Next WI right-wing legislative target - - Smart Growth

[Updated from 12:02 p.m.] A Wednesday morning state senate hearing at the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison on a bill could be the beginning of the end of fifteen years of fully-open, rational and publicly-spirited local planning in Wisconsin, according to this alert from 1000 Friends of Wisconsin:

Please contact your legislators and tell them you support Wisconsin’s Smart Growth Comprehensive Planning law that guarantees local planning will be locally driven.

If the bill joins a long litany of recent measures favoring corporate interests, then get ready to see land in your town or at the border which you assumed was intended for school expansion, housing, recreation or conservancy get fast-tracked behind closed doors and wired approvals for an insecticide factory, hog feeding operation, trucking depot or big box cluster - - and there could be little you could do about it, because:

*  You've been cut out of current planning processes - - by the bill that is getting a hearing this week.

*  The same special interests which control legislative maneuvers like the one to repeal Smart Growth and wreak other havoc also have the administrative rules processes, the Wisconsin Supreme Court and the Chief Justiceship under their control, so various petitions and appeals and even lawsuits to prevent or undo reckless, undemocratic planning will be less likely to succeed.