, the resolution observed, in April 2022, the DNR purchased conservation and access easements on 12,410 acres but the Joint Finance Committee stopped that purchase, and Gov. Tony Evers used $4.5 million dollars in state monies to fund the cancelled purchase, removing the acreage in Oneida County from land available for future growth and tax base.
Those points were contested as factually incorrect. According to the DNR, the JFC did not object to the 12,500-plus acre purchase, which used 100-percent Stewardship monies. And, the DNR states, the money that would be used to purchase this 55,000 acres would not be borrowed but would come out of the DNR's segregated forestry account.
Regardless of funding source, the resolution states that the DNR's purchase of the conservation and access easements would impact not only the future tax base of eight towns in the county but the overall future tax base of all of Oneida County.
As such, the resolution would put the county on record as objecting to the purchase of the easements and call upon the state and the DNR to cease "the unsustainable and runaway debt of the Knowles Nelson Stewardship Fund; as well as to create a statute prohibiting purchases and easements of land when 35 percent of the land within a town or county was public land, not including MFL."
The contestants
Clint Miller, the regional director for the Conservation Fund, which owns the land, spoke to the board. He recounted the widespread practice of timber and paper companies selling their land to real estate investors who sought only maximum harvest and short-term profit.
"Millions of acres of forest acres across the United States are being lost annually because of this practice," Miller said. "With each of these shifts in ownership comes a change ... [where] profit is the big motivator and public access is irrelevant or not important."
And so the Conservation Fund bought the Pelican River Forest to pause that pattern and to secure an opportunity to secure permanent public access and emphasize long-term sustainable forest management, Miller said.
"A conservation easement does this," he said. "It gives a nod to the past but it's available and adapts for the future. You've heard a lot of people speak about what a conservation easement does, but this easement guarantees permanent public access. It opens the gates to more than 50 miles of interior roads that have been closed to the public for nearly a decade."
And the Conservation Fund will make a nearly $1 million gift to build an endowment to maintain those roads, Miller said.
"The easement requires a sustainable forest management plan, and the easement limits the subdivision of land so that snowmobile and ATV trails are not subject to the vagaries of multiple landowners who do not share the passion for motorized recreation," he said.
The land will remain in private ownership, and the easement requires the landowner to pay the taxes now and into the future, Miller said.
Finally, Miller said the Conservation Fund was sensitive to local governments and their desires to maintain land for economic development, and so agreed to remove 1,200 acres of land from the easement along the highway.
Jim Lemke, the real estate section chief of the DNR, urged the county not to oppose the easement purchase, which he said both the Wisconsin Conservation Congress and the Natural Resources Board had recommended.
Lemke said the DNR had a long history of partnering with Oneida County and other counties and towns across the state in using the Stewardship Fund to acquire conservation easements and that those acquisitions were important, as was this purchase.
"This project ranks second in priority nationwide as a key conservation project in the nation, and as a result of that we received almost an $11 million grant toward the purchase of these 56,000 acres," Lemke said. "That reduced the impact on Knowles Nelson Stewardship down to about $4 million."
The DNR remains committed to the project, Lemke said. The easements not only speak to the DNR's mission of sustaining clean water and clean air, Lemke said, but also will also protect ATV-UTV access in the area.
Lemke also spoke about the development potential of the properties.
"The real estate market tends to dictate the highest and best use of these lands," he said. "The reason these properties are left in timber management right now is because that is their highest and best use. If there were other recreation development opportunities, the timber companies would have spun those off years ago. They haven't. This property has always been productive forest and will most likely remain as productive forest."
After Lemke spoke, county board chairman Scott Holewinski took serious issue with the DNR's actions. For one thing, while people were criticizing the late resolution with little notice to supervisors and the public, the DNR itself had given the county little time to act with its own late notice and lack of response, Holewinski charged.
Holewinski said he was unaware of the proposed easement until late in the game.
"There was no notification," Holewinski said. "In about September, the DNR sent me a letter that I had 30 days to submit an approval or disapproval. They gave me a DNR telephone number to call. I called that number five times and left messages."
Holewinski said he never got a return call until after he submitted a resolution objecting to it.
"Then everybody came out of the woodwork," he said. "The DNR didn't do anything. They kind of hid on this thing. All we wanted was simple questions answered and we couldn't get an answer."
