State funding of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has been reduced by more than $100 million per biennium in the past 30 years.
A key factor: smaller debt payments.
DNR received $334.3 million in state general purpose revenue in the 1995-97 state budget and $226.2 million in 2025-27.
That’s a reduction of $108.1 million, or 32%.
Between the two periods, debt service dropped from $234.7 million to $103.4 million.
A Wisconsin Reddit user posted Nov. 22 about the cuts.
A 2023 report on DNR by the nonpartisan Wisconsin Policy Forum said those savings have been used to fund Medicaid, K-12 schools, prisons and tax cuts. Republicans have controlled all or part of the state budget process for all but one cycle since 1995.
The DNR is charged with protecting and enhancing air, land, water, forests, wildlife, fish and plants and provides outdoor recreational activities.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
An oak savannah in southern Dane County that the Badgerland Foundation is working to conserve using Knowles-Nelson Stewardship funds (Photo by Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)
The looming shutdown of Wisconsin’s decades old Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Grant program has put conservation projects across Wisconsin at risk as land trusts attempt to muddle on without the program that has protected more than 700,000 acres of land in the state.
Without the stewardship fund, projects to conserve 1,300 acres of Northwoods forest near the headwaters of the Wisconsin River in Vilas County, hundreds of acres of “ecologically significant” wetlands in Door County and dozens of acres of prairie and grassland in Dane County could go unfinished.
“It’s a bit bleak and it’s so disheartening to know that there’s so many beautiful, wonderful places kind of on the chopping block right now all across the state,” says Emily Wood, executive director of the Door County Land Trust. “It’s not just us. We hear from our partners that there are hundreds and thousands of acres that are just not going to be protected if [the program] goes away, and that’s going to have such an impact, domino effect, on future generations.”
The Knowles-Nelson Stewardship fund was created in 1989 to fund land conservation in Wisconsin. The program provides grants to local governments and non-profits to cover some of the costs for purchasing and conserving land that can be used for recreation, preserving animal habitats and supporting local industries such as forestry.
The program enjoys massive bipartisan support, yet in recent years, some Republicans in the state Legislature — largely from communities in the northern part of the state — have grown hostile to it, claiming that the program has too often been used to fund the purchase of land up north, depleting local tax bases.
Republican legislators have also complained that they no longer have oversight over the Department of Natural Resource’s management of the program after a Wisconsin Supreme Court decision last year found that the Legislature had given itself an unconstitutional veto authority over the DNR’s grant decisions.
Several attempts have been made to save the program from expiring next summer. In his initial state budget proposal, Gov. Tony Evers asked to extend the program for ten years with $100 million in annual funding. Republicans stripped that provision from the budget immediately.
Rep. Tony Kurtz (R-Wonewoc) and Sen. Patrick Testin (R-Stevens Point) have authored a bill that would extend the program for four years at $28 million per year. The bill also includes a provision that would require the full Legislature to approve any land purchases that cost more than $1 million — a proposal that critics say would be far too slow for the speed at which real estate transactions need to move.
A separate proposal from Sen. Jodi Habush Sinykin (D-Whitefish Bay) would re-authorize the program for six years at $72 million per year and create an independent board made up of members appointed by the Legislature to approve large land purchases through the program.
But there has been little progress made on advancing either proposal and now conservation groups are trying to plan for the next year without the support that Knowles-Nelson has traditionally provided.
Oak Bluff Natural Area in Door County, which was protected by the Door County Land Trust using Knowles-Nelson Stewardship funds in 2023. (Photo by Kay McKinley)
Wood says that her organization is trying to protect the landscape in one of the most ecologically significant parts of the state. The challenge for her group is that Door County’s natural beauty draws tourists and increased development, yet too much development would damage the natural beauty.
The Door County Land Trust has protected more than 5,000 acres of land in the county and Knowles-Nelson has covered half the cost in nearly every transaction, according to Wood. With the program shuttering next year, three projects totaling about $1 million — all of which scored highly on the DNR criteria — are at risk.
“The county as a whole receives a ton of money from the Knowles-Nelson stewardship fund, because we are so geared towards tourism and access to natural resources,” she says. The stewardship fund is critical for Door County to continue “to be the county that you know, everyone expects us to be when they get in the car and come up here.”
