River News: Our View

The abrupt resignation this past week of Department of Natural Resources secretary Adam Payne, as well as the appointment of Todd Ambs to the Natural Resources Board, is bad news for those who hoped that the DNR as an agency would stay focused on science and nonpartisanship, as it was during the years when Scott Walker was governor.

These latest turns signal just the opposite — a return of the DNR’s authoritarian swagger.

In his resignation letter, Payne relayed to Gov. Tony Evers that he really, really needed to spend more time with his family and to help care for his and his wife’s aging parents. We can certainly understand that sentiment, and it’s likely a big part of Payne’s departure, but the timing of it suggests there’s more to the story.

If that were the only reason, Payne could have confided that to Evers a month ago, or, if he just decided, he could have given the governor a little more time. 

Instead he gave the governor 10 days and ran for the door, with all sorts of issues pending, from wolf management to Natural Resources Board (NRB) appointments to PFAS pollution. With all the chaos on the NRB, Payne’s decision to up and quit, with his hands effectively held high in the air, essentially leaves the agency leaderless.

In the end, that probably doesn’t matter too much because the real DNR leadership is the bureaucracy, which devours DNR secretaries like candy.

When Payne was first appointed, we opined that the real reason was to install a PR guy who would play “good cop” to the bureaucracy’s “bad cop.” Payne was supposed to schmooze with local leaders and assure them of just how reasonable the DNR was, all while the bureaucrats were busy burying hatchets in their backs.

And that’s how the story played out for some months. Of course, we will never truly know what has been going on inside the walls of the agency in Madison, but there are clues in some of the dealings Payne has had with leaders up north.

For instance, when the DNR sat on town opposition to the Pelican River Forest easement purchase, keeping that opposition from the policy-making NRB, Payne was ready with mea culpas, not only to the board but to local leaders.

Specifically, in a conversation with Oneida County board chairman Scott Holewinski last spring, Payne said he was sorry, sorry, sorry, and he promised better communication. But then the calls from Payne stopped coming. And so did any calls from anybody else inside the DNR.

The spring came and went. No calls. August came and went. No calls. Finally, in September at a counties’ association conference, Holewinski says he caught up with Payne, who was surprised no one in the DNR had followed up with him.

Well, that’s no surprise to us, which underscores just how little Payne actually knew about the DNR bureaucracy.

But it also suggests that Payne had directed that bureaucracy to stay in touch with local northern leaders, and the bureaucracy just ignored him. Payne likely got a bellyful of that and finally had enough. If you are going to be ignored, you might as well slink away.

There’s more. In his spring conversation with Holewinski, the Oneida County chairman said Payne agreed with Holewinski that it’s reasonable to allow a stairway to a boathouse roof deck, given that the legislature specifically OK’d such decks.

Through rule interpretation, though, the DNR bureaucracy has opposed such stairways — their way of subverting the law is to deny you a way to get to a deck that the legislature allows. 

Such a position is not science; it’s spite, and one would think Payne would have actively pursued common sense after his conversation with Holewinski. Maybe he did, but what the bureaucracy says, goes.

There’s no question that Payne was supposed to be “good cop” window dressing, and the boathouse deck/stairway controversy is a good example of that, but it appears with his abrupt resignation that Payne actually wanted to have some policy input.

If that was the case, it was a fatal defect.

Now there’s no question that Payne was a liberal, but it also appears that, with his departure, the last semblance of moderation has disappeared from the agency. It will be all radicalism all the time now.

The biggest indicator of that is Gov. Tony Evers’s appointment of the radical Todd Ambs to the NRB. Republicans need to defeat that appointment forthwith.

Ambs’s appointment is Evers’s latest attempt to remake the agency into one much like the DNR under former Gov. Jim Doyle — an agency whose bureaucrats and field staff pretty much terrorized citizens statewide.

“They destroyed property, they ruined lives, they degraded the environment in the name of aesthetics, they wallowed in the mud of hypocrisy,” we warned back then.

The last time Evers pulled Ambs’s name out of a hat was to name him as assistant deputy secretary and now he wants to put him in an even more powerful position. Under Doyle, when he was the water division administrator, Ambs supported and helped write rules that he and his colleagues hoped would subvert state law passed by elected officials, and he supported and pushed the most extremely radical shoreland zoning provisions, even trying to get strict impervious surface standards applied to many homes not on the water.

Then, too, as we have reported, when Ambs was trying to get emergency rules implemented that would overturn the Job Creation Act passed by the Legislature and signed by the governor, he reported to the NRB that lawmakers had expressed no significant concerns about the proposed rules.

That would have been a curious response from lawmakers, to be sure, and it turned out not to be true. There was plenty of concern, only Ambs — who was tasked by the NRB with finding those concerns — couldn’t find any.

As such, his honesty is as questionable as his politics.

In another instance, Ambs enthusiastically supported restoring the DNR’s Bureau of Science Services. There would be nothing wrong with this, if it had been truly a science bureau and not a propaganda bureau, but the DNR’s science, on everything from climate change to impervious surfaces to wolf management, has been discredited time and again.

The science bureau engaged in bogus science, in other words, and bogus science will be exactly what Ambs will likely try to bring to the NRB, on every issue from PFAS to wolf management to climate change.

Ambs also previously favored an ever expanding regulatory zone around water bodies, so much so that if he had his way and could have imposed a 1,000-foot regulatory boundary around lakes, which what he wanted the DNR to do, all development and growth in the Northwoods would have been crippled for generations.

We have pointed it out before but we will again: Claiming that such a regulation is necessary to protect water quality flies in the face of the real science, which shows that the impervious surface numbers in the Northwoods pose no environmental threat to watershed water quality, either now or in the next few hundred years. Draconian regulations that will cripple local economies and deprive people of their property rights simply aren’t needed.

Once again, as we have written, it exposes Ambs’ true mentality, that is, ever more regulation of private property is needed until it is regulated out of existence.

In his previous DNR stint, Ambs’s goal was to expand regulatory zones and property restrictions ever more, until all private property becomes nonconforming. After all, the more regulation you have, the more nonconformity you have.

In the end, in such a world view, all property becomes nonconforming and subject to government control. In effect, there is no private property.

This time around the specific issues might be different, but the man and his ideology are the same: More government control over land and people. Expect shoreland zoning to be even more terrifying if Ambs sits on the NRB.

In his previous DNR incarnation, Ambs was a key player in the transformation of the DNR’s reputation as a consumer-friendly organization to that of a feared police agency whose goal was to run roughshod over the average citizen.

That he would now sit on the NRB is chilling, and GOP lawmakers need to stop it, as well as advocate for a new DNR secretary who will stand up to the agency bureaucracy rather than being a hapless shill for it.