March 23, 2023 at 11:31 a.m.
River News: Our View
Pelican River Forest easement must be killed once and for all
It's clearly a bad deal all the way around.
It's bad deal for the state, given the burden the DNR's land acquisition program already is on state taxpayers - $1.2 million a week in debt service, and now the DNR wants to tack on another $4 million overall.
Then, too, there's the impact on northern Wisconsin as our counties - and our future potential for economic growth - get eaten alive by an out-of-control bureaucracy that has an insatiable appetite for ever more government control of everything, including the lands of northern Wisconsin.
And there are the taxpayers who will have to pay higher and higher taxes as our tax base shrinks with ever more government purchase of land and easements, soon enough making it too expensive for all but the very wealthy - and bureaucratic overseers and minders - to live here.
Of course, that's exactly what the bureaucratic overseers and minders want.
All those arguments are compelling enough, but the revelations this past week that the DNR subverted due process and misled the Natural Resources Board (NRB) about supposedly unanimous public support for the acquisition makes it imperative that the legislature's Joint Finance Committee convene immediately and vote to kill the project.
Put simply, the DNR did not comply with statutory requirements that it give voice to communities that oppose a proposed purchase, and that such opposition be conveyed to the Natural Resources Board before any vote is taken to approve funds for the project.
As we report in today's edition, that simply did not happen.
The NRB convened last October 26 to consider the Stewardship purchase. Before board members voted, they were treated to an enthusiastic and even gushing performance by DNR real estate chief Jim Lemke, who proclaimed that in all his years he had never seen such overwhelming support for a project. He rattled off an impressive list of groups to make his point.
He did not mention one opponent of the easement purchase.
The thing is, all of those supporters were special interest groups. What was missing were the voices of the people, the communities that would be most affected.
As it turns, two of those towns, Sugar Camp and Monico, had passed resolutions opposing the purchase. Not only that, they had properly submitted those resolutions to the DNR for presentation to the board. The DNR confirmed they received those resolutions - the one from Sugar Camp was confirmed as received eight days before the NRB meeting, and the one from Monico was confirmed as received five days before the meeting.
And yet not a peep about them at the NRB meeting. To be sure, if ever there was one group of people who needed to have their voice heard, it was the town of Monico, whose economic future is set to be sacrificed at the altar of ever more public land. More than 80 percent of the town's land is set to disappear beneath a tsunami of government expansion.
To put it another way, when the NRB signed off on the proposed purchase, the NRB effectively signed that town's death warrant. You'd think town leaders would have been able to at least appeal the conviction and sentence, to have their day in court. But, no, as is so typical of the DNR, what towns wished were never revealed.
Again, that is contrary to state law.
To be sure, Lemke says he was not aware of such opposition. No one gave him the Monico and Sugar Camp resolutions, he says. One of his underlings - Niccole Smith in the DNR's Rhinelander office, a real estate specialist whom Lemke had tapped to receive the resolutions - was in fact in receipt of the two resolutions but, for some bizarre reason, simply sat on them.
Now we cannot say for sure whether the suppression of these two resolutions was a deliberate act or one of gross incompetence. But what is clear is that the events that took place have hopelessly compromised the statutory notice process, and makes it vitally important that the Joint Finance Committee vote this project down.
To do otherwise would be to disrespect due process. To do otherwise would be to thumb its nose at the rule of law.
One thing is for sure, in working through the thread of what happened with these resolutions, the DNR's answers do not add up, and the behavior that does add up is inexcusable.
For example, Sugar Camp town chairman Scott Holewinski maintains that his records show that Smith never returned his calls between September 19 - when the DNR sent out its notices giving local governments 30 days to pass a resolution and get it to the DNR - and October 16, the day before the Sugar Camp town board passed its objecting resolution.
In an email to Holewinski, Smith does say she left him "a few voicemails" - it's not clear when - and Smith did convey to the town clerk that she had received the resolution on October 18 and that she had left Holewinski a message and her number. Holewinski says he never got a message until October 20, two days later and the day before the DNR's deadline. By that time, Holewinski was out of state and another town supervisor could not connect.
Such lack of communication is inexcusable. Smith was the contact person the DNR had given to the towns to answer their questions in that critical 30-day period, but it appears that she only reached out after the towns had reached a decision adverse to the DNR's interests, and then only half-heartedly.
We will offer up a caveat here. Maybe she did reach out. In our experience with emails and cell phones, we have had both emails and voicemails never show up on our devices. It doesn't happen a lot, but it isn't rare, either. It's possible Smith did reach out and Holewinski simply has no record of it.