Near the southern border of Dane County, Filip Sanna and the BadgerLand Foundation are working with the Driftless Area Land Conservancy and The Prairie Enthusiasts to protect and restore vital oak savannah and prairie in southern Wisconsin.
Hundreds of years of agriculture have all but destroyed the native prairies in what was once one of the most ecologically diverse regions in the world.
The foundation has already conserved and gifted to the Driftless Area Land Conservancy hundreds of acres between Belleville and New Glarus that will soon be open to the public for hiking and hunting and used for sustainable practices such as regenerative agriculture. But future plans are threatened by the looming loss of stewardship funds.
Recently, a tract of about 30 acres became available on the market within an area environmental groups have targeted as important for protecting grassland bird habitat. The Prairie Enthusiasts wanted to conserve the land but funds through the stewardship program wouldn’t be available fast enough. So the BadgerLand Foundation and the Prairie Enthusiasts reached an agreement in which the foundation would purchase the land and then sell it to the Prairie Enthusiasts once the stewardship grant comes through.
Now those funds are uncertain and Sanna says it could sidetrack future plans.
One of the arguments Republican legislators have often made against the Knowles-Nelson program is that more populated areas in the southern part of the state should bear more of the land conservation burden.
But the program dying off could jeopardize land conservation in the population centers because land is more expensive there. Dane County’s recently enacted 2026 budget doubled the size of the county’s conservation fund from $5 million to $10 million. That, Sanna says, can be a Band-aid for now. But county and local governments are facing their own budget challenges and smaller counties won’t be able to step into the DNR’s conservation shoes. In many places, the local governments are also dependent on stewardship program funds to conserve and maintain public land.
“One of the responses we have to the uncertainty about Knowles-Nelson is to try to look to the county level and then some combination of county funding and private donations,” Sanna says. “That might work in Dane County, where we have a relatively strong tax base. But if you go to the neighboring counties around, Green and Iowa and Lafayette and all of those counties, that’s probably not an option.”
“if [Knowles-Nelson] dies, the next step is going to be, now you’re going to have nice parks around all the wealthy people, but all the rest of Wisconsin that is smaller population centers that’ll just be like towns, rural housing, farmland, private land,” he continues. “There won’t be public land.”
Way up in Vilas County, in the part of the state where the fight over land conservation has been most heated, a handful of administrative delays might end up killing a 1,300 acre conservation project because stewardship funds will no longer be available.
The Northwoods Alliance and Partners in Forestry are working together to use federal and Knowles-Nelson funds to preserve two tracts of land west of the town of Land O’ Lakes. Joe Hovel, director of Partners in Forestry, says the project would include trails as part of the extensive Wilderness Lakes bike path system.
Because the real estate deal on the project got delayed, and the slow speed at which the state and federal government have moved, it’s likely that the chance to use Knowles-Nelson dollars has already passed.
Hovel says the complaints about land conservation up north discount the economic value of protecting the land for recreational uses.
“It’s really short sighted in a sense that there isn’t enough respect for the recreational value of this land conservation stuff,” Hovel says. “The value of public access conservation land dwarfs, I mean it literally dwarfs, the value that timber revenue brings in.”
A report from the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable found that recreation on federal public lands generates $128.5 billion in economic activity every year. All the logging on federal land generates $200-300 million per year.
Forest Lake Road in Vilas County, where two conservation groups are trying to conserve 1,300 acres of land. (Photo Courtesy of Joe Hovel)
The Legislature has just over six months to extend the program. Wood says it would be a self-inflicted wound if elected officials allow a program that other states look to as a model to expire.
“It’s so disheartening to hear that the fund that has had so much success over the years, that other states look to how to fund conservation, they look to Wisconsin’s model on how to do it, and that we as a state, that same model is going to go down just because of partisan gridlock,” she says. “We really just need to keep it alive because funding it in a later year, or coming back and making changes to make it better are way more possible if it’s an existing program.”
“But coming up with another one from scratch, it just seems like it would be an impossibility. So right now, it does feel like we are just screaming to keep it, just keep it alive. Just don’t kill it.”
