Zero enforcement on wake boats, enhanced or hazardous wakes in Oneida and Vilas counties

Oneida County sheriff Grady Hartman, Vilas County sheriff Joe Fath and chief deputy Pat Schmidt have said there would be no enforcement by the sheriff’s offices with regard to enhanced wakes and wake boats. Regulating wake boats or drafting ordinances regarding enhanced or hazardous wakes has been a hot button topic for a number area town boards over the last few years. While a number of towns have discussed it, none have finalized an ordinance. 

The Winchester town board is closing in on the final stages of adopting a hazardous wake ordinance. The board has sent the ordinance to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR), held a public hearing and OKd a draft at its March 4 meeting. The draft will head to the town’s planning commission again on March 25 to remove exemptions pertaining to North Turtle Lake and Birch Lake.

While responding to someone who attended the March 4 meeting, town chairman Joe Discianno said the board wasn’t going to discuss the enforcement aspect of the potential ordinance at that time.

Schmidt told The Lakeland Times the sheriff’s office doesn’t have a contract with the town to enforce the town’s ordinances.

He said a town constable could enforce town ordinances, but then there would need to be a municipal court in place as well. 

When asked who would enforce enhanced wake rules, Schmidt said it would need to be a town constable because it wouldn’t be the sheriff’s office. 

“They (the towns) are putting the cart before the horse on a lot of these things,” he said. “And we’ve tried talking to them about it but that’s not something they want to talk to us about.”

Schmidt compared the situation to what he remembered happening in St. Germain when the town board there enacted ordinances prohibiting hunting in certain areas of the town and placed large signs informing people.

“It’s sort of like St. Germain back in the day had ordinances on hunting and all these other things and they had these giant signs all over the place — well, they weren’t enforceable,” he said. “You can make all the ordinances you want … but you still have to have some venue for those ordinances to go to.”

He said the sheriff’s office “will not be getting involved with it.”

Fath said if a town would want to enforce wake boat or hazardous wake ordinances, it would need a constable for patrol and a mechanism in place to enforce it — for example, creating a municipal court or entering into an agreement with the county’s circuit court. 

Eagle River is the only municipality Fath mentioned in Vilas County where an enforcement mechanism is set up. He said the city has an attorney who acts as the prosecutor for violators of those ordinances. 

Fath explained town ordinances that aren’t state law can’t be enforced by the sheriff’s office unless there’s a “law enforcement agreement” filed with him.

He said the difficulty and uncertainty that comes with enforcing a hazardous or enhanced wake ordinance is one of the reasons he doesn’t have agreements with any of the towns. 

“Some of the ordinances might not be constitutional,” Fath said. “So probably, if a town approached me to enforce their ordinances with an agreement, I’d have to have our corp counsel review all of their ordinances to make sure they were constitutional.” 

He agreed with Schmidt that towns may have the “cart before the horse” in these instances.

“(The Oneida County sheriff’s office) will not enforce it unless it becomes state law,” Hartman said. “If it becomes state law then yes, but any town or city ordinance, we don’t enforce any of that, that’s up to the towns to enforce.”

According to Hartman, no towns have an agreement with the county in order to enforce town ordinances. 

Therefore, he said an ordinance regulating wake boats or enhanced or hazardous wakes is “unenforceable.”

“They could contract with me, but we don’t have any of those contracts,” Hartman said. “They could do a constable, which it’s down to two of those now — Pelican and Pine Lake. They have constables, but they don’t have law enforcement authority.”

Municipalities in Oneida County that have mechanisms to enforce town ordinances include the towns of Minocqua, Woodruff, Three Lakes and the city of Rhinelander because they all have police departments and designated prosecutors, Hartman explain.

Hartman indicated he could see difficulties arising if residents try to enforce wake ordinances themselves, especially if they don’t have any law enforcement experience. Instances like that also open up the possibility for those trying to enforce a wake ordinance of being arrested themselves.

A contract with the sheriff would be one way Hartman said he could see the sheriff’s office working with municipalities to enforce an ordinance regulating wakes. 

But, he said, the amount of money that contract would cost may not be worth it for a particular municipality. 

“The amount of money they would have to pay would far exceed any benefit that (a) town gets,” Hartman said, adding he could see it amounting to over $100,000. “Because I really don’t want anything to do with it. We got real (crimes to worry about).”

The violence and dangers associated with illegal narcotics was just one example of a high law enforcement priority, the sheriff’s noted.

“We’re just really not interested (wake ordinances),” he said. 

The Newbold town board, like Winchester, is also closing in on enacting an ordinance dealing with enhanced wake. 

The board has sent a draft ordinance to the DNR for review, but have yet to hold a public hearing on it. At a Feb. 29 meeting, the board scheduled a public hearing date of April 6 at 10 a.m. and to be held at the community center. 

Town chairman Dan Hess told the Times he sees this ordinance as a preventative measure rather than a reactionary one. 

He said he hopes people will follow signs at boat landings asking boaters not to produce enhanced wakes and respect other boaters.

Hess said the ordinance isn’t based on boats, but enhanced wakes. 

He said the ordinance outlines enhanced wakes specifically related to a boat’s fins and ballast tank.

Newbold is unique, Hess said, in the sense that there aren’t many lakes big enough for people to comfortably operate wake boats on. He said most of the lakes in town are “pretty small” and “there’s very few of those types of boats on these lakes.”

“We’re hoping that with education and with proper posting at the boat landings, it will take care of the issue that (residents) are having,” Hess said.

Trevor Greene may be reached via email at [email protected].