Richard Moore

One of the things that has most perplexed me over the past decade is why no governor wants to undertake a fundamental reform of the state Department of Natural Resources.

And make no mistake about it, no governor does.

Former Gov. Tommy Thompson actually helped to make it the agency the beast it is. What’s more, he not only loaded it with radical aestheticists whose very intent was to destroy private property rights in northern Wisconsin but gave them the tools with which to accomplish their radical goals, including the launch of a rewrite of the state’s unincorporated shoreland rules and comprehensive planning statutes, also known as Smart Growth.

By the time Thompson got done, private property owners were howling, and a Republican Legislature was listening. In 2001, as Thompson was leaving for Washington and Republican Scott McCallum replaced him, lawmakers did the right thing and voted to split the giant bureaucracy into separate agencies, as other states have successfully done, including Michigan and Minnesota.

Unfortunately for everybody, McCallum wasn’t listening to the people. He was listening to special interests – environmentalists and then Democratic majority leader Chuck Chvala – and vetoed the legislation. A historic opportunity to curb unbridled anti-property rights power was lost.

Of course, there’s no need to mention what happened when Gov. Jim Doyle came along. He piled it on even more, and the agency reached the peak of its unpopularity, arrogance and downright contempt for average property owners and citizens around the state.

Now along comes Gov. Scott Walker and, once again, we are left to wonder: Where’s the beef? So far, there ain’t any, and property rights advocates should not take the crumbs tossed their way so far as a full meal. It’s not going to fill you up.

None of which is to say property rights aren’t safer, or property owners more protected, under the Walker administration. They are. The agency has delayed implementation of NR115 (shoreland zoning) to review its more onerous provisions, and the governor has tightened the criteria for willy-nilly rulewriting adventures the agency was famous for. DNR secretary Cathy Stepp is a smart and property-rights friendly manager who is intent on reaching out to the alienated public and on taming the worst of abusive staff tendencies.

And then there is the mini-reorganization announced last week. It’s loaded with good initiatives and good targets. It will increase over-the-counter customer service, which the DNR had curbed under Mr. Doyle. That’s a great step in restoring public confidence.

The DNR will also strive to reduce permitting times and open an office to serve as a contact point between regulators and businesses seeking to do business in the state. That’s good, too, as a way to start cutting burdensome regulations that often kill job-creating projects.

In addition, the department will be able to reduce bureaucratic inefficiencies by managing its own fleet and facilities’ operations. Cost savings goals have been etched into the agency’s memorandum of understanding with the Department of Administration to make sure these goals are accomplished, and, if they aren’t, the DOA can rein the agency in.

Sounds really good. So what’s the problem?

The problem is, none of this represents fundamental reform. None of this puts in place statutory mechanisms to make sure the “good DNR” lasts well into the future. As long as Mr. Walker is governor, everything will likely be hunky-dory. But what will happen if he’s not?

All of us should remember a bit of history. Way back in the early 2000s, The Lakeland Times uncovered the DNR’s massive mismanagement of its fleet. Technically, they weren’t managing their fleet independently of the DOA, but the DOA was approving just about every request sent its way.

In other words, the DOA and the DNR had their own unofficial memorandum of understanding, Democratic and big-government Republican style – the DOA approved virtually every excess the DNR desired.

And excess it was. The agency spent more than $18 million purchasing vehicles statewide in the four-year period between 1999 and 2002, our investigation revealed. In 2002, the department spent an average of $16,753 a day buying vehicles.

And that was under Republicans!

The same goes for managing their properties. The pages of The Times have been loaded for a decade with examples of the DNR trashing its lands.

Fundamental reform is needed to prevent all this from happening again. That means fundamental reform of the administrative rule process to give the Legislature an active rather than passive role in rule review, meaning elected officials must sign off before anything that has the force and effect of law is enacted.

The state, too, needs to follow in the footsteps of others and split the bureaucracy into separate agencies for environmental protection and for conservation, and perhaps for forestry as well.

