May 1, 2023 at 12:03 p.m.
River News: Our View
A bureaucracy never changes; it only lies in wait
Lives were ruined, bureaucrats rewrote laws on a whim, and hypocrisy was the gold standard of the day. The agency's arrogance was breathtaking, as was its determination to foreclose northern Wisconsin to as much human habitation as possible.
Back then, the state attacked the northern part of the state with a three-pronged strategy. The state used the relatively new Stewardship program to buy up as much northern Wisconsin land as it could. Two, it claimed huge swaths of the region through determinations that transformed what were really wetlands into fake lakebeds that the state automatically owned.
Much like the CDC declared face masks to be effective despite a decades-long scientific consensus that they were not, so the DNR declared wetlands to be state-owned lakebeds after decades of calling them wetlands. You know, evolving science.
Three, the DNR pursued an extremist state shoreland zoning code with onerous impervious surface caps, long-term elimination via nonconformity rules, and other provisions that would have forever decimated any reasonable economic development or affordable housing in the region.
Much of that plan was derailed once Gov. Scott Walker and the Republicans came to power in 2010. They curbed the massive land-buying scheme. They shelved the lakebed determinations. And they overturned the most burdensome and unreasonable shoreland zoning standards, as well as prevented counties from being more restrictive than those reasonable standards. That latter restraint was important because many counties were, and are, victims of DNR regulatory capture, that is, they do anything DNR bureaucrats want them to do.
Put bluntly, when voters put the GOP in control of state government, the DNR bureaucrats retreated into their little cubicles and warrens with little to do.
Of course bureaucrats usually have the last laugh. Because Wisconsin state government does not have at-will civil service employment, bureaucrats live forever. This thwarts good government because the bureaucrats can thwart the policy agendas of elected officials they don't like - usually the policy agendas of conservatives - all without any fear of being held accountable.
It's a perverse process. The people elect their officials to implement the policies they want, but the state's civil service structure prevents those elected officials from hiring the agency personnel needed to implement that agenda, or to get rid of those who don't like the agenda and refuse to help implement it.
And so it was that after Walker and the Republicans in the legislature were elected, they found they could take property rights reforms only so far: They could stick those bureaucrats in a corner but they couldn't fire them. And because they couldn't fire them, they couldn't hire their own people on the ground.
And so those DNR bureaucrats, as all bureaucrats do, burrowed deep into the bowels of the bureaucracy and laid in wait for the next Democratic governor.
Then along came Tony Evers, who unleashed the anti-democratic bureaucrats among us again. If they were not always specifically the same people, they were nonetheless their ideological relatives, molded and trained and brainwashed in agency groupthink.
And so now the state is back to shutting down northern Wisconsin as fast as it can. The land-buying schemes were curtailed, so the DNR resurrected its bid for complete state control by buying easements instead of land, with the same result - locking up that land forever from development.
And they have begun to weaponize the state shoreland zoning code again, this time by reinterpreting state statutes and the administrative code in more restrictive ways, no matter that neither have changed since Evers took office.
Of course, DNR bureaucrats will stop at nothing to get their way. Ethics and due process mean nothing to them.
So they deliberately hid the fact that there was public opposition to one of its major easement schemes, its plan to forever close off 70,000 acres in the Pelican River Forest with a conservation easement. Among that opposition was a resolution from the town at ground zero of the project. DNR staff had it in hand but the Natural Resources Board never heard about it before they approved funding for the project.
For their part, it should be observed, the DNR is claiming that they were merely incompetent in keeping that opposition from the NRB. Perhaps, but that's mighty convenient incompetence.
Then there is Oneida County's attempt to rewrite its shoreland zoning ordinance to streamline permitting and allow some common-sense changes - you know, like letting people have an exterior stairway to the deck on top of their boathouse.
This is classic DNR behavior - the legislature specifically declared that decks on boathouse roofs were OK and that the DNR could not prohibit them. So the DNR did the next best thing: They denied people access to them.
