Marketplace of Ideas Blog

The Department of Natural Resources has been busy sending us news releases announcing proposed area land buys under the state’s Knowles–Nelson Stewardship Program, in Door County and most recently in Green Bay.

The Door County news releases included the sentence that the land “will be open to the public for low impact recreational activities, including hunting, fishing, trapping, hiking, cross-county skiing, snowshoeing, nature study, wildlife observation and photography.” The Green Bay release said something similar: “limited hunting, fishing, hiking, trapping, cross county skiing, nature study, and other urban recreation opportunities.”

Perhaps we should be skeptical about the “hunting” and “fishing” part, according to the Eau Claire Leader–Telegram:

In the negotiations over the funding level, rural legislators and sportsmen’s groups had language included requiring lands bought with stewardship dollars be open for a range of public uses, specifically hunting, fishing, trapping, cross-country skiing and hiking.

Uses could be restricted for public safety, to protect unique plants and animals or based on “usership patterns.”

However, sportsmen have complained that some southern counties and land trusts have bought land with stewardship dollars, then closed it to trapping or hunting where safety and rare resources were not an issue.

The proposed rule has “muddy” wording that still would allow groups to close land for arbitrary reasons, said Dean Gullickson of the Chippewa Valley Outdoor Resources Alliance.

Members of the Wisconsin Wildlife Federation questioned the meaning of the term “usership patterns.” If a private landowner did not allow hunting or trapping on a piece of land but that land is then bought with stewardship money, past restrictions should not be a reason to deny public use for those activities on lands bought with public money, they said. …

Gullickson said the rule should allow restrictions to hunting, trapping and other public resources to be appealed to the Natural Resources Board.

Mike Carlson of Gathering Waters Nature Conservancy said having an appeals process before the board would introduce a level of politics to determine where certain uses were or weren’t allowed on a piece of land.

There are at least three problems with this. First, the phrase “low impact recreational activities” immediately implies that anyone with one of those icky motorized vehicles — ATVs, boats, jet skis and snowmobiles — is not welcome, even though owners of those vehicles are taxpayers just like anyone else. (In fact, they’re taxpayers and fee-payers given that all of those vehicles require licenses.) It’s analogous to ordinances banning pet owners from taking their pets into municipal parks (not that any particular municipality comes to mind …) despite the fact that pet-owners pay all the other taxes and pet licensing fees too. It’s also similar to the heavy-handed bureaucracy that is the Lower Wisconsin Riverway Board, an approach that could be coming to a body of water near you someday:

The agency administers a system of “performance standards” which are designed to protect the aesthetic integrity of the Riverway. Permits are required for structures, timber harvesting, utility facilities and other activities. A number of activities are now prohibited within the Riverway. However, most activities associated with an agricultural operation are exempt from the new regulations.

The Leader–Telegram story and the experience of landowners unfortunate enough to be on the lower Wisconsin River suggest that, when it comes to outdoor activities on publicly owned lands, some taxpayers are more equal than others. We all get to pay for these government land purchases, whether or not we’re allowed to use these public lands.

The DNR purchases listed at the beginning of the blog are not really DNR purchases; they are purchases by nonprofit land trusts, with half the funding coming from the state. That is certainly preferable to the DNR merely writing a check (at inflated land prices, some say).

The broader problem is that, as noted here previously, government already owns 16.25 percent of the land in this state, and the state plans to spend $860 million to buy more land between 2010 and 2020. The DNR has a goal to acquire 2.5 million acres, or 7.2 percent of the state’s land area, and, according to the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, the DNR is nearly two-thirds of the way to its goal.

All of this government-owned land requires government services (at a minimum, public safety services), but none of it pays property taxes. Towns with county forests get at least 10 percent of proceeds from timber sales from their county, and the feds and the state make payments to offset property taxes, according to the WTA. But given the state of federal and state finances, to assume that such PILTs will continue requires more faith than I have with our elected officials in Madison and Washington.

As it is, the state plans to spend $86 million on land purchases in 2010 at the same time that the state cut almost $150 million in school aids, which might as well be called the “Plants Before People” program. Proponents of state land purchases say that wildlife areas are part of the state’s quality of life. It’s not clear to me, though, that more state land purchases mean more quality of life. Beyond that, as those of us who get our paychecks in the private sector know, everything has a price.