Rob-n-Cin farms has expanded to become a concentrated animal feeding operation. Environmental groups and local residents have filed a petition against the DNR's decision to grant the farm a wastewater discharge permit. (Photo by Darren Hauck/Getty Images)
Two environmental groups filed a petition late last month challenging the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources’ decision to grant a permit allowing a West Bend dairy farm to operate as a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO).
The dairy, Rob-n-Cin Farms, has been operating as a CAFO for several years without a permit. Under state law, CAFOs are required to obtain Wisconsin Pollution Discharge Elimination System (WPDES) permits, which regulate the pollution industrial activities such as factory farms are allowed to discharge into local waterways.
CAFOs are industrial farming facilities with more than 1,000 animal units — one animal unit is equivalent to a 1,000-pound cow. Rob-n-Cin plans to expand its herd from 1,300 cows to 2,000. After expanding, the herd will produce more than 18 million gallons of manure every year which the farm plans to spread on fields in Ozaukee and Washington counties.
In 2023, the DNR investigated the farm for operating as an unpermitted CAFO and issued a notice of noncompliance against the farm.
Since then, Rob-n-Cin has been going through the process to obtain a permit, drawing complaints from local residents and community groups. Those complaints include the farm’s failure to list two satellite locations where it plans to spread manure in its permit application, the lack of sanctions on the farm for operating unpermitted and the effect on local groundwater.
Residents are worried about the farm’s effects on the Milwaukee River watershed and the Cedarburg Bog, which is protected as a state natural area and national natural landmark.
On Nov. 26, the environmental-focused law firm Midwest Environmental Advocates filed a petition for a contested case review of the DNR’s permit approval on behalf of Milwaukee Riverkeeper and area residents. The residents include a nearby organic farm and neighbors of Rob-n-Cin.
The petition alleges that the DNR has not proven the expansion will comply with the state’s groundwater quality standards, particularly the limits for phosphorus and nitrates. The permit includes statements that the farm will follow statewide best practices for manure spreading but the petition argues that’s not enough and the DNR should have done more to prove the groundwater will be protected.
“DNR’s issuance of a permit relying solely on standard practices that are not intended to ensure compliance with groundwater quality standards is unreasonable,” the petition states. “This is particularly true in an area of high susceptibility where many members of the public raised credible concerns of groundwater contamination and examples of excessive nitrate levels. Rob-n-Cin needed to demonstrate, and DNR needed to find, that issuance of a permit would not lead to continued or widespread groundwater contamination in excess of established standards. Simply relying on default nutrient management practices without performing analysis or investigation was unreasonable.”
The petition also argues the DNR should require monitoring of the local groundwater after the expansion is complete, stating that state regulators can’t know if the farm is violating its standards if it isn’t tracking how the expansion affects the groundwater.
And the petition states that the DNR did not complete a sufficient environmental review before approving the permit.
“DNR conducted no substantive evaluation of environmental or socioeconomic impacts of the WPDES permit, including effects on groundwater, Cedar Creek, Mole Creek (a Class II trout stream), the Milwaukee River watershed, which is subject to an EPA-approved [Total Maximum Daily Load] for nutrients and sediment, or the Cedarburg Bog,” the petition states.
In a news release, MEA attorney Adam Voskuil said the DNR’s authority requires it to prove that the expansion won’t violate state water standards and it has failed to do so.
“State law is clear that the DNR is required to affirmatively determine — not merely assume — that Rob-n-Cin’s manure-spreading plan will not violate groundwater quality standards. Without off-site groundwater monitoring, there’s simply no way to obtain the data necessary to make that determination,” Voskuil said.
If the petition for a contested case hearing is granted, a hearing on the permit approval will be held by an administrative law judge. That decision would be appealable to the state circuit court system.
The shore of Lake Superior near Ashland. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)
A rule to protect Wisconsin’s cleanest waterways from being harmed was finalized last week over the objections of Republican legislators and allied lobbying groups.
The rule highlights the ongoing dispute between the Legislature and the administration of Gov. Tony Evers over the level of oversight legislators are allowed to have over the administrative rulemaking process. Earlier this year, the state Supreme Court issued a ruling that curtailed the ability of the Legislature to kill administrative rules.