Whether that is the case or not, it's still a total failure on the DNR's part. The DNR only had a statutory requirement to send a notice and be done with it, but it had a service and mission requirement to aggressively reach out to towns and field their questions. Smith or another person out of Rhinelander should have been making the rounds to town meetings.
After all, Lemke's tag line at the bottom of every agency email he sends is, "We are committed to service excellence." Making a few phone calls and leaving a few voicemails over the course of a month, even if that happened, is not service excellence; it's just the opposite. In any case, this was a total disconnect. Who knows, had the DNR actually done its job and answered Holewinski's questions, maybe the town board would not have passed an objecting resolution.
The bigger problem is, even if we assume Smith did reach out, if feebly, her failure to forward the resolution to Lemke once she had it still makes not one shred of sense. After all, that was the whole point of the letter - to notify local governments that they had 30 days to pass supporting or opposing resolutions, and that, for those who passed and returned such resolutions, the NRB would consider them. In fact state law requires that the NRB consider them.
So the whole point of her job was to collect the resolutions for the NRB. Indeed that's why the notices went out when they did, so the towns could return them in time for the NRB to consider them. By what rationale does the employee tasked with collecting the resolutions for the NRB think it's OK to simply stick them in a drawer and forget about them days before the critical meeting?
In her email to Holewinski, Smith maintains that she withheld the resolution because her "intent had been to discuss the project with you and answer any questions I could prior to sending the resolution on, but we never connected."
Again, even if we assume the best, that there was just honestly missed connections, by October 21 there was no more time. As Holewinski points out, the deadline had come. The town had already made its statement. The NRB meeting was five days away. Smith had a duty, a responsibility, and indeed a statutory requirement to forward that resolution to Lemke and the NRB. She did not.
And the same fate met the Monico resolution - it sat there in her desk drawer, so to speak, unknown to anybody else in the DNR for the next three months. Well, it's hard to object to the NRB when you've been captured and are being held hostage in a DNR desk drawer.
As incredulous as that explanation sounds, the explanation offered by Lemke to The Times is equally ludicrous.
For one thing, Lemke says he never found out about the resolutions until after the DNR board meeting, nor did he think to ask Smith whether any resolutions had come in. Lemke says it's not his style:
"I typically rely on staff to bring forward a variety of subjects they feel needs involvement from me, versus resolving questions themselves," he said. "In this instance, I believe Niccole felt she was appropriately answering the town's questions on the conservation easement, and as such was dealing with the resolutions at the local level and didn't involve me."
Say what? That's rubbish. He was in fact at the center of involvement on a significant matter. He's the one who sent the notice. He's the one who tasked Smith with collecting the resolutions. Most important, he's the one making the presentation to the NRB, which included whatever public input the agency had on the project.
Again, by what rationale is he not involved? By what rationale doesn't he ask Smith about any resolutions that might have come in, especially since they were local governments at ground zero of the project?
The bottom line is, Jim Lemke is the agency official who notified the towns and assured them that, if they passed resolutions, the NRB would consider them. It was exactly his job to do that, and he made a promise to do it. Yet he failed to follow up. He failed to do his job.
There are other questions coming out of this story, such as the fact that the DNR sent Oneida County's notice to a man who had not served on the board for about five months. There are questions about how the DNR got Langlade County to give up its concerns and climb on board with the project.
We have two recommendations. The first is, kill the project. Again, by design or by incompetence, the statutory notice and resolution requirements were not met before the NRB voted, and that is more than a technical matter. Some of the most important voices at the local level were not heard.
On that alone, the project should die. Along with that, before any more of these kinds of projects are approved - including this one - the legislature needs to look at statutory changes to end wholesale easement purchases, and especially to lengthen notice requirements and give local governments more say in approving or defeating such projects.
The situation we have today is that, in making these decisions, the bureaucracy is more important than the people. That must end.
The second recommendation is that legislative oversight committees should take up former Supreme Court justice Daniel Kelly's advice and actually exercise its oversight responsibilities. There needs to be an investigation into this fiasco. There needs to be hearings. There needs to be accountability.
It makes no sense that the DNR point person for resolutions would not forward those resolutions to appropriate personnel. What was the point of asking for resolutions if no one was going to hear about them anyway? Similarly, it makes no sense that Lemke would not be interested in what the towns right in the middle of the conservation purchase had to say.
Their answers don't add up.
These are important questions. The Legislature needs to answer them. All of Wisconsin needs to know the truth.
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