In most cases, government becomes more efficient and accountable when it consolidates, but that is not always the case. Sometimes, resources can be more efficiently managed in smaller, more focused units, and without spending more money, even though a new agency administration is developed.

Such agencies can be more accountable because the money is easily trackable, and segregated funds can’t be lost, or shifted to another agency, as they can be shifted to other internal departments in large bureaucracies. The larger the agency, the more room for bureaucratic mischief, when run by those aligned with bureaucratic new bosses.

That’s exactly where the DNR is. Cathy Stepp and company might manage it for the benefit of taxpayers, but it is too large to be held accountable and to have practical oversight when run by the new bosses – the very same argument candidate Walker made about Milwaukee Public School system.

It’s also why Michigan Republican Gov. Rick Snyder resplit the DNR there earlier this year after Democrats had recombined it a year earlier. Overall, the spending for the two agencies for 2012 will rise by just 2.3 percent over the combined agencies last year, while general tax funding will decrease by about 15 percent for each agency.

In Wisconsin, general tax funding for the DNR held steady. The 2011 budget does shrink by $43 million, or 4.7 percent over last year, but that’s due to a one-time debt service. It bounds back to within 1.4 percent of 2010 funding in 2012. In other words, there’s not much fiscal impact by splitting the agencies, and it looks like it might be a boon to taxpayers.

But there’s a colossal impact over the DNR’s long-term ability to attack private property rights and elude accountability. There might be a better way to fundamentally reform the agency in the long run, but I haven’t heard it. In the meantime, business and property owners should enjoy their breather from burdensome regulation.

Just don’t be surprised if it doesn’t last too long. 

Once upon a long time ago, the United States of America was a land of real ideas, the substance of which was debated fiercely in presidential elections.

They were often radical ideas, at least for their time – you know, some of them led to a revolution – but, revolutionary or not, the theoretical constructs were never very small. Scholarship and philosophy, not pettifoggery and partisanship, were the driving forces behind the moral and political commitments of our Founding Fathers and other early political leaders.

That’s not to say spiteful, greedy grabs for power were absent. After all, you can’t strip bald-faced opportunism from the body politic any more than you could disembody liberalism from Barack Obama. Oh, that we could.

Take the election of 1884, for instance, when Grover Cleveland was running against James G. Blaine. At the time, Blaine was caught up in a stock market scandal and accused of unethical business dealings, which led to this barb from the Cleveland campaign: ‘Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, The Continental Liar from the State of Maine.’

Catchy.

Of course, the Blaine camp had its own weapons stemming from rumors that Cleveland had fathered an out-of-wedlock child. They bounced back with: ‘Ma, Ma, Where’s my Pa, Gone to the White House, Ha, Ha, Ha.’

Ouch.

Truth be told, name-calling was part of the political landscape from the get-go, and even the lofty Founding Fathers could wallow in the mud with the best of them. Take the election of 1800, when fabled Thomas Jefferson squared off against the legendary (and incumbent) John Adams.

That campaign featured attack ads, personal smears and electoral trickery – all of it as vile as the tenor of this summer’s Wisconsin recalls. Jefferson’s supporters called Adams an unstable, hypocritical elitist, while Adams’ backers accused Jefferson of being a trouble-making demagogue, and an atheist to boot.

Edward J. Larson, a noted historian, captured all this in his book, “A Magnificent Catastrophe,” in which he described the two Founding Fathers like this: “They could write like angels and scheme like demons.”

Both sides viewed the 1800 election in apocalyptic terms, just like today.

“For both sides, freedom (as they conceived it) hung in the balance,” Larson wrote. “One election took on extraordinary meaning. Partisans worried that it might be the young republic’s last.”

The republic survived, and so it shall in these raucous times.

But all this is not to say we haven’t slipped from a lofty perch since the toddling days of our republic. For while the Founding Fathers happily and energetically fought in the muddy trenches, they did so for philosophical ideas they considered noble and critical; in the end, the lofty ideals were all that made the muddy trenches worthwhile.

Which is to say, there has always been a slimy layer to American politics, but it has not always been nastiness for nastiness sake; if dirty politics was one lip of the double-edged sword, the other was the American ideals of republican democracy.