Two years ago, the DNR decided that certain parts of Oneida County's shoreland ordinance were not compliant and the ordinance needed to be rewritten. The county's zoning committee invited the DNR to a public meeting to explain why the ordinance was not compliant, given that neither state law nor administrative code had changed since the DNR certified the ordinance.
Ah yes, a different governor and a different interpretation. Anyway, the DNR refused to meet with the elected officials, opting instead to communicate through county bureaucrats and local special interest groups.
Now that the county is trying to rewrite the ordinance - primarily based on input from contractors and landscapers who say the ordinance is too restrictive based on practices in other counties - the DNR says those practices won't be certified.
Given that other counties routinely allow those things, including stairs to boathouse roofs, concrete aprons in front of boathouses, and multiple access and viewing corridors, the elected zoning committee again invited the DNR to a public meeting for a discussion.
But the Orwellian bureaucracy has refused once more to meet with the people's elected representatives. Instead, they simply say it's their way or the highway. Again, the arrogance is breathtaking.
As for those other counties, the DNR says it is going to crack down on all that are noncompliant, which it claims it knew nothing about. That seems highly unlikely, given all the years these practices have been going on and the high degree of interaction between agency and local officials on shoreland projects.
Somewhere along the way, some DNR officials must have realized that there existed multiple access and viewing corridors on properties all over the place.
More likely, because those counties did not codify those practices but allowed them through policy, the DNR chose to pick its fights carefully, and the fight they picked was when one county did try to codify the practices. Now the DNR can fight just one county instead of multiple ones at once, and, if it prevails and establishes its legal position clearly, it wipes away those other counties' policies in one fell swoop.
Oneida County supervisors know that and want to form a coalition of counties to change the state statutes, but that's problematic because of a Democratic governor who will not sign any such legislation if it passes.
As always, the DNR's interpretations are based on partisan readings of the law. In the statute governing access and viewing corridors, for instance, the DNR says the statute is clear that only one corridor is allowed, period, no matter what the administrative code says.
But that's only one interpretation of the law. The statute actually says that a county can require property owners to maintain a vegetative buffer zone but must allow "the buffer zone to contain an access and viewing corridor."
Now one can interpret that to mean one and only one corridor since "an" is singular. But that indefinite article is not necessarily singular except as it refers to a class of things, in this case access and viewing corridors. The law does not specifically limit the number of corridors, and depending on legislative intent, it could mean "at least" one viewing corridor.
Indeed, that's the way counties and the DNR interpreted it for years.
Or there could have been no legislative intent on the matter either way. The point is, the statute's language does not expressly forbid multiple viewing corridors. Drafting notes would be helpful, and perhaps clarification is needed, but an unelected state agency with a partisan agenda should not be wielding the power to "clarify" as it sees fit.
In doing so, the agency is up to its old rogue tricks again.
A couple of things never change in this world. One constant is ever-growing and abusive bureaucracy; the other is the fact that, as the investigative journalist I.F. Stone used to say, "Government lies."
And the DNR lies better than most. This attempt to twist the meaning of the state statute is just another of those lies.
Perhaps we can add a third truth: Bureaucracies have contempt for the people. By refusing to meet with the people's elected representatives on matters of critical importance, the DNR has shown its deep and abiding contempt for the people of Oneida County and of Wisconsin.
Several reforms are ultimately needed. The state needs at-will employment in the civil service ranks to ensure accountability to public officials. Bureaucrats will snub their noses at elected officials a lot less when elected officials have the ability to get rid of them.
Then, too, the leaders in the Legislature need to take seriously former justice Dan Kelly's advice to exercise its oversight powers aggressively. The legislature needs to use its power to convene oversight hearings, to compel agency participation by using subpoena power, and to use those hearings as a bully pulpit to shine a relentless light on what the agency is doing to the people of this state.
That might not make an impression on the bureaucrats - nothing usually does - but it could make a big impression on the governor who is in charge of the agency.
It's time to hold him accountable for this agency's rogue ways once more.
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