Get partisan politics out of the courthouse

To the Editor:

The fact that our county government spent so much time fighting the immensely popular private property called the Pelican River Forest illustrates how our current board, chaired by Scott Holewinski, has devolved into a partisan political quagmire, and exposes the hypocrisy of some elected Wisconsin representatives and county board members.

This all started when then state politician Tom Tiffany interfered in a local county election and then proceeded to launch an attack on local control, aided by his political cronies on the county board, allowing real estate developers to chop up even the tiniest of our lakes into 100 foot lots. This threw away decades of hard work and investment by many counties across the North that was focused on protecting their lakes.  

In 2018 Tiffany’s repeal of the wildly popular “Prove it First” law, gave some county board supervisors an excuse to remove a vital local control from the towns for the purpose of creating a mining district in the Northwoods centered around the Lynne Deposit that lies under a vast wetland area upstream of the Willow Flowage in the Town of Lynne. 

The fact that so-called property rights advocates would deliberately strip local control from property owners, could not be any more outrageous and hypocritical. This scheme only died because the referendum question asking for the support of voters in the county was rejected substantially at the ballot box. Now, that method of gauging public opinion has been removed thanks to Mary Felzkowski and other state politicians.

Between 2009 and 2018 our county government spent an enormous amount of time and considerable resources promoting something that the people of the county did not want, and more recently our county government spent considerable time and energy trying to block something that most people strongly favored. This is clearly an unacceptable way for our elected representatives to operate and could have been avoided had they been listening to the people they are supposed to represent.

The common denominator for these cases is a small number of supervisors and representatives pushing a mine that the local people do not want, one on public land at Lynne near the Willow Flowage, and the other adjacent to the Upper Wolf River in the Town of Schoepke. 

Our county is poorly served when our county government becomes infected with partisan politics because our elected officials stop listening while they are serving other interests. Get the politics out of our courthouse and start representing the public’s interest!

Karl A. Fate

Crescent