River News: Our View

Well, just as we presumed, the Oneida County board was partying like there was no tomorrow this past week, voting to approve the DNR’s purchase of yet more land using tax dollars in Oneida County.

Short recap: Most of the board says it’s A-OK for the government to borrow money, which taxpayers will have to pay back with interest, to pay an inflated price for land that is neither environmentally endangered nor needed for access to the Willow Flowage. 

The DNR says it will make a “nice” addition to its vast holdings in northern Wisconsin, courtesy of the taxpayers. Maybe they’ll put a thank you note in your next tax bill. 

Forgive us for pointing this out, but Stewardship funds were originally designed to purchase only environmentally endangered or pristine properties that needed protection forever — a limited but important inventory, to be sure. The fact that the fund uses borrowed money that accrues interest over time was meant as a safeguard to ensure that the government would limit its purchases to only the most necessary properties.

It was never meant to buy land or secure easements on parcels simply because they would be a good fit for the agency’s wish list. In other words, it was never meant to augment the government’s real-estate portfolio by grabbing land that could actually be developed; the intention was the reverse — it was meant only to protect uniquely pristine and obviously sensitive resources from irresponsible projects.

Otherwise, if the program were not held to such strict acquisition standards, debt and interest payments would balloon into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and the government would end up owning so much land that economic development would not be possible or sustainable.

You know, like what has actually happened.

The parcels that the county board overwhelmingly approves of the government taking are not pristine by any stretch of the imagination, not even the wetlands on them. They are not uniquely endangered; in fact, they were mapped out years ago for rural residential housing. The DNR does not even bother to justify the purchase on these grounds.

They only stress that it bolsters public access to existing public property nearby, but the purchase isn’t even necessary for that. It’s just a nice thing to have, especially when the bureaucrats aren’t paying for it.

Even more astonishing, supervisors approved it while trampling all over the comprehensive plan they themselves adopted only last year. Fifteen supervisors voted yes. Just two voted no.

There is nothing about the purchase of the properties that those who created Stewardship years ago would approve of today. It is just out-of-control government “buying” of land, even paying an enormously inflated price to foreclose any possible market competition, which is not so much conservation as it is monopoly rent-seeking.

Still, and this may shock some people, today we want to say thank you to all 17 supervisors who voted on the resolution, both those who voted yes and those who voted no.

First and foremost, our sincere thanks go to supervisors Greg Oettinger and Robert Briggs, the only two members willing to oppose this latest government land grab. In a room filled to the brim with political conformity and feel-good slogans, and overflowing with fiscal recklessness and utter cluelessness about the nefarious nature of what they were doing, Mr. Oettinger and Mr. Briggs alone could see the bigger picture and were not willing to sacrifice principle to appease progressives who might call them right-wingers if they actually stood up for their constituents.

Mr. Oettinger and Mr. Briggs also understand something increasingly rare in government: Once the state takes land, it almost never allows it back into the private sector.

That’s especially so when it buys the property for an inflated price. And, of course, conservation easements are government ownership by any other name, since the easements give the state control over land use forever, no matter whether economic or environmental conditions change.

Mr. Briggs and Mr. Oettinger understand that taxpayers are footing the bill and incurring long-term debt for the purchase, and they understand how important property rights — and having private property at all — are to future prosperity.

Most important, they understand principle. Because what happened this week was not conservation. It was the final convulsion of a bloated government program that long ago wandered, or marched, from its original purpose.

Indeed, what nobody on the county board floor wanted to discuss Tuesday was this: The Knowles-Nelson Stewardship program is already dead, or will be on June 30, when it will take its last breath.

Yes, as we mentioned, the DNR still has bonding authority in the pipeline, and yes, there will likely be deals squeezed through before the money runs dry. But politically, legislatively, and philosophically, the program is finished.

And it died for a reason that the program’s apologists on the county board dare not mention.

Lawmakers killed the Stewardship program precisely because it had become a runaway land-acquisition machine untethered from its original mission. When former Gov. Tommy Thompson and bipartisan lawmakers created the program decades ago, the purpose was both limited and defensible. Identify the truly extraordinary lands and waters of Wisconsin that deserved permanent protection and preserve them for future generations.

Reasonable people could and did support that. And those lands and waters were, in fact, protected. The program even originally contained a sunset provision. Lawmakers expected the work to be completed within a decade. The task was simple. Identify the truly irreplaceable lands and waters, preserve them, and then get government out of the land-buying business.

But, wonder of wonders, that never happened.

Instead, the sunset disappeared, and Stewardship mutated into something else entirely — a permanent taxpayer-funded land empire. In county after county, the state and its nonprofit partners have vacuumed up property piece by piece, year after year, decade after decade. 