To wit, that mudslinging election of 1800 was no less than a transformative event, a campaign that saw then dominant Federalists swept from power by Democratic-Republican forces opposed to more federal power.

Here’s how Mr. Jefferson put things in 1798:

“Two political Sects have arisen within the U. S. the one believing that the executive is the branch of our government which the most needs support; the other that like the analogous branch in the English Government, it is already too strong for the republican parts of the Constitution; and therefore in equivocal cases they incline to the legislative powers: the former of these are called federalists, sometimes aristocrats or monocrats, and sometimes tories, after the corresponding sect in the English Government of exactly the same definition: the latter are stiled republicans, whigs, jacobins, anarchists, disorganizers, etc. these terms are in familiar use with most persons.”

In 1800, then, American politics reached a political critical mass, and it mattered not whether the philosophical war was won by the high road or the low.

We are no less reaching a new critical mass today. As I wrote recently, the years since the mid-1960s have been dominated by a two-party consensus of ever bigger government and special-interest “compromise” that a new oxygenated grassroots force is rising to challenge.

Since the mid-1960s, then, elections have not been about fundamental underlying propositions – the underlying principle of the corporate welfare state went unchallenged by just about everybody. Presidential elections were liberated from the inconvenience of principle: the mud in the trenches covered up no noble theoretical foundation, but oozed simply from the fetid muck of special-interest power.

The mud was all that mattered.

With the rise of the Tea Party, all that is different. The Tea Party has not only railed against Democratic big-government programs but has taken on the Republican establishment as well. Once again, principles are on the table, even if the mainstream media denounces them as anachronistic and dysfunctional.

But there’s another difference.

All of the philosophical debate – all the serious discussions about the country’s direction – is taking place within the Republican Party. There’s the fiscal conservatives versus the establishment RINOs, and there is the ongoing divide between religious fundamentalists and libertarian and states’ rights conservatives.

Much of the time this leads to personal potshots and face-to-face pit politics. All of it looks like impairment, but it really expresses rather rigorous philosophical debate engaging many of the same thorny issues that mattered so much to the Founding Fathers.

The decisions to be made are critical. Jefferson and Adams would be proud of the knife fight going on within the GOP.

But not so on the Democratic side.  There stands an ossified dinosaur wedded to a rigid view of bigger-is-better government, with hardly a shred of protest within its borders. Just where did all the blue-dog Democrats go?

Whereas philosophical battles used to be waged on the presidential stage between two competing philosophical forces – the Federalists v. the republicans, each of whom tried to sully the other along the way – now that battle is waged within the perimeter of only one of the forces that will compete for the presidency.

And so it is no longer principle v. principle on the general-election stage, as it was during the time of Jefferson and Adams, but principle v. naked power. Nobody believes in big government as a principled way of governance anymore; it is an excuse for a collection of special interests to advance private agendas, and everybody knows it.

The bottom line is, mudslinging and polarization, not to mention electoral shenanigans, are just facts of life in American politics, and always have been. In and of themselves, they tell us nothing about the health of the Republic.

What’s important is whether the mudslinging is for principle or power.

In the Republican Party, the wars are over the former; in the Democratic Party, it’s shamelessly about the latter. In this summer’s recalls, Republicans have stood up for the taxpayers they represent as a whole, while Democrats have held for the narrow private interests of public-sector unions.

Can any reasonable person doubt that, in these elections, it’s about principle v. power?

That makes all the difference in the world. Smear us for the sake of principle and we can shake you off and fight on; smear us for your greed and you squeeze the very soul from the body politic.

And one last point. If I may join in the spirit of this summer’s mudslinging, I think Jefferson’s crowd was right: Adams sure was a hot-head, and an ivory-towered one at that.

Richard, Lakeland Times publisher Gregg Walker and Lakeland Times reporter Laurel Carlson interview 12th District Democratic Sen. Jim Holperin as recall day nears. Today's installment is in two parts. Find the first half hour directly BELOW the first podcast file. The second day of the