Wisconsin's Water Crisis

I wrote this piece for the Journal Sentinel (it got trimmed for length - - it was too long) - - so I will post the full original later: That iteration will include URL links the hard-copy paper can't use, too:

GOP policies putting Wisconsin's waters at risk

Michael Sears

Is there a trend in Wisconsin away from smart water policy?

By James Rowen

May 31, 2013 6:52 p.m.

Wisconsin waters are at a crisis point.

Impossible, you say. We're bordered by two Great Lakes and the Mississippi River — watershed abundance, border to border.

The benefits of public access to water were so basic to Wisconsin's very existence and definition that Congress guaranteed it in 1787 — before statehood — and public water rights are now inscribed in the Wisconsin Constitution as Article IX, "The Public Trust Doctrine."

The DNR Public Trust Doctrine web page announces that "Wisconsin's Waters Belong To Everyone" and explains that the state is obligated to assertively manage water with the public interest put first; federal treaties with Native tribes in Wisconsin contain broad rights to water, hunting and fishing — even off-reservation.

But Gov. Scott Walker and the GOP-run Legislature are systematically draining the Public Trust Doctrine from law and programs through power politics and party-line votes, making water access and management into private-sector tools.

Through complacent, shortsighted and partisan behavior, these politicians are disconnecting wetlands from their ecosystems and also disconnecting Wisconsin from imperative local-to-international water conservation planning.

Turning these disconnects around begins with absorbing the common sense conclusion of the 1966 Wisconsin Supreme Court Hixon case ruling that informed water-related decision-making for decades:

A little fill here and there may seem to be nothing to become excited about. But one fill, though comparatively inconsequential, may lead to another, and another, and before long a great body of water may be eaten away until it may no longer exist.

An even earlier Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling in the 1914 Husting case also emphasized the importance of unfettered public access to water:

The wisdom of the policy which, in the organic laws of our state, steadfastly and carefully preserved to the people the full and free use of public waters, cannot be questioned. Nor should it be limited or curtailed by narrow constructions.

The current official and lamentably partisan disdain for principled water policy, science and law emerged in the early hours of Walker's administration.

That's when, in the name of job creation, Walker pushed the Legislature to adopt a bill short-circuiting the formal, routine review of a wetland filling permit application from a Green Bay-area developer (and Walker campaign contributor) to facilitate construction near Lambeau Field of Bass Pro Shops, a national fishing equipment destination operation.

Aware of the ensuing controversy, and the contradiction between fishing supplies and wetland filling, Bass Pro Shops withdrew from the situation. But the administration was not chastened.

Not even a subsequent 2011 letter from federal officials citing a jaw-dropping 75 "omissions and deviations" in Wisconsin's management of the U.S. Clean Water Act has slowed the flow of proposals or actions by the governor, state agencies and the Legislature that would:

■End some environmental reviews for some major development projects.

■Change laws to ease building in wetlands, including waterways protected for their scientifically significant status. The bill was drafted with active input from Wisconsin building interests; Walker signed it to a standing ovation at a convention of Realtors.

■Allow mega-dairies to expand without serious regard for the water table; and exempt some new high-capacity well water (100,000-plus gallons daily) applicants statewide from assessing the wells' cumulative water draw effects; and reduce state water program management overall by ending the collection of the $125 annual high-capacity well water withdrawal fee.

Imagine if authorities were to allow developers to build multiple 10-story parking ramps without studying the cumulative impacts on traffic.

■End the ability of municipalities to establish construction site runoff regulations stronger than state standards, while simultaneously transferring overall enforcement to the DNR — an agency now run with a chamber-of-commerce mentality intentionally installed there by Walker.

■Deeply cut funding for a long-standing and bipartisan open space acquisition program — the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund — and require the DNR to sell 10,000 acres of land, land that retains moisture, prevents flooding, filters water and sustains fish and wildlife.

■Open shore land to greater development, despite the benefit and need for erosion and flood controls.

■Enable unprecedented mountain-top removal in the pristine, northern Penokee Hills for an historically long, deep and wide open-pit iron ore mine in a watershed that includes the headwaters of the Bad River near Lake Superior.

The mine would be upriver from public drinking water supplies and close to wild rice producing estuaries central to the survival of the Bad River Band of Ojibwe (Chippewa), and could allow, despite scientific testimony and other warnings, the dumping of millions of tons of acid-yielding waste rock across more than 3,000 acres and into streams and wetlands — expanding the impact of the wetlands-filling legislation written earlier that had pleased real estate and building interests.

Worse, the trend in Wisconsin away from smart water policy is taking place against a backdrop of additional problems and risks.

Where in this roiled natural and political environment is the required adherence to the Public Trust Doctrine and the state Supreme Court's water guidance nearly a half-century ago?

James Rowen is a political writer and environmental consultant. He blogs at "The Political Environment" at Purple Wisconsin.