Holewinski said the DNR and involved groups failed to give adequate notification and information but suddenly now it was they who wanted more time.
"The DNR didn't do its job," he said. "You want to communicate now because we objected to it, but you didn't want to communicate with us up front."
Lemke took responsibility for the lack of communication, saying that the 30-day notice is part of the established process, but, in this case, with the size and significance of the purchase, he should have communicated sooner.
"I miscalculated based on past conservation easements that the state has done and the popularity of those within those counties, and, since Phase 1 (the 12,500 acres) wasn't objected to, that this too would be received favorably by the county," he said. "That's my mistake."
Briggs and Holewinski both pointed out that the DNR publicized to the media and to the NRB resolutions passed by towns such as Schoepke supporting the easement, while never mentioning towns that passed resolutions opposing it, such as Monico and Sugar Camp.
Lemke said he had never received the objecting resolutions, though the towns insist they were sent to the DNR.
Opposing views
Supervisor Mike Roach offered that the issue was not the principle of protecting land with conservation easements - everyone one supports that to an extent - but how much land the government should be allowed to own or control.
"When we look at governments owning or controlling land, like our Founders said, 'land will make us rich,' land for me to build a hotel on to make me rich, or to have a business, that is pursuing happiness," Roach said. "When we lock up the land with these easements so I can never build a hotel or have a business, I have to wonder if that aligns with our Founders' thinking of our country when there was nobody here."
How much land in our state, in our counties, in our townships-how much should be controlled by government? Roach asked.
"Certainly I love kayaking and canoeing and I'm a Second Amendment guy, I love all this," he said. "But if the government owned 100 percent of the land ... that's communism. That's communism when you can't do anything with your land."
So, Roach asked, what was their number? Just how much land do they think government needs to own or control through easements?
"Is it 30 percent, because that's where we are at?" he asked. "Is it 50 percent? ...What we are really talking about are our freedoms."
Felzkowski also talked about the amount of land under public ownership and control, pointing out that there are 5.9 million acres of public land in Wisconsin.
"That is larger than the state of Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island and is equal to the state of Vermont," Felzkowski said. "The counties of Forest, Florence, Langlade, Lincoln, Oneida and Vilas have a total of 1.3 million acres of public land."
Felzkowski also clarified the DNR's point that the easement purchase would not be bonded but would be purchased using segregated forestry funds. In the 2021-23 budget, she said, the state legislature had a concern with the amount of debt that the state currently had and was trying to bring the level of debt down.
"We used money in the forestry segregated account for the first time in the Knowles Nelson Stewardship history to purchase this," she said. "Yes, Mr. Lemke is right, but that is only a tiny portion of the overall picture."
Felzkowski said she was not against the public ownership of land but wanted to put it in perspective.
"Florence County is 45.7 percent publicly owned, or 32 acres per resident," she said. "Forest County is 59.7 percent publicly owned, or 42 acres per resident. Langlade County is 32.6 percent publicly owned, or 9 acres per resident. Oneida County is 30 percent publicly owned, which equates out to 6 acres per resident."
By contrast, Dane County is 3.8 percent public land, which is less than one half of 1 percent per resident, Felzkowski said.
Felzkowski also said that lower income residents in urban areas will have few opportunities to ever step foot in northern Wisconsin but the ongoing purchases are making it impossible for those living in the north to use their land.
"The purchase of land north of Hwy. 64 has got to stop if we are ever going to see economic vitality up here," she said. "The towns can't afford EMS services. Our schools have declining enrollment."
Felzkowski agreed with Roach.
"There is no wealth or accumulation of wealth without land," she said.
Manufacturers must build on land, Felzkowski said, and for most people, the largest asset they have is their house, which is built on land.
"Everything comes down to the ownership of land," she said. "Government ownership of land is the restriction of the accumulation for the building of wealth. What I have asked for since I've been elected is balance - balance in the ownership of land by the government for outdoor use and allowing people the ability to purchase land."
Felzkowski also reminded everyone that a conservation easement is forever.
"With a conservation easement, what changes?" she asked. "That land is controlled in perpetuity. Not 20 years, not 30 years, like the MFL, or 50 years under the old program, but in perpetuity. Forever. That takes the control out of every local unit of government, and every citizen in this area, and every citizen in this state. Perpetuity is a losing time, people."
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