The new rule, which was published in the state’s administrative register Nov. 24 and is set to go into effect July 1, is the result of a decade of wrangling.
In 2015, the U.S. EPA updated the Clean Water Act’s antidegradation regulations — which guide how states are required to protect high quality lakes and rivers from pollution.
Dozens of creeks, rivers and lakes are classified as outstanding resource waters and exceptional resource waters under Wisconsin’s administrative code and will be protected as “high quality waters” under the new rule. Additionally, a body of water can be considered a high quality water if it has contaminant levels that are better than an established statewide standard.
“This means that a waterbody can be high quality for one or more parameters, even if it is impaired for a different parameter,” Laura Dietrich, manager of the Department of Natural Resources’ water evaluation section, said in an email. “For example, a waterbody may be impaired for phosphorus, but chloride levels are better than the chloride water quality criterion. The waterbody would be considered high quality for the purposes of considering new or increased discharges of chloride, but would not be high quality for phosphorus.”
Under the new rule, the DNR will be required to conduct a review before regulated entities are allowed to discharge new or increased levels of contaminants into the water body. Discharges may be allowed if found to be necessary through a “social or economic analysis.”
The rule’s finalization is the end of a process that began in 2023 and has included multiple public hearings and the input of several legislative committees.
Last month, the Assembly committee on the environment voted 4-2 to request modifications to the rule, but the DNR and the Evers administration moved forward with finalizing the rule anyway.
That action has angered Republicans who want more say in the process.
“Representative government has been taken away and we now have rule by king,” Rep. Joy Goeben (R-Hobart) said in a statement. “We don’t want a king and the current path forward is dangerous.”
Lobbying groups have also complained about the rule’s finalization.
Scott Manley, a lobbyist for Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, the state’s largest business group, told Wisconsin Public Radio that the rule going into effect is “terrible from a representative government standpoint.”
Erik Kanter, government relations director with Clean Wisconsin, told the Wisconsin Examiner that he thinks the rule represents the DNR finding a solid compromise between environmental and business concerns and that WMC was involved in the entire process through an advisory committee.
“DNR engaged the stakeholder group regularly over the 30-month process it took to put the rule together at the DNR, and so WMC, along the way, had all the opportunity, and certainly took the opportunity, to make their thoughts [known] on how to put this rule together,” Kanter said. “It almost feels like it was never going to be enough for WMC.”
Kanter also said that because the rule aligns the state with the EPA regulations, the state doesn’t have a choice if it wants to retain regulatory authority over its own water.
“Wisconsin has to do this. We have to update our own rules to comply with federal changes to the Clean Water Act,” he said. “There’s no two ways about it if we want to maintain our delegation authority and have state regulators in charge of administering the Clean Water Act. It’s something we have to do.”
The alternative would be for the federal EPA to administer the act in Wisconsin, he said.
“I think a lot of folks in the business community wouldn’t want EPA and the federal government breathing down their neck,” Kanter said. “And so this delegated authority situation is, I think, better for everybody.”
The return of the sandhill crane to Wisconsin is a conservation success, but now the state needs to manage the population and the crop damage the birds can cause. (Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources)
Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature are trying once again to establish a sandhill crane hunting season in the state and once again the issue has caused a heated debate.
At a public hearing on a bill to establish a crane hunt Wednesday morning, Democrats and conservation groups complained that the proposal was a solution in search of a problem while hunters repeatedly insisted the only way to manage the crane population is through a hunt.
The bill is the product of a Joint Legislative Council study committee convened last year — which spent months trying to find a compromise solution that would satisfy farmers concerned about the more than $1.5 million in crop damage the birds cause each year, hunting groups dead set on establishing a hunt and bird conservationists worried a hunt could damage a population that the state spent decades working to reestablish.
Sandhill cranes were once gone from the Wisconsin environment, but years of careful work have reestablished the birds. However, many of the wetland habitats that originally served as the bird’s nesting sites have been replaced with farmland and the birds like to eat the corn seeds out of those fields.
The compromise proposal barely eked through the study committee — which was divided along similar lines as Wednesday’s hearing.
