River News: Our View

In the good old days way back when, back when real leadership existed in Oneida County, none was more fearless than the late, great Oneida County supervisor, Gary Baier. 

Baier bravely fought for conservative policies at a time when Wisconsin was decidedly bluer than it is today. He especially championed individual property rights, and he did so by standing up to the powerful corporation counsel at the time, the decidedly pro-DNR Larry Heath. 

Baier rarely, if ever, took Heath’s pro-environmental legal advice; instead, he led a rewrite of the zoning ordinance that prompted the DNR to threaten the county with a superseding ordinance if the county didn’t comply. But guess what? Baier didn’t back down, and, in the end, the DNR blinked.

Baier also effectively ended Heath’s career. His ongoing challenges to Heath’s radicalism and bureaucratic usurpation of power ultimately led to a bid on the county board floor to fire him. Heath barely survived on a 10-10 tie vote, but he never wielded much power after that.

When Baier served, the people, not the lawyers, governed the county.

Oh, how we long for another Gary Baier. The current zoning chairman, Scott Holewinski, who is also the county board chairman, lacks such foresight and leadership, so much so that he could never be considered even a shadow or a shell of Baier. 

His leadership imprint is so invisible that a person who spontaneously combusted on a deserted beach would leave a more conspicuous mark in the sand.

All of which brings us to the current mess, which can be best described as a dog’s dinner after it has been upchucked in the back yard. If we look closely at the chunks, though, we can begin to make out the outlines of various characters. The two biggest are Holewinski and corporation counsel Michael Fugle; less complicit but still in the mix are supervisors Mike Timmons and Bob Almekinder.

For allowing this technicolor yawn, Fugle should be fired; Holewinski should be removed as board chairman by the county board; and Holewinski, Timmons, and Almekinder should pay $500 fines for violating the county code.

And then those three should demand that Fugle reimburse them the $1,500 for the fines.

A quick recap. All of this involves Kirk Bangstad’s bid for a conditional use permit (CUP) for an outdoor beer garden at his Minocqua location. 

Specifically, it involves his second application after his first CUP application was denied because it didn’t meet county standards — an application he should not have been allowed to resubmit because, by code, applicants cannot submit another CUP for a similar project for a year after the first one is denied.

But the geniuses on the zoning committee somehow concluded that an outdoor beer garden is not similar to, well, an outdoor beer garden. Not even close!

Then, after a public hearing at which the town of Minocqua opposed the second CUP application, after reviewing the evidence of his repeated violations that got an earlier administrative review permit revoked, after hearing a swell of locals oppose the project, and after concluding that his plan was deficient when it came to county standards, the attending zoning committee members were on the verge of denying the CUP when, after a motion to deny had been made, Fugle rushed onto the stage, muttering something to the effect of “Adjourn! Adjourn!”

The sheep obeyed. Holewinski adjourned the meeting so fast you would have thought Fugle was yelling “Fire! Fire!” in a crowded theater. Come to think of it, the meeting dissipated so quickly that maybe it was spontaneous combustion.

Indeed, all that could be recovered after the meeting were the smoke and mirrors of the committee and Fugle.

The thing is, what Fugle advised them to do was a violation of the county’s parliamentary procedures, which are codified, so carrying out his advice to adjourn was a violation of the county code. A motion to adjourn to another time — this motion was to adjourn to the next meeting — cannot be made in the middle of a pending vote.

A sheriff’s department investigation confirmed just that. The district attorney also said parliamentary procedure was violated.

Now real leadership would have fixed it. Gary Baier would have fixed it. He would have shut down the bobblehead lawyer and rescheduled the next meeting — with proper posting and noticing because it would actually be a continuation of the public hearing — and immediately continued taking the vote.

But that’s not what happened. That’s not what happened by a long stretch.

For one thing, while the zoning committee was content to violate the county code and to let their miscarriage of the CUP process stand, all to Bangstad’s favor, they had the audacity to allow the zoning department to send out enforcement letters to certain Minocqua businesses threatening them with $1,800 charges for doing such things as placing a bench outside their stores for the public to use — no service or anything to do with the operation of their business — or setting out planters to help beautify the town. 

