River News: Our View

Most people in Oneida County don’t know it yet, but the county will soon make its biggest personnel decision in decades, a decision that will, in no small measure, impact our ability to make a decent living, to run a small business, to use our land reasonably, and to pay our taxes.

Nope, we are not talking about the upcoming spring elections for county board supervisor or about the new board’s selection of a county chairman after that. Over the years, county voters just haven’t paid much attention to these elections, and it shows. With a few exceptions, the board is full of puddle wumps and log stumps, none of whom have a clue the bureaucracy laughs at them behind their backs. 

For sure, they spend millions of our tax dollars on worthless programs such as the UW Extension that they never cut, but, even so, none of them, individually or collectively, can do the damage that the most powerful person in county government can inflict.

That person would be the zoning director, and the zoning director is about to change. The county has announced that long-serving director Karl Jennrich will retire at the end of August. By the way, we could also call him long-suffering since he has had to deal with a multitude of idiots and good-old-boys through the years. Michael Fugle and Brian Desmond are just two who come to mind.

So, for starters, congratulations to Jennrich on his retirement, and let’s give credit where credit is due. Such long public service is rarely appreciated — mostly with good reason — but over the years Jennrich has demonstrated a professionalism and responsiveness that deserve recognition, especially in government transparency.

Just take a look at our annual Sunshine grades and, almost always, Jennrich has ranked at the top of the list with ‘A’ grades. When records have been requested, they have been provided in a timely fashion. When questions were asked, answers generally followed. In an era when government agencies too often behave as if transparency were a burden rather than an obligation, that responsiveness matters.

For the most part, too, when it comes to regulation and enforcement, Jennrich has displayed an even hand that preferred to let elected supervisors make the policy decisions they are supposed to make. That’s rare for a bureaucrat. Generally, they love to legislate, obfuscate, and confuse elected officials to get their way. That wasn’t the case with Jennrich.

Oh, there were a few slip-ups. He led the department in persecuting downtown Minocqua business owners for committing such heinous crimes as providing the public with a bench to sit on as they shopped, while letting Minocqua Brewing Company owner Kirk Bangstad break just about every rule in the book.

And here’s another good one. Remember when Jennrich joined up with some supervisors, the DNR, and privileged progressives — they called themselves “the team” — to secretly write new shoreland ordinance language concerning such things as vegetative buffer zones and viewing corridors? Their proposals were far more restrictive than the existing ordinance, and — this is the rich part — they spent months working on the ordinance language without any public input or input from the zoning committee.

They planned to spring the new ordinance on the zoning committee and on the public in what was, in effect, a coup d’état of the zoning ordinance and the zoning committee. To their credit, zoning committee chairman Scott Holewinski and the late supervisor Mike Timmons, both elected by the people, loudly objected to the back-room shenanigans and shut it down. 

On the other hand, Jennrich did stand up for codifying anti-trespass language, clarifying that zoning officials could not encroach on private property willy-nilly, despite the objections of a clueless corporation counsel. In general, for leading a department whose very reason for being is to destroy property rights, Jennrich navigated the battle lines fairly well. 

Let’s just say he could have been worse. And we mean a whole lot worse.

Which brings us to the hiring of Jennrich’s replacement. The county cannot afford to make a mistake and hire the wrong person, and we cannot afford to allow that to happen, or homeowners, small businesses, and taxpayers will suffer greatly.

From the get-go, that means the hiring process for a new director must be fully transparent. This hire must not be made in secret. Candidates need to be publicly vetted and interviewed. Maybe they should be required to appear before a town hall-style meeting to take questions from the people, you know, their true bosses.

The public should be able to ask the job candidates direct questions: How would you balance shoreland protections with property rights? How would you view the role of conditional use permits? What is your philosophy on enforcement discretion? How would you handle pressure from state agencies?

We need to immediately ask Oneida County officials, especially county board chairman and zoning committee chairman Scott Holewinski, how he intends to make this transparent policy happen and when he will announce it to the public.

Second, the county needs to know exactly what it is looking for in a zoning director. In a recent executive committee discussion, Holewinski brought up the need for a person who can “get educated” on Oneida County’s zoning and land-use history and become familiar with town issues, and that’s fair enough.

But that’s a necessary and not sufficient condition.

Sure, history matters, and a successful candidate needs to also know the ins and outs of zoning and land-use law. Zoning codes are not academic exercises; they are binding rules with the force and effect of law that affect the use, enjoyment, and value of private property.

But philosophy is equally important. Zoning is, at its core, a limitation on property rights, an all but illegitimate exercise of government power. Communities have a recognized interest in managing incompatible land uses and preserving environmental standards, but they also have an interest in allowing people to use their land reasonably as they see fit, and in economic development. For the most part, that should be accomplished through the market, private deed restrictions, and by-right zoning.

An acceptable land-use philosophy means favoring flexible, performance-based approaches over rigid, box-checking enforcement. It means focusing on the actual impacts of regulations — on affordable housing and on small-business regulatory costs — and working to ease those impacts rather than adding prescriptive prohibitions. 

It means allowing property owners to innovate while protecting legitimate public interests.

It means viewing conditional use permits as invitations to flexibility, not as opportunities to impose arbitrary conditions. It means understanding the concept that what was conforming when it was built remains conforming forever. It means understanding that the modern use of conservation easements is a death blow to prosperous rural communities.

The new zoning director needs to know that his or her role will be to enforce the code as written, not interpret it.

The new zoning director must not be a zealot out to maximize and expand zoning authority, which is little more than the authority to fence in certain classes of people in artificial boundaries that are really little more than legally electrified cattle pastures. 

We must make sure the next zoning director grasps all this, or we promise to make that director’s employment short-lived and hellish. We will not accept going back to the Steve Osterman and Larry Heath days of ruining people’s lives over non-conformity and simple building permits.

Over the past several decades in Wisconsin, we have seen state agencies — particularly during certain administrations — attempt to stretch statutory language into broader regulatory control. When that happens at the state level, local governments feel the ripple effects. Guidance documents, too, begin to force county ordinances to mirror the most restrictive interpretations. 

Oneida County has largely avoided the worst of that. That must continue.

Unfortunately, the county’s search is not off to a good start. As we report in today’s edition, the county’s executive committee has approved a cross-over training period, a proposed three-month overlap between Jennrich and the new director. That overlap, if fully utilized, is projected to cost approximately $34,000.

In a word, this is stupid. Beyond stupid. By gosh, speaking at the county’s executive committee meeting, even supervisor Steven Schreier managed to see how bad the idea was, which is saying something. He compared it to the sheriff, an elected position: “What’s more, other critical positions don’t overlap… They don’t have a luxury overlap. I mean, you either do your job well and then keep your job, or you don’t, and they elect someone else. But guess what? The new guy doesn’t get to hang around with the old guy. You’re out the door. You don’t hold that position anymore. You’re unelected.”

The county board must not botch this hire, or they should become the next to be unelected, with no overlap.