St. Germain enhanced-wake committee holds initial meeting

St. Germain’s enhanced-wake committee held its inaugural meeting on Dec. 18. 

The ad-hoc body is tasked by the town board with the single goal of preparing and presenting a draft ordinance for the board’s consideration regarding the regulation of enhanced-wake boats on town lakes. Saint Germain town supervisor Patric Niggemeier, the committee’s chairman, came away from the meeting with the realization the process will likely be a very long one.

“I don’t even think we’ve found a footing yet to really get started,” he told The Lakeland Times shortly after the meeting adjourned.

The subject of enhanced-wake boats has been discussed multiple times in St. Germain at the town-board level, and the town’s lakes committee has been discussing the topic for years.

Bob Schell, a Found Lake committee representative and a wake-committee member, presented a draft ordinance to the lakes committee in May.

“I think most of you have been reading the papers,” Schell said at the time. “Winchester adopted its wake ordinance in March. Newbold just adopted theirs ... Lake Tomahawk and Cloverland have both submitted draft ordinances to the DNR (Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources). Lake Tomahawk will adopt theirs by mid-June.”

Several other Vilas County towns are doing it, he told the committee. “And I understand the (Lac du Flambeau) tribe has totally outlawed it and they put in some tough enforcement,” Schell said. “They said — I think — that they’re going to impound vehicles and stuff like that as fines.  They’re not going to mess around. So, it’s coming folks and that’s what this committee has been talking about for three years. We were waiting for the groundswell to hit.  Well, it’s hitting right now. And it’s something we should talk about.”

He explained at that May meeting wake boats weren’t banned although a wake boat ban is precisely what the tribal council for the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians enacted in late April. 

Outside of that wake boat ban, elsewhere, Schell said what would be banned would be “the act of creating a big wake.”

“You can’t ban a boat from a lake because of the Public Trust Doctrine,” he said. “But what you’re doing is putting in ordinances to prevent enhanced wake. In other words, somebody can have a wake-boat out there without a ballast in it.  They can probably water-ski behind it. As long as they’re not performing the enhanced-wake function, they’ll be legal.”

However, once the wake boat operator begins “moving that stern down and putting ballast in their tanks,” Schell said, “it’ll be illegal.”

Pros and cons

The agenda for the initial committee meeting had only two action items, one to discuss organizational and scheduling issues for the group with the other item to discuss and possibly amend the draft ordinance presented by Schell.

To Niggemeier’s chagrin, the committee spent little time on the contents of the document and a majority of the meeting expressing general opinions instead.

“I tried multiple times to get the conversation back to the ordinance at hand,” Niggemeier told the Times “But it just didn’t happen.”

Committee members debated the pros and cons of a sweeping ban to prohibit enhanced wakes altogether, whether individual lakes should have specific regulations and how a potential ordinance would be enforced.

The group failed to reach a consensus on the environmental and geological impacts of enhanced wakes and even on the size of the waves which wakeboats are capable of generating.

“I just want to make sure we’re not getting railroaded into a one-size-fits-all resolution because I think there might be multiple options that might represent the interest of our lakes,” committee member Anne LaCelle said. 

While LaCelle is a lakefront-property owner and St. Germain taxpayer, she is the only non-resident, non-elector ­— or at-large member — on the committee. She attended the meeting via Zoom from her home in Colorado.

“The lakes committee unanimously voted to make her the representative for the quote-unquote wakeboat owners,” Niggemeier told the Times regarding LaCelle’s selection to the committee. “Anne has been very involved at the lakes committee meetings in terms of this enhanced-wake boat thing,” he said. “She’s very knowledgeable. She understands both sides.  And the lakes committee wholeheartedly agreed. They know her stance. They know that A) she is a wakeboat owner on Big Saint and B) she understands the need for a restriction. So they were hoping for somebody to be like that, to have a more complete understanding of what’s going on and not just saying ‘No, this ordinance is crap, and I’m going to defy you every single step of the way.’”

“Those kinds of wakes can be created by any large boat,” LaCelle told the committee. “You don’t need to have specialized equipment or a special boat. Any large boat can create a wave capable of causing the same kind of wake that you’re concerned about. A large fishing boat, a tri-toon. Are we going to ban those?”

Eric Eade, who represents Lost Lake on the committee, said the issue is “all about the damage and the use of public waters in a mode where — especially on a smaller lake — the use of an enhanced-wake boat in a certain area of the lake keeps anybody else from being able to use that part of the lake. Very few boats actually work that way.”

In May, Schell got into what he said was “some of the justification” for keeping wake boats off the lakes is acquired from boat manufacturer literature.

“When they put out their brochures to sell their boats — and these boats are $200,000 – a cheap one is a hundred-and-some thousand — they brag about how high their waves are,” he said in May. “They have certain models where the waves are four-foot-eleven or something. They brag that they can make a wave that big.”

During the Dec. 19 meeting, Schell painted a picture of those of affluent means dominating St. Germain lakes while the less well-to-do are forced to wait their turn to use the public waterways.

“All these lake (front-property) owners are trying to do is protect what they have,” he said. “They’re not trying to ban anything. People have a right to have a boat and everything else. They’re just trying to protect their shoreline.”

Schell mentioned  other lake activities people take up.

“And they have a right to go out on a paddle board without getting dumped,” Schell said. “That type of thing. These people have rights, too. If you have five people on a lake who have rights with their wakeboat, you’ve got a hundred and some-aught that have rights to be out there as well, enjoying the lake.”

LaCelle said there’s “been a lot of fear-mongering” as it relates to wakeboats. 

“They’ve been called ‘monster trucks of the lakes’ and things like that,” she said. “A lot of what has been discussed is very scary. ‘These boats are going to ruin your lake. They’re going to destroy your rip-rap. They’re going to kill plants. They’re going to kill the loons.’ You know, those things are very motivating to want to do something very drastic and — in my opinion — very reactionary.”

LaCelle acknowledged with a new sport “comes the need for new regulation.” 

“With new technology comes the need for new regulation,” she said. “I don’t want people to think I’m saying ‘Just do nothing, let people do whatever the heck they want.’ That’s not what I’m saying at all. We have other options we can consider ... the technology is here. The boats are here. You can’t put a genie back into a bottle.”

LaCelle touched on the enforcement aspect. 

“And the DNR has made it clear that they will not touch these ordinances,” she said. “As far as enforcement goes.”

“Why we’re here is to try to put together a draft ordinance,” Niggemeier said toward the end of the discussion. “Compromises are going to have to be made on both sides. I can guarantee this isn’t going to be one way but compromises need to happen. I understand there are strong passions on both sides, but there has also got to be a little bit of give-and-take on both sides, too.”

He also said he had “homework” for members of the committee.

“We didn’t get to what I was hoping we’d get to today so the next meeting will be about the St. Germain ordinance,” Niggemeier said. “We’re going to go through every line — sentence-by-sentence with a fine-toothed comb — and discuss what we like and we don’t like ... and by then, we should have an idea of whether we need to start over or if certain changes need to be made.”

He told the Times if a draft ordinance is created at committee level, it would be presented to the town’s lakes committee “to be voted on, not discussed.”

Should the lakes committee vote to recommend approval of a  draft enhanced wake ordinance to the town board, the board would then discuss the draft and take its own straight-up-or-down vote on the proposed ordinance.

Should the board reject the document, town supervisors could then suggest their own changes and return the draft to the enhanced-wake committee for further discussion and/or amendments.