They gobbled up large swaths of land. They chowed down on small parcels of land. And everything in between.

In some Wisconsin counties, nearly half the land mass is now publicly owned. In Oneida County alone, more than one-quarter of the land is already government-controlled.

And still it’s not enough. Just next door in Price County, to cite one example, the DNR was busy throughout the first half of the year trying to acquire 2,000 acres. And on and on it goes. In his last budget proposal, Gov. Tony Evers sought to give Stewardship $100 million in bonding authority each year for a decade. 

Can you imagine what the DNR would do with that much money? Our gullible county supervisors would likely be voting every other month to support Stewardship purchases that “fit nicely” and provide “much-needed access” to recreation. And no doubt the easy marks on the county board would support them all.

Thankfully, lawmakers in Madison finally realized what was happening, even if our supposed local representatives can’t see the private property for the government trees. They realized the program had evolved far beyond conservation into a sprawling system of permanent public acquisition financed through endless borrowing. 

They realized that most local government officials had become willing accomplices. And they realized taxpayers were being handed a bill they never dreamed could climb so high.

They saw local officials engage in explicit subversion of the program, both in large purchases and in smaller parcels, and so they killed the program because of the rampant abuse. That’s why Stewardship died — because people like our Oneida County supervisors didn’t know when to say no, or didn’t want to.

It didn’t die because Wisconsinites suddenly stopped loving forests, lakes, or wildlife habitat, or because residents oppose conservation. And certainly not because people oppose public access to natural resources.

The program died because lawmakers finally decided to put their foot down on the obviously rampant abuse. They acted because local officials would not, and indeed even cheered as more and more private property disappeared from the tax rolls forever. They acted because borrowing to buy unnecessary land for the government is fiscally reckless.

And they acted because they saw communities slowly surrendering control over their own futures.

Which brings us back to Tuesday and why we also want to thank the supervisors who voted for the purchase, wrong-headed as it was. 

Because what unfolded before the Oneida County board was practically a case study in why the Stewardship program collapsed under its own weight, and a great example of why this program should never be revived.

Make no mistake. Next year, Democrats, progressives, and environmentalists of all stripes of crazy will be back, clamoring to revive Stewardship, probably with outrageous sums of money. And you can bet that, when they do, they will say people have learned their lesson over time. Stewardship will be more restrained, they will argue. The program will focus on property maintenance, not land acquisition, they will assert.

We know they will argue that because they did so in this past session when they were trying to keep the program alive. Gov. Tony Evers made a big deal about how the program was pivoting to property maintenance. All his political vassals said, Amen.

But this purchase becomes Exhibit A that the DNR has never changed course from its land acquisition schemes and will continue to spend ungodly sums of borrowed tax dollars on properties if it is ever given the chance.

And this will become Exhibit A that local county officials can’t be trusted to stand up for their constituents and the future of their communities.

Not one supervisor who supported the purchase this week meaningfully addressed the long-term consequences of permanently removing more private land from potential economic use. Not one supervisor bothered to ask what it means for taxpayers to continue financing acquisitions through state borrowing. Not one acknowledged the ultimate contradiction between supporting “smart growth,” housing availability, economic opportunity, and local flexibility while simultaneously cheering the permanent transfer of more land into permanent government control. 

We’ll give a little credit: Supervisor Robb Jensen raised the latter question, but even he quickly fell in line with the land-grabbers.

Instead, residents got the usual emotional appeals and moral posturing that always accompany these deals, as though opposing perpetual government expansion somehow makes one anti-conservation.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin faces enormous fiscal pressures, rising infrastructure costs, and growing demands on state resources. Yet government officials continue behaving as though public debt is imaginary so long as the purchase can be wrapped in the language of conservation.

So we thank the supervisors who supported this purchase because, when the Democrats trot out Stewardship revival and how the program is all about maintenance, not land acquisition, we’ll point straight at this body of big-government apologists. We’ll send lawmakers the transcripts of this week’s Oneida County board meeting and last week’s executive committee meeting so they can read aloud and marvel at their gullibility and fiscal recklessness.

Everyone should be reminded this week that liberty, including property rights, rarely disappears all at once. More often, it is stolen away acre by acre, purchase by purchase, constitutional right after constitutional right, all wrapped in language designed to make resistance sound selfish or backward. 

After all, it’s just one parcel, just one fundamental right, right? You’ll never notice it’s gone.

That kind of thinking, which saturates most of the county board, is why dissent matters. That is why Mr. Oettinger and Mr. Briggs mattered Tuesday.

And that is why the collapse of the Stewardship program may ultimately prove one of the healthiest political corrections Wisconsin has made in years.