River News: Our View

First things first, let’s give credit where credit is due. 

Our Northwoods representatives, Rep. Rob Swearingen (R-Rhinelander) and Rep. Calvin Callahan (R-Tomahawk), were right to vote against the rushed reauthorization of the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program last week, as we report in today’s edition. 

Their votes weren’t a rejection of conservation or even of the Stewardship program — though we have plenty to debate there — but a call for something painfully lacking in Madison these days: time to think and deliberate.

Try as downstate politicians might to rush a bill, the truth is as unavoidable as it is painful. Stewardship, as currently constructed, has stopped being a movement and morphed into an industry, a conservation industrial complex of perpetual expansion, much as our military industrial complex wants and needs perpetual war. 

For the conservation industry, rural America is one big easement in perpetuity begging to be invaded and captured. Its mindset is that every acre not yet in state hands is somehow a problem we need to conquer to survive. 

The latest Stewardship bill does try to slow things down a hair by requiring large land purchases to be approved by legislative enumeration — that is, passing a specific bill approving it. It’s like sticking a finger in the leaking dike, but even so the DNR is deathly afraid that such a requirement would slow things down. 

In fact, that’s exactly what Wisconsin needs to do. As more land is protected, land purchases should become rarer, more surgical, and approached only after careful deliberation. Instead, the rush has become the point. And that, in a nutshell, is why this version of the bill needs to head back to the drawing board.

To be sure, if history is any indication, when the legislature gets to work on a Stewardship bill, citizens should grab their wallets with one hand and clutch their property deeds with the other. Sudden awakening in the legislative catacombs, or cata-comas as the case may be, is always a tell that someone wants something before the public catches on. 

Bills start to appear from nowhere; hearings are held two or three days later; supporters mysteriously arrive fully prepared, as if they have known about it for months; while ordinary citizens and potential opponents are left standing flat-footed on the sidelines.

That’s exactly what happened here. The Stewardship bill surfaced last June with a snap hearing that environmental groups and pro-land-grab Republicans celebrated like Christmas morning. There was no meaningful dissent because there was no meaningful forewarning. 

After pushback, the bill disappeared, only to reemerge like a fighter jet contrailing across the sky. That is, until Swearingen and Callahan tapped the brakes a bit and caused a 6–6 deadlock that brought attention to the issue. Hopefully, now, discussion will follow.

In Madison, Swearingen said it best, expressly wishing there had been more time to address concerns: “I’m hoping that beyond today’s executive session that we can continue to have those discussions on both sides and get me to a place where I could comfortably vote for both bills on the floor, hopefully in January.”

Let’s begin that discussion right now. For starters, lawmakers need to acknowledge what they have avoided admitting for years, namely, that Stewardship has wandered dangerously off mission. The program is now a 36-year-old land-acquisition machine, heavily bonded and fueled by nonprofit land trusts that depend on a steady flow of state dollars. 

It has drifted far from its original promise of time-limited, targeted conservation and instead has become a conveyor belt of government expansion, one that erodes private property rights, shrinks rural tax bases, and locks land away forever under easements that ignore changing technologies, environmental conditions, and communities.

Worse still, many if not most of the landowners lining up to make a quick sale aren’t conservationists at all; they’re opportunists seeking the fastest sale from the highest bidder, and the state — backed by bonding — has the deepest, quickest pockets in the room. That’s not stewardship. That’s a marketplace distortion that punishes taxpayers and future generations.

Here in Oneida County, well more than 30 percent of the land is already publicly owned or under a conservation easement. Some counties are over 50 percent. And yet the DNR’s stated goal is another 200,000 acres, mostly in the Northwoods.

That’s not protection. It’s a modern form of feudalism in which the government and elite own the land and, with their permission, we might be able to farm it, or log it, or hunt and fish it, or enjoy kayaking down the overlords’ rivers or hiking through their forests — until the overlords decide otherwise.

Once the feudal barons decide that the conservation priority can no longer accommodate all those “preserved” easement activities, those activities will be gone with the windmill.

Meanwhile, taxpayers are still paying interest on these purchases. With $532 million in outstanding Stewardship debt and outstanding interest payments of $121 million, the program has become a trade-off conceived in hell: debt in perpetuity for land locked in perpetuity.

If enacted, the current bill would spend $28.25 million a year and still allow at least $10 million annually in spending on land-acquisition programs that bureaucrats and environmentalists never want to end. 200,000 acres? They won’t stop there. Ten million a year? That’s chump change to them, and it’s not their money, it’s yours. 

If you really think the environmentalists will one day have enough, just look at their current counterproposal — a whopping $72 million a year! Give them an inch, and they’ll keep “conserving” until they have completely devastated northern Wisconsin.

But, really, will $28.25 million a year yield any better result when it goes on forever? Think about it.

People should also consider that the current bill might not pass constitutional muster. Last year came the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s ruling in Evers v. Marklein, which struck down the Legislature’s main oversight mechanism — the Joint Finance Committee’s review authority — as unconstitutional.

The problem is that the current proposal relies on the same type of mechanisms. It appropriates land acquisition dollars but requires later legislative approval for specific projects. Bottom line, the bill appropriates funds annually for land acquisition, but the DNR cannot spend a significant share of those funds unless the Legislature later authorizes individual acquisitions. The executive cannot execute unless and until the Legislature chooses to act a second time, and that’s a potential constitutional problem.

True, the bill’s supporters should prevail in court because the statute itself would condition the delegation of land acquisition authority on later approval, but then again, it might not, given the current composition of the court. So the Legislature risks passing a bill only to watch the court strike it down again on the same grounds.

Any claim that this proposal is “safe” under the court’s ruling should be taken with a grain of salt. If the court tosses this one out, too, it’s Katy bar the door.

There is hope here, however, especially if Republicans realize they hold the actual leverage, because if no bill is passed, Stewardship dies on June 30. It’s a leverage they should use.

Fixing Stewardship requires recognizing the bill’s core flaws. One is that it helps cement permanent expansion. The program was supposed to have ended in 1999, yet the bill validates an eternal expectation of annual land expansion, year after year, generation after generation.

Has anyone ever thought to ask: When is enough enough? How do we keep finding so many “new” tracts of land to protect? Why wasn’t protection of these lands considered vital 36 years ago when the DNR rigorously inventoried land for the original Stewardship initiative?

And here’s one: If conditions have changed so much in 36 years that developable land suddenly became pristine land critical to environmental integrity, isn’t that an argument against any kind of land use lock-in for perpetuity? Might conditions and technology change that would make once fragile lands available to development without environmental harm?

What’s more, once the state allocates annual acquisition funds, the pressure to spend them becomes irresistible. The state ends up chasing acres because the budget line exists, not because a public need does. It becomes a land quota rather than a land-use strategy. If you give government money to spend on a program, it will spend it.

Worse, there are no protections for counties drowning in public ownership, nor safeguards against easements in perpetuity. There’s no balancing test that weighs conservation against economic development or future community growth.

The bill pretends these problems don’t exist. It can be salvaged, but lawmakers must acknowledge that a problem has surfaced in the form of a massive conservation industrial complex, and it needs to be reined in.

The key to doing so is to rebuild Stewardship around a simple principle: private property rights must be accorded equal standing to conservation, not subordinate to it. Its foundational primacy must be recognized, not ignored.

Who knows how a negotiation based on such a principle might end? It won’t be any worse — and likely will be a whole lot better — than if we just close our eyes to the great land grab being perpetrated upon everyone in this state.

Until legislation explicitly limits the state’s ability to accumulate more acreage — through purchase or through the loophole of conservation easements — Wisconsin will never restore balance between conservation and economic freedom.