Walker's 8-year war on Wisconsin's environment: Part 2. Walker & Stepp.

This 21-part retrospective series I'd promised will run with daily updates, ending prior to the Nov. 6 election. This is Part 2.

Walker deliberately installed Cathy Stepp

a highly-partisan-anti-DNR-home builder-and-ex-McDonald's restaurant manager - - later promoted by Trump to run the EPA's Great Lakes regional office! - - atop the agency to run it with "a chamber of commerce mentality" which also governs state GOP, legislative and state supreme court priorities in place to move Walker's agenda forward.

Yet she claimed her opinions had no impact on what Walker wanted her to do as she deregulated, despite what we saw for years. This typified the game they played.

* August 11, 2011:

Wisconsin DNR Secretary checks her opinions at the door. Really?

That's the management style for the state's leading resource regulator, reports The Journal Sentinel's Lee Bergquist.

She said her job now is to serve as a cheerleader for the agency and its employees. She said she is striving to harmonize the often competing agendas of environmental regulation and environmental protection.

On the issue of climate change, Stepp declined to offer her thoughts on whether humans are contributing to a warming of the earth’s atmosphere.

“It doesn’t matter what I think,” she said, adding, “My job is to check my beliefs and ideologies at the door.”

...In a separate public television interview, Stepp said she didn't have any positions, or those that counted, on subjects such as clean water rules, or phosphorus regulation. 

Stepp and Walker are working on recreating the DNR as a so-called "charter agency" with fewer rules to give it political independence (read: control by Walker) and align it better with the new Department of Commerce and "customers," like businesses, according to their planning memo I obtained some months ago.

Here is Part 1 from October 15, 2018.