Cathy Stepp touts her record. Not cubicles

Part One of a long and useful Lakeland Times review (registration may be required) of issues at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has much to offer, including:

* The agency is gearing up for a 2017 wolf hunt:

"The hunt is on the books and as soon as there is a decision at the federal level we will be instituting a wolf hunt," said [Deputy DNR Secretary Kurt] Thiede. 

* DNR Secretary and Scott Walker "chamber of commerce mentality" chief implementer Cathy Stepp is something of a change agency, she tells the Lakeland Times:

"It's not like it's the old days in the DNR where these decisions were made in a building in Madison in a cubicle," she said.  

Thus reprising a key piece of her famously blogged and ranted trope which helped explain why Walker picked her for the job - - aversion to DNR staff and where they worked:

...people who go to work for the DNR's land, waste, and water bureaus tend to be anti-development, anti-transportation, and pro-garter snakes, karner blue butterflies, etc...This is in their nature; their make-up and DNA. So, since they're unelected bureaucrats who have only their cubicle walls to bounce ideas off of, they tend to come up with some pretty outrageous stuff that those of us in the real world have to contend with.

* And though she supported what was a failed effort through the last budget to remove the oversight functions of the Wisconsin Natural Resources Board, with all its avenues of public access into DNR activities, Stepp told the Lakeland Times she was the people's champion with a track record to prove it:

I would hope that people have seen enough of my track record over six years and how much work we have put into getting more public involvement - more transparency, more online chats, more surveys, more meaningful involvement and feedback from the public and back to the public," she said. 

This is not the first time she's sung her own praises.

And her self-addressed paean about transparency contradicts her agency's scrubbing from official websites long-established information and links about climate change.