River News: Our View

It was a blessed thing to behold last week when Republicans in the state Legislature fired Todd Ambs from the state’s Natural Resources Board, the governing body of the state Department of Natural Resources.

He should be thankful that the only punishment our system can mete out is termination of his service. His is a singularly shameful career that a moral society anchored in due process should condemn. 

Mr. Ambs has become the very face of public disgrace: We can’t recall another Wisconsin figure in state government who tried to do more damage to our institutions and to the lives of real people than Mr. Ambs attempted to do with his woke and totalitarian public policy aspirations.

We trust that a day of moral reckoning will one day come for him. For way too long — as a water division administrator in the DNR, as DNR deputy secretary, as an environmental trouble-maker — this intolerant radical has roamed the regulatory and political landscape like a menacing monster, making life miserable for countless law-abiding, hard-working citizens.

The bottom line is, Todd Ambs should be nowhere near any public policy decision making, if justice is to prevail, if the term is to have any meaning at all.

For all practical purposes, appointing Ambs to sit on the policy-making board of the powerful DNR was akin to inviting the grim reaper to sit at the dinner table, knowing you are going to get your just desserts in the end.

Thankfully, the legislature  realized that the devil really is in the details, and fired the devil before he could condemn all of us to eternal damnation.

Mostly, Republicans relied on Ambs’s inability to work with Republicans as an excuse to open the hatch door and send him on a long plunge to the bottom of the outhouse well, a well-deserved resting place. Not that Ambs didn’t try to sanitize the stench of his record in a two-page rant, but even that was a hilarious confirmation that he is anti-Republican all the time on every issue. 

Indeed, his statement was a recitation of radical Democratic talking points. For example, he castigated the legislature for not supporting Gov. Tony Evers’s special session requests during the pandemic, such as Evers’s plan to end all in-person voting.

He ranted that Republicans refused to come to the table to discuss critical issues like health care, education and workforce development, even when Evers requested a special session to address those important topics.

As it just happened, those important topics turned out to be radical manifestos of far-left wish lists, including proposals for red flag laws, eliminating prohibitions on abortion, and expanding welfare.

He belittled Republican appointees on the NRB for conducting what he called a circus, in effect because they refused to obey every marching order of the unelected civil service. He said they “shilled for the Republican Party,” hardly the words you think you’ll hear from a guy who swears he can work with the other side.

Republicans used the ammunition Ambs gave them — including some toxic posts on X — to fire him, but in fact his destructive record goes a lot deeper than his anti-Republican bias, and people should know about it.

In his statement, Ambs said he had worked “zealously” to guard against efforts to weaken protections for land, air, and water. What he really meant was that he worked zealously to turn the DNR into an agency that for years pretty much terrorized citizens statewide. 

In years past, when Ambs sat atop the DNR’s water quality division, which oversaw shoreland zoning, we wrote of him and his staff: “They destroyed property, they ruined lives, they degraded the environment in the name of aesthetics, they wallowed in the mud of hypocrisy.”

For instance, Ambs helped create a firestorm of protest in 2005, when the DNR proposed the implementation of new rules governing the placement of piers in the state’s waters. After the Legislature determined that people could not have piers larger than what was needed for docking, loading, and unloading, the DNR, by rule, arbitrarily defined that as not having a pier more than six feet wide.

Ambs also stoked discontent when he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the DNR would rely on citizen complaints to enforce the new rule. Classic left-wing tactic — pit neighbor against neighbor, turn in your family and friends.

In 2009, Ambs created far more controversy when the DNR began to write new a shoreland zoning rule. Among other things, such as tough standards for mitigation, the agency not only proposed strict impervious surface limits but advocated placing those limits on all properties within 1,000 feet of a lake’s ordinary high water mark.

With a 1,000-foot regulation zone, the rule would have imposed impervious surface limits on many nonriparian properties, that is, on lots that were not on the water. Just two years earlier, in 2007, the agency had called for a 300-foot impervious surface regulatory boundary for lakes, but, in writing the final version of the rule in 2009, agency officials quietly changed the 300-foot boundary to 1,000 feet.

The newly expanded perimeter was never taken to public hearing.

Speaking before the Natural Resources Board, Ambs vigorously defended the “science” of the 1,000-foot perimeter.

Ambs was also heavily involved in a 2004 attempt to write an emergency rule that would have effectively overturned a new state law known as the Job Creation Act.

In fact, the DNR proposed 12 emergency rules to implement the newly passed and enacted law, which established a three-tier system for regulating development projects along lakes and rivers. The idea of the Job Creation Act was to exempt activities with minimal resource impacts from more onerous permitting requirements, and the law included a comprehensive list of such activities that had not been exempted before.

However, in the law, those activities would still not be exempt in “areas of special natural resource interest” — in outstanding or exceptional resource waters, trout streams, state natural areas, and areas of significant scientific value “as designated by the DNR.”

Environmentalists immediately called for adoption of a comprehensive package of environmental rules “to fill major gaps newly created in Wisconsin law,” and, with Ambs at the helm, DNR staff used their power to designate areas of “significant scientific value” to write an emergency rule package that exempted most water bodies in the state from the more lenient permitting provisions of Act 118. 

In the eyes of Ambs and DNR staff, almost every water body was of significant scientific value, and was thus so designated. The law was completely subverted, though the rules did not ultimately survive.

Curiously, when Ambs was trying to get the emergency rules implemented, he reported to the NRB that lawmakers expressed no concerns about them. 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 was 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 was truly a science bureau and not a propaganda bureau he wanted. But the DNR’s science, on everything from climate change to impervious surfaces to seawalls, was discredited time and again. 

It had been tossed out of court; it had been ridiculed for its allegiance to averages rather than to specific scientific measurements; it has been ridiculed for relying on hypothetical assumptions rather than verifiable field tests to determine many of its conclusions.

Yet, when Evers pledged to restore the science bureau, Ambs tweeted his approval: “Science in the WDNR! What next? Acknowledging climate change?”

In his previous DNR stint, Ambs’s goal was to expand regulatory zones and property restrictions ever more, until all private property became 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.

Ambs apparently has one modus operandi when it comes to public policy: He simply wants everything everywhere regulated in the most restrictive way possible, whether logic requires it or not, whether science calls for it or not.

And why not? Like many radicals who rise to positions of power, Ambs believes he is one of that privileged class that knows better than the people about what is good public policy, and so why let the decisions of elected officials get in the way of the wisdom of bureaucrats.

This week, thankfully, the wisdom of the elected got in the way of a particularly sinister bureaucrat: One Todd Ambs.

In the short-term, let’s hope his record will preclude him from any policy-making influence in the state of Wisconsin. In the long-term, let’s hope his name will come to be associated with those public officials that time has embarrassed, that his name will truly become the face of disgrace in this state.