The Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Grant program, established in 1989 to help Wisconsin obtain and maintain its natural areas expired Tuesday. Cause of death, according to advocates, was legislative obstinance. 

Initially created through a bipartisan piece of legislation, the program has helped local governments build boat launches, playgrounds, bike paths and hiking trails in every corner of the state; helped land trusts and non-profits obtain and conserve thousands of acres of forest land and helped the Department of Natural Resources grow and manage Wisconsin’s state parks. 

“Every single community has a boat launch, or a playground, or a neighborhood park, or a bike path that was funded with Knowles Nelson dollars,” said Charles Carlin, the director of strategic initiatives for Gathering Waters, an alliance of 40 land trusts around Wisconsin.  “So, the state just looks a lot different than it would if we didn’t have Knowles Nelson, and we all have more opportunities to get outside and enjoy all these places that make Wisconsin special than we would have without the program.”

Since its inception, the program has enjoyed broad support from voters and been seen as a national model for land conservation systems. However, in recent years, a handful of Republican legislators — largely representing the northern parts of the state — began to sour on the program’s aims. 

This group has argued that too much land in northern Wisconsin has been conserved, leaving  struggling local governments without enough of a property tax base to fund their budgets or grow their communities. An analysis by the Examiner found that most of the public land in northern Wisconsin is national forest land and that land purchased through Knowles-Nelson is a tiny portion of Wisconsin’s public lands portfolio. 

Opposition to the program was supercharged after the state Supreme Court ruled that the Legislature’s Republican-controlled Joint Finance Committee was unconstitutionally exercising its power by allowing members to anonymously hold up any proposed land acquisitions through Knowles-Nelson. 

The decision angered legislators who had previously been able to quietly stop projects in their districts, and the program suddenly faced energized opposition. Proposals that aimed to bring together bipartisan support to continue the program from Gov. Tony Evers, a handful of Republicans and the Legislature’s Democratic caucus failed to gain traction during the most recent legislative session. 

“Scoring a few political points in the Capitol at the expense of your community and of your voters just encapsulates what people hate about politics right now,” said Carlin. “What happened this session is a very small number of Republican senators decided that political retribution inside the Capitol in Madison was more important than good policy for their constituents. That’s bad governance. It undermines their own communities, and I would hope that they are questioning that choice, perhaps regretting it. I think we’re all going to be looking to see what happens in November, and to see, gosh, are there consequences for choosing to govern like that?” 

With the program’s expiration this week, legislative Democrats have stated that if voters elect Democratic majorities in the Legislature and a Democratic governor next year, re-authorizing the program will be among the first priorities. 

Senate Minority Leader Diane Hesselbein (D-Middleton) said at an event Tuesday morning at Governor Gaylord Nelson State Park in Waunakee that with trifecta control of government, Democrats would bring the program back.

“Senate Republicans … have ensured that towns and cities across our state do not have the money to repair boat launches or keep our trails safe,” she said. “They have made it impossible for the state to preserve more of our landscape, giving developers free rein. They have decided to disregard the will of the residents, and no wonder why the Republican party is losing so much at the polls. The expiration of this program today is just another example of Republican failures, but my message to Wisconsin is very simple: Vote for Democrats in November, and we promise, especially with the Democratic trifecta, we will bring the Knowles Nelson Stewardship Program back in full force, so people can enjoy nature regardless of their zip code, every single place in the state of Wisconsin.” 

Sen. Jodi Habush Sinykin (D-Whitefish Bay), one of the authors of the failed Democratic bill to reauthorize the program, told the Examiner Monday that the expiration was just a “pause.” 

Habush Sinykin said that she’s working on ways to get a Knowles-Nelson bill through the Legislature no matter the result of the November elections. 

“We’ll find out just in a matter of months what we have to work with,” she said. “But we have quite a bit of give with regard to how we can keep the program going forward productively, in terms of funding and for oversight mechanisms. And again, I would be certainly grateful to be able to work across the aisle and with legislators in my own party to come up with the Knowles Nelson reauthorization program that makes sense for Wisconsin. It contributes so much to our state and local economies and quality of life. It really is a wise investment.” 

Even if a bill to restart the program is introduced immediately at the start of the next session and fast tracked to the governor’s desk, it could be close to a year before the program is back on track. Carlin said that because of the long-term planning required for the type of land acquisitions funded through Knowles-Nelson, the “ripple effects go way beyond that 12-month period of time.” 