To characterize those as violations depends on an insanely expansive interpretation of the code, unlike the clearly brazen infractions the county has tolerated with Bangstad.

And yet, after those letters were sent, the zoning committee uttered not one word of dissent or complaint, they made no attempt to correct what is an obvious over-interpretation of the code. They sat content in their entitled silence, overlords who believe they can violate the county code with impunity without any consequences, while at the same time they pursue, persecute, and threaten to prosecute small businesspeople for simply trying to be good citizens in their community.

How shameful. How utterly shameful.

Then, too, by the next zoning meeting after the public hearing — which had never been properly adjourned — the hearing itself had magically disappeared and the CUP was placed as an item on a regular meeting agenda. We contend that’s an open meetings violation, but it gets worse.

When the meeting began, instead of immediately taking up the pending motion, Holewinski let Bangstad’s lawyer talk, who promptly announced that he had been having a really good discussion with Fugle and much progress had been made, so they really needed more time.

So that’s what the sheep did. They immediately voted down the motion to deny and gave Bangstad more time.

Now let’s think about what just happened there. 

What started out as a public hearing with public participation and deliberation was suddenly hijacked by an attorney running roughshod over a spineless committee, and then it was taken behind closed doors, transformed from a public hearing to a private negotiation between two lawyers, without the public or any elected officials involved.

Gary Baier must have been spinning in his grave.

If all this isn’t enough, there’s more! 

Sometime after the lawyers’ lovefab and the committee’s time extension meeting, and after the findings that the public hearing adjournment violated both county code and parliamentary procedure, supervisor Bob Almekinder, much to his credit, realized he could still file an objection to the violation of parliamentary procedure and once again put the vote back on the table where it should be.

It’s called a continuing objection. Normally a parliamentary objection has to be made at the time of the violation, but egregious breaches — such as code violations and illegal adjournments — can be objected to later. Otherwise, committee chairpersons would be adjourning meetings all the time with no one able to object because the meeting would be over.

So Almekinder filed a complaint, and it was placed on the zoning committee agenda. And so was the CUP decision, the resolution of which could be undertaken immediately after taking responsibility for constantly listening to their corporation counsel.

We’ll give three guesses as to what happened with those two agenda items, and the first two don’t count. Right on cue, at the outset of that Sept. 20 meeting, Holewinski announced that those two agenda items would not be discussed or otherwise taken up. There was no explanation, though some intimation was that the removal had something to do with the upcoming county board meeting this past Tuesday.

That meeting included a closed session concerning litigative strategy over a separate lawsuit Bangstad has filed against the county. At first, we feared the county might be prepared to use Bangstad’s CUP application as a bargaining chip (the permit in exchange for dropping the lawsuit), which would be wrong on so many levels it would be too hard to count. But principally, it would be wrong because the county board has no jurisdiction over CUPs, and, second, either an application meets county standards or it doesn’t — it can’t be used as a negotiating strategy.

If it were, it would be discriminatory against all other CUP applicants who did not receive special treatment, who had to actually adhere to the county’s CUP standards.

Thankfully, just before entering the closed session, Timmons — and much to his credit, too — made a point of order to confirm there would be no discussion of the CUP or any proposed settlement — such as giving him the CUP for dropping the lawsuit — in closed session. He got that confirmation, but, frankly, as of this writing, we are not sure the CUP did not come up in that closed session. If it did, that’s an open meetings violation of the worst sort.

Still, mysteries remain: Let’s say the CUP was never mentioned in that closed session. Then why was Almekinder’s complaint pulled from the previous week’s zoning meeting? That complaint was directly related to the legality of the adjournment, and it has now magically disappeared into thin air. 

And if a CUP settlement offer was not going to be discussed at the county board, why was the CUP decision itself pulled from the meeting agenda? Why did the committee not take action on a matter it should have decided almost two months ago?

Things simply do not add up, unless adding up is spelled s-p-e-c-i-a-l-t-r-e-a-t-m-e-n-t.