In the version of the bill under consideration now, a number of proposals meant to help farmers with the crop damage problem have been stripped out, including a program that would subsidize part of the cost for pre-treating corn seeds with a chemical that makes them unappetizing to the birds.
Dave Considine, a retired state representative whose former district includes the Baraboo-based International Crane Foundation, said at the hearing it was a “travesty” that aid for farmers has been left out of the bill.
“I thought we had a really decent compromise [in the study committee]. Now I come here to testify and we have given farmers no help, nothing,” Considine said. “Matter of fact, most of the science in the committee meeting, spoke of the fact that if anything [a hunt] may increase damage.”
Plus, a number of anti-hunt advocates questioned how holding a hunt in the fall is meant to deter crop damage, which largely happens in the spring before the seeds have sprouted.
A number of pro-hunt speakers at the hearing pointed to Alabama, Kentucky and Tennessee, as well as the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec, which hold or are preparing to start sandhill crane hunting seasons.
The difference, conservationists argued, is that the sandhill cranes that migrate through the eastern flyway (the region of North America of which Wisconsin is a part), use Wisconsin as their annual nesting ground.
“Cranes are long-lived, and slow to breed one or two young annually,” said Ann Lacy, director of North American eastern flyway programs at the International Crane Foundation. “They do not have the same biology as ducks or geese; therefore, they cannot be managed similarly. They have unique biological considerations, especially in Wisconsin. What happens to these birds in Wisconsin has an effect on the Eastern Population as a whole.”
Despite all those concerns, hunting advocates refused to budge, even as several experts testified explaining the scientific reasons why a hunt won’t help the crop damage problem. For example, sandhill cranes mate for life and are extremely territorial but most of the damage in the state every year comes from single birds moving in larger flocks. If one or both members of a mated pair are killed in a hunt, that only opens up the pair’s territory to be taken over by an unruly group of unmated birds.
“[We’ve] heard several times that hunting is not a tool that will help us against agricultural damage,” Todd Schaller, a member of the Wisconsin Waterfowl Association board said in response to the expert testimony. “I’m going to say, in my pragmatic thinking, that’s false.”
In 2021, Republicans in the Legislature proposed a similar bill to start a crane hunt. When announcing that bill, conservative rock musician Ted Nugent appeared at a press conference in which he called the birds “ribeyes in the sky.” On Wednesday, Tim Andryk of Wisconsin Ducks Unlimited argued people would be less squeamish about having a crane hunt in Wisconsin if they tasted the meat.
“They’re just amazing when it comes to eating them,” Andryk said. “They’re a delicate, dark red meat … they’re such good eating that people that are opposed to hunting them, once they’ve eaten one, I don’t think they would be opposed to hunting.”
A sign acknowledging Stewardship program support at Firemen's Park in Verona. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)
A Wisconsin Assembly committee deadlocked 6-6 Wednesday on a Republican-authored bill to prevent the broadly popular Knowles-Nelson Stewardship program from lapsing next year.
The program, which allows the state Department of Natural Resources to purchase, conserve and maintain public land enjoys bipartisan support among Wisconsin residents. However a subset of Republican legislators have soured on the program’s intentions, arguing too much land has been pulled off local property tax rolls in northern Wisconsin. Republicans have also complained that a state Supreme Court decision removed their authority to conduct oversight of the program.
Previously, members of the Joint Committee on Finance had the ability to anonymously hold up stewardship projects.
Republicans in the Legislature stripped money to re-authorize the program out of the state budget earlier this year and both parties have proposed competing pieces of legislation to keep it running beyond 2026.
On Wednesday, the Assembly Committee on Forestry, Parks and Outdoor Recreation took up the Republican bill, authored by Rep. Tony Kurtz (R-Wonewoc). Democrats and environmental groups have been unsupportive of the Kurtz bill since its initial release because it requires that any attempt by the DNR to acquire land at a cost of more than $1 million be approved by the full Legislature through standalone legislation.
Critics have argued the full legislative process is the opposite of what the Court intended when it took the anonymous hold power away from JFC, that the Legislature could never move quickly enough for the speed at which real estate transactions must sometimes take place and the public nature of legislation could scare off potential sellers.
