Wisconsin's
Land Trust;
How much land should government own?
by JJ Blonien, Editor
March 8, 2007
It started out as a very sound idea. WisconsinÕs first stewardship
program was created in 1989 for the purpose of acquiring land to expand
recreational opportunities and protect environmentally sensitive areas.
The Warren Knowles-Gaylord Nelson Stewardship Program as it is now known,
authorized $231 million in general obligation bonding authority for the
purpose of acquiring land to expand recreational opportunities and protect
environmentally sensitive areas. The program was originally intended
to end after a ten-year period ending in fiscal year 2000.
With the end of the land acquisition program in sight, environmentalists
demanded that the legislature extend the program. So in 1999 the land
acquisition program was reauthorized for another ten-year period with
additional expenditures of $430 million.
This was still not enough. In 2001, under pressure from environmental
groups, the bonding authorization was increased to $60 million annually,
beginning in 2002 and continuing through the remainder of the program
in 2010. These combined legislative actions authorized a total of $803
million for the 20-year program.
Is 6.3 million acres of public conservancy land enough to protect the environment?
So, how much land has been acquired since 1990? As of June 30, 2006,
the stewardship program has allowed the DNR to purchase 420,900 acres.
This brings the total of state-owned conservation land to almost 1.5
million acres Ñ approximately 4.2 percent of the total land area
in Wisconsin (34.76 million acres).
Wait thereÕs more. Now add the 6.3 million acres held by the federal
government (mostly national forests), and 2.3 million acres of parks
and forests owned by Wisconsin counties. In total, public conservation
land throughout the state of Wisconsin is more than 6.3 million acres Ñ or
18 percent of the stateÕs total land area.
I would guess that most people would be content to have the Stewardship
program sunset in 2010, knowing that one out of every five acres in the
state has been set aside as public conservancy.
But not the environmentalists and Gov. Jim Doyle. Under his proposed
budget, Doyle wants to not only reauthorize the Stewardship program,
but increase spending by more than 75 percent Ñ from its present
$60 million to $105 million a year in 2011.
In all, DoyleÕs plan would cost $1.6 billion in the next decade
to continue the program to convert more private land to public conservancy.
Are we paying inflated prices for land
purchased with stewardship funds?
While the Stewardship Program is hailed as a savior of natural areas,
it is not without controversy. A report from the Legislative Audit Bureau
issued in 2000, discovered that the selling price of properties purchased
with grants from the Stewardship Program were on average three times
higher than the average local assessment for property tax purposes. The
range of differences between local assessments and the appraised values
in which they were purchased under the stewardship program, was highlighted
by three examples:
• A 20-acre property in the Town of Scott with an assessed value
of $15,200 and an approved appraised value of $300,000.
• A 35-acre property in Washington County assessed at $17,576 and
approved appraised value of $248,000.
• A 2.8-acre property in the Village of Ashwaubenon with an assessed
value of $9,000 and an approved appraised value of $124,000.
A more outrageous case is the Green Bay landowner who hired his owner
assessor and got paid over eleven times the value that the city deemed
accurate for tax purposes. In that case, the property was assessed at
a value of $20,300 in 1996, with an increase to $84,400 in 1997 Ñ a
far cry from the ownerÕs selling price of $1 million.
Will public land be open for hunting,
trapping, and fishing in the future?
The past 27 years of the never-ending stewardship program raises a number
of questions. Have we converted too much private land to public ownership,
and do we really need to add more?
Are we paying well above fair market value for land purchased under the
stewardship program?
What impact will the fact that these lands will never produce any property
tax revenue have on the budgets of local government?
A larger question looms in the future. While the vast majority of conservancy
lands are presently open to public hunting and fishing, what guarantees
are there that they will remain open in the future.
There is intense pressure from animal rights activists to ban hunting
and fishing on public lands. Who is to say that future state lawmakers
wonÕt cave in to pressure from special interests and place restrictions
on public land access to hunters, trappers, and fishermen?
Hunters have already lost access to more than 10,000 acres of public
land in the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife Refuge.
Inquiring minds want to know. The problem is that no one is asking the
hard questions and risk being labeled as anti-environment. The conservancy
goal in Wisconsin should not be to amass huge tracts of public land.
The goal should be a well-crafted plan to properly manage the 6.3 million
acres that we already own.
Contact Blonien at: jj@blonien.com
Contact Blonien at: jj@blonien.com
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