So here is where we are. Essentially, the new county board chairman is Mike Fugle. He is pulling every string, and no one will challenge him. He is telling the zoning committee when to illegally adjourn, he has negotiated with the applicants behind closed doors without elected officials present, and, while we don’t know for sure, we bet he was behind pulling Almekinder’s complaint from the September zoning committee meeting. If not him, we should all ask, who and why?

Shades of Larry Heath.

Now it is bad enough that he has essentially used his legal position to get his way over matters that should be in the hands of elected supervisors. It’s bad enough that supervisors jump at his every command, but what makes it even worse is that Fugle is giving notoriously bad advice. Someone should let Fugle and Holewinski know that no one is fooled. 

The bottom line is, the lawyer, not elected officials, is running the county because the county board chairman and the zoning committee are either too afraid to challenge him, as a courageous leader like Gary Baier did to another counsel so long ago, or they are complicit in what looks like an attempt to put their thumb on the scales in favor of Bangstad.

The remedies are obvious. Mike Fugle should be terminated and terminated immediately. He should be terminated for giving bad advice, which resulted in supervisors violating the county code and parliamentary procedure. He should be terminated for not owning up and taking responsibility for his egregiously bad counsel. He should be terminated for compounding that error by meeting in private and resuming negotiations without elected officials present, after he had yanked the CUP process out of the public’s hands. 

Most of all, he should be terminated for tainting the CUP process by subverting a codified public process and transforming it into a process taking place almost completely behind closed doors instead of in public deliberations.

Why can’t the county’s elected officials and Bangstad deliberate in public? Why can’t the county just resume the public hearing, which it should do, and take the CUP vote? Why can’t a supervisor who filed an objection to the legality of parliamentary procedure have his complaint and argument heard in open session?

The answer to “why” is: Mike Fugle. He should be fired.

Second, the county board should remove Holewinski as chairman for cause. He has surrendered control of the county to an attorney and sacrificed public participation in the process. And more, he has allowed ongoing violations of the county code without taking any responsibility and without remedying it. He and he alone now is responsible for letting the illegal August 2 meeting adjournment and illegal disruption of the CUP process to stand. Even worse, he has blocked — or has allowed Fugle to block — a rightful objection to the illegal adjournment and a subsequent remedy for it.

Holewinski isn’t part of the solution; he’s part of the problem.  

Third, sheriff Grady Hartman should slap the zoning supervisors involved directly in this matter — Holewinski, Timmons, and Almekinder — with $500 forfeitures. While they initially acted on bad advice from Fugle, and while Timmons and Almekinder have both tried to mount challenges, ultimately no one has publicly challenged the counsel or demanded that illegal conduct be remedied. For instance, at the September 20 zoning committee meeting, Almekinder could have challenged the removal of his complaint from the agenda; he did not.

Those supervisors, after they are fined, should seek reimbursement of those fines from Fugle.

Finally, some have challenged the authority of the sheriff to write citations for the violations. Unfortunately for them, the county code gives the sheriff the authority to write citations of between $5 to $500 for any violation of the general code. He has evidentiary support of such a violation. His own department investigated and found a violation. The district attorney also concluded that parliamentary procedure was violated. His authority to write citations is unquestionable.

Even so, some say, the parliamentary procedure is simply the board’s internal rules of procedures and, under separation of powers, the executive branch, of which the sheriff is a part, cannot interfere with a legislative entity’s internal rules of procedure. 

Normally, that would be the case. Normally, only a member of that body could object to a violation of its rules of procedure (as Almekinder tried to do). The sheriff certainly could not object to a violation of their rules if a member didn’t because he would have no jurisdiction.

Unfortunately for the county, they didn’t just adopt those rules as policy, they codified them. By putting the rules in the county code, the violation amounts not only to a violation of the board’s rules but to a violation of the county code, and there the sheriff does have jurisdiction (we would argue, an obligation). 

A ticket would not be for violating their rules of procedure because he would not be issuing tickets for their violation of their rules of procedure but for violating the county code. The separation of powers argument implodes.

Unfortunately for all of us, what has imploded instead is Oneida County government. Perhaps it would be better described as a spontaneous combustion. Whatever it is, it sorely reminds us how much real leadership is missed.