Earlier this week, Kurtz released a proposed amendment to his bill that would lower the threshold requiring legislative approval from $1 million to $250,000.
A Democratic proposal, which was introduced as a separate bill this summer and offered as an amendment to the Republican bill this week, would create an independent board, nominated by members of both parties, to oversee the program outside of the legislative process.
On Wednesday, the committee voted 7-5 in favor of accepting Kurtz’s amendment to his bill. Rep. Paul Melotic (R-Grafton) voted with the committee’s four Democrats against the amendment.
But on the vote to advance the bill out of committee, Reps. Calvin Callahan (R-Tomahawk) and Rob Swearingen (R-Rhinelander) joined the Democrats to vote no, resulting in the 6-6 tie.
When an Assembly committee votes for a bill, it reports the bill to the full Assembly floor and recommends that it be passed. According to Assembly rules, when a committee ties on a vote, the chair of the committee has the discretion to report the bill to the full Assembly “without recommendation.”
The bill has already been reported to the full Assembly for a potential vote, according to the office of Rep. Jeff Mursau (R-Crivitz), the committee’s chair.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Rep. Vincent Miresse (D-Stevens Point), a co-author of the Democratic proposal, said “Wisconsin Democrats are united in their support and vision for Knowles-Nelson,” while “Republicans cannot seem to agree on a path forward.”
Charles Carlin, the director of strategic initiatives at the non-profit land trust organization Gathering Waters, told the Wisconsin Examiner that Wednesday’s vote shows the only way to save the program is with a bill that can get support from both parties.
“Today’s hearing was a missed opportunity for bipartisan cooperation on the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship program,” Carlin said. “There is ample room for compromise across the aisle. But today’s deadlocked committee vote demonstrates that no reauthorization is going to move forward without buy-in from both parties. The hearing should motivate legislators on both sides of the aisle to come together and work out a compromise that keeps Knowles-Nelson working for Wisconsin.”
A bipartisan group of legislators has proposed a bill to require the state Department of Natural Resources to warn county and tribal health departments when an exceedance of state groundwater standards is discovered.
The proposed bill, which was circulated for co-sponsorship Monday by Rep. Jill Billings (D-La Crosse), Rep. Todd Novak (R-Dodgeville) and Sen. Jesse James (R-Thorp), would include warnings about the presence of PFAS — even though the state has been unable to finalize a PFAS limit for groundwater.
That provision would allow private well owners to be warned about the presence of PFAS despite the yearslong political quicksand that has mired the effort to enact a contaminant limit for the class of chemicals. The lack of a PFAS standard has been a regular sticking point in negotiations over legislation to spend $125 million already set aside for PFAS clean up.
While the state doesn’t have a PFAS groundwater standard, it does have standards for nearly 150 other chemicals such as aluminum, nitrates and lead.
About one-third of Wisconsinites get their drinking water from private wells, which don’t come with the same warnings that are often required of municipal water systems.
“The public should be able to know if there is any threat to the safety of the water they and their children drink every day,” the co-sponsorship memo states. “This bill would provide Wisconsinites with more knowledge so they can protect themselves and their children from pollutants and allow them to take advantage of local and county-level testing initiatives and state-level assistance opportunities like the Well Compensation Grant Program.”
After the legislation’s announcement, environmental groups celebrated it as a potential win for clean water.
“Wisconsinites have a right to know about pollution that may be impacting the health of their families,” said Peter Burress, government affairs manager for Wisconsin Conservation Voters. “This legislation is a common sense solution that will protect Wisconsin families. It’s unacceptable that so many Wisconsin families could be drinking water contaminated with PFAS, lead, and nitrates — chemicals tied to cancer and birth defects — without ever being told.”
A bill introduced on Monday would grant Devil's Lake State Park the rights to "flourish, evolve, and be clean." (Photo by Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)
To celebrate Indigenous People’s Day, Democrats in the Wisconsin Assembly announced a package of bills Monday that would grant rights to Devil’s Lake State Park and reinstitute a law that effectively banned mining.