“Every single land trust and every single local government is cash strapped, and they are strained for capacity as well. There’s more to do than there is people and money to get it done,” he said. And so, as the future of Knowles Nelson became more and more uncertain, you know, land trusts, they really ramped down their land acquisition planning. Because if they don’t have a sense of how the heck they’re going to fund a project, they don’t pursue it. And so what that means is, is fewer conversations are happening with prospective landowners, that fewer negotiations about land purchases are happening. And that’s not an on/off switch; it takes a while to ramp that up and to get going again.” 

Carlin added that the state knows there’s a growing maintenance backlog for the state’s outdoor recreation facilities and a need to help communities across the state build infrastructure to manage the effects of climate change. 

“By pulling the rug out from under ourselves to make those investments for a year, we’re causing delays that might wind up lasting three years or five years until we get ourselves back on track, even when Knowles Nelson is fully funded,” he said. “So you know what’s done is done, and now we’ve just got to figure out how to fix it and get back on track as quickly as possible.”

Early last month, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources announced a deal to add 100 acres to  Devil’s Lake State Park, expanding recreational opportunities at one of the DNR’s most popular properties. The move also calls attention to the dwindling life of the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship grant program that made the acquisition possible. 

The nearly 40-year-old stewardship grant program has long been a bipartisan success story, allowing the purchase and protection of hundreds of thousands of acres of land across the state. 

Growing opposition to the program within a subset of the Republicans in control of both chambers of the state Legislature — stemming from a combination of antagonism toward land conservation and concerns about the property tax base of Northwoods communities — stymied multiple legislative efforts to re-authorize the program beyond its set expiration at the end of June. 

The Devil’s Lake purchase marks what could be one of the last major actions of the stewardship grant program, which has allocated more than $1.2 billion to conserve more than 700,000 acres of Wisconsin land over its lifetime. 

The program had about $5.5 million remaining as of early April, according to DNR spokesperson Molly Meister. That money is divided into a number of categories, with $2.9 million earmarked for acquiring general easements — agreements with landowners that conserve and protect the land without transferring ownership — and $1.3 million set aside for general land acquisitions. Another $666,667 is meant for acquiring easements specifically for the Ice Age Trail, plus $8,333 for Ice Age Trail land acquisitions. An additional $600,000 is set aside for acquiring land for county forests. 

Meister told the Wisconsin Examiner in an email that the money set aside for the DNR to acquire land itself is expected to be fully used by the time the program expires, while the money set aside for easements will largely be used, but the exact amount is dependent on the agency finding interested landowners. 

“We are currently negotiating with landowners who have expressed a willing interest in selling their land to the department and anticipate all Stewardship general fee acquisition funds to be encumbered before the end of June,” she said.  Easement acquisitions, Ice Age Trail (both fee and easement), and County Forest acquisition is a similar process, but as you have noted, depends on willing landowners looking to acquire an easement versus an outright purchase in the remaining months. We expect a significant amount, but not all, of these funds will be encumbered before the end of June.”

While the program is set to expire, there are ongoing Knowles-Nelson projects around the state that have already been funded through the grant program yet won’t be completed for a few years. Meister said that program staff will close out those active projects before moving to other jobs within the DNR. The rest of the agency has also faced significant cutbacks in recent decades, due to budget constraints and Republican opposition to environmental protection initiatives. 

“It will take several years to close out currently active projects. Staff will continue to work on finishing up these projects,” Meister said. “After these projects are closed out, DNR staff will continue working on other department priorities. Over the past 20 years, we have lost over 500 FTE positions, so there is always more work to do.”

David Grusznski, the Milwaukee programs director for The Conservation Fund, the land conservation non-profit that facilitated the DNR’s purchase of the Devil’s Lake property, told the Examiner that through the stewardship program, the DNR has often been able to function as the last piece of the funding puzzle for projects that conserve land and provide access to that land for the public. 

“It’s very rare that one pot of money funds an entire acquisition, so money is always being leveraged with other people’s money,” he said. “So without the state stewardship funding being able to bring in a portion of that money, we, a lot of partners, are going to be unable to leverage federal dollars, state, city or county dollars that may be available. And we’re going to have to really rely pretty heavily on private fundraising, which is going to be extremely difficult.”

Now, he said, non-profits and land trusts across the state are coming to terms with the pending loss — which will push planned projects years into the future while putting organizations across the state in direct competition over the same pot of private philanthropy money. 

“I think this is all really just starting to set in with a lot of people across the state,” Grusznski said, “as far as the money is not there — what do we do?”