Friday, November 4, 2016

Big WI water permit winners are major Walker donors

This blog has repeatedly posted information about policy-making positions for example - - 
This time it's a forestry industry executive to manage the Forestry Division, according to a DNR news release - - 
and procedural favors, for example - - 
a plan by the Kohler Co. to convert into a high-end golf course a water, dune and woodland-rich nature preserve bisected by the Black River near Sheboygan along Lake Michigan 
   without requiring the company to submit a formal permit application. 
The plan even includes turning over for golf course operations at least four acres of land in the adjoining Kohler Andrae State Park - - a request likely to find a friendly reception at the DNR where, as we speak, thousands of acres of state land under DNR ownership - - public land, your land - - is being offered for sale.
- - which Scott Walker's 'chamber of commerce mentality' Department of Natural Resources has thrown to insiders for their special interest agendas.

Walker's DNR and the ideologically-driven Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel have been working closely to punch holes in the state constitution's protection of common water rights so that big ag can have all the groundwater it wants.

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In fact, there are so few rules anymore in the corporatized state which Walker and his allies have wrought here through gerrymandering and free-flowing campaign cash that big ag put its recent gimme demands for unfettered access to state groundwater in writing and hand-delivered them to legislators just in case the lawmakers didn't know who was buttering their bread.

So big props to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign for finding and publicizing a torrent of campaign donations to the Walker campaign from two corporate ag operations which won controversial well water permits from the DNR without having to account for the impact those withdrawals would have downstream or on the depth of the water table:
One of the permits was granted to James Wysocki, of Bancroft, for a well located in Pine Grove in Portage County. Wysocki and several members of his family own the Wysocki Family of Companies, which operates large vegetable and dairy farms.
The owners of the Wysocki Family of Companies contributed about $31,000 to Walker between January 2010 and August 2016...
And you wonder why there are dead zones in Wisconsin lakes near big feedlots and manure-contaminated rural wells?

And why good people with science backgrounds and years of experience are either leaving the DNR or holding on against the tide so that some public interested work might find its way past Walker's corporate-sector managers to save some of the state's open land, clean air, fresh water and fast-fading reputation

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