The proposal to grant “rights of nature” to Wisconsin’s most popular state park comes just months after a group of Republicans introduced legislation that would prevent local governments in the state from enacting similar legislation. The Milwaukee County Board passed a rights of nature resolution promising to protect the Menominee, Milwaukee and Fox rivers and Lake Michigan. The Green Bay city council is also currently working on a rights of nature resolution.
Under the bill, Devil’s Lake has the right to “flourish, evolve, and be clean.” The bill gives the state attorney general the authority to enforce the law against people who infringe on the park’s rights and allows anyone to sue or intervene in a lawsuit in the name of the park to enforce the park’s rights. Anyone who infringes on the park’s rights by damaging the environment will be liable to pay damages to restore the park to its previous state.
In addition to the Devil’s Lake bill, the package includes a joint resolution acknowledging that “nature has inherent rights” and the state of Wisconsin “has a duty to uphold those rights as part of its enduring conservation legacy and its responsibility to future generations.”
The resolution also states that the Legislature won’t pass laws preventing local rights of nature ordinances.
The Republican bill preempting local rights of nature efforts is “anti-free speech, it’s anti-democratic,” Rep. Vincent Miresse (D-Stevens Point), one of the bills’ co-authors, told the Wisconsin Examiner. “Whereas our bill is, ‘Hey, let’s get this on the docket and actually have a productive conversation, actually bring in stakeholders about what it means to look at nature actually having rights.’”
Miresse said the more symbolic measures passed by local governments are important statements of values, but he wanted the bill to have “teeth.”
“I would like to move beyond mission and vision statements. I think those are great for guiding principles and taking us in the right direction and keeping our mission and vision top of mind when we are creating and drafting policy at the local level. And I want to make sure they have a right to do that regardless of what the preemption bill would do,” Miresse said. “However, when we were looking at this in terms of crafting policy and changing statute, there would be some teeth here.”
Miresse said the bill is targeted only at Devil’s Lake, rather than all the bodies of water in Wisconsin, because it was simplest to start with a piece of nature that has defined political boundaries already under the state’s control.
In their preemption bill, Republicans Rep. Joy Goeben (R-Hobart) and Sen. Steve Nass (R-Whitewater) argued that laws granting rights to nature posed a “dangerous shift in legal precedent” that would result in “threatening property rights, stalling development, and burdening the judicial system.”
Democrats counter that granting legal rights to a park or a body of water isn’t much different than granting First Amendment rights to a corporation — which Republicans successfully argued for in court cases such as Citizens United.
Also announced Monday is a proposal to reinstate Wisconsin’s “prove it first” mining law, which requires that in order to obtain a permit from the Department of Natural Resources, mining companies must prove the mine can be operated for 10 years and be shuttered for 10 years without harmful effects on the local environment. The law was enacted in 1997 until Republicans repealed it in 2017. U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, a Republican gubernatorial candidate, authored the bill to repeal the mining ban when he was in the state Senate.
This year, a Canadian company has begun exploratory drilling projects in the state, potentially leading to the first operating mines in Wisconsin for the first time in decades.
Miresse said he wants decisions about mining to consider local environmental health rather than just being about “dollars and cents.”
A PFAS advisory sign along Starkweather Creek. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)
More than two years after $125 million was set aside in the 2023-25 state budget to fund the remediation of PFAS contamination across Wisconsin, legislators are again trying to pass two bills to get that money out the door.
At a Senate public hearing Tuesday, the bills’ Republican authors said they’re “all ears” for reaching a compromise on final language. However in the last legislative session, initial hopes that a deal could be reached went unfulfilled after Republicans, Democrats, business groups and environmental organizations dug into their positions and the bill was ultimately vetoed by Gov. Tony Evers.
As was the case in the last effort, the dispute is over who and how the state will hold entities responsible for PFAS contamination.
PFAS are a class of man-made chemical compounds commonly known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down easily in the environment. The chemicals, which were used for decades in goods such as non-stick pans, fast food wrappers and firefighting foams, have been connected to causing cancer, thyroid diseases and developmental problems. CommunitiesacrossWisconsinhavefoundPFAScontamination in their water supplies.
Sen. Eric Wimberger (R-Oconto), one of the bills’ co-authors, said at the Tuesday hearing he’s trying to make sure people don’t have to choose between “their health and financial ruin” by testing for contamination and potentially being held responsible for paying for the clean up under the state’s spills law — which allows the Department of Natural Resources to force “responsible parties” to pay for the testing and remediation of chemical contamination.
“We are transitioning from a medical and legal paradigm where a widely used substance was not considered hazardous, to a paradigm where it is considered hazardous, it’s imperative we don’t sweep up those who are not responsible and treat them as though they are,” he said.
Wimberger and Rep. Jeff Mursau (R-Crivitz) have proposed Senate Bills 127 and 128, which establish the exemptions under which people won’t be held responsible for PFAS contamination on their property and create a number of grant programs to spend the $125 million.
The challenge is that Republicans and industry have different definitions of who counts as responsible for contamination than Democrats and environmental groups. Constructing exemptions to the spills law that are too narrow could result in people being forced to pay for remediation they didn’t cause. But writing the exemptions too broadly could result in polluters passing the cost of remediation on to taxpayers.
Across the state, municipal wastewater treatment utilities sell or give away the byproducts of their plants to use as fertilizer on farm fields. The DNR grants permits to allow the spreading of these byproducts, known as biosolids, which for years was seen as an environmentally responsible source of fertilizer because it was recycled. However biosolids from places with PFAS contamination in the water are contaminated, which can pollute the water near the field where they’re spread.
Wimberger wants to make sure these farmers aren’t on the hook with the DNR to pay for contamination they didn’t know was happening and the DNR gave them a permit to create.
But environmental advocates don’t want the exemptions to be so vague that they’re available to entities such as paper mills or chemical manufacturers.
“We’re just asking you to understand that the way that you word an exemption is going to matter,” Christine Sieger, director of the DNR’s remediation and redevelopment bureau, said in her testimony. “I implement the spill law all day, every day, and I can tell you, people are crafty when it comes to getting out of liability. They will come up with all sorts of ways for how they can get themselves off the hook. And I just, I don’t want you to help them do that. Let’s make sure that they can take care of our people and clean up the mess that they’ve made.”
After the proposed PFAS bill was vetoed by Evers last session, Wimberger complained that opponents raised concerns about the exemptions being too broadly worded without naming specifics. On Tuesday, he said people objected with “platitudes” rather than specific language that could be corrected and that he hoped opponents could be more constructive this time around.
Erik Kanter, director of government relations for Clean Wisconsin, said Tuesday the organization couldn’t support the proposal without amendments, proposing specific line-by-line changes for the bill authors to make.
Kanter pointed to a line in SB 128 that states “a person that spreads biosolids or wastewater residuals contaminated by PFAS in compliance with any applicable license or permit” is exempt from being held responsible for PFAS contamination under the spills law. However, he said, that line is so vaguely worded that an industrial manufacturer could purchase and spread biosolids on its property as a way to gain an exemption from being held responsible for contamination it caused by creating PFAS as a byproduct of manufacturing.
“The Legislature created the PFAS trust fund 29 months ago,” Kanter said. “Marinette, Peshtigo, the Town of Campbell, the town of Stella and communities and individuals throughout the state have waited and waited and waited for state government to create the programs through which the PFAS trust fund can be allocated. They don’t deserve to wait another day. They don’t deserve a bill that doesn’t meet their needs or lets polluters off the hook and saddles taxpayers with the bill. We believe that compromise is possible and essential. We value the bill authors’ partnership to find compromise on this bill. Clean Wisconsin shares their goal in getting a bill to the governor’s desk for his signature this session, and we will continue working in good faith toward that end.”
Both Mursau and Wimberger expressed hope that they could write an amendment that would get enough support to be signed into law.
“It’s my intention to take the feedback here … and bring forward the amendment that can earn the support of the Legislature to be signed into law by the governor,” Mursau said. “I also want to take this opportunity to thank the groups and individuals who have come to us, not just with criticisms, but with constructive ideas. Those who are willing to engage in dialogue, not just opposition, have been instrumental in helping us shape the legislation that can actually pass and deliver results. In a divided government like ours, meaningful progress requires compromise. I’m grateful for those who recognize that and continue to work with us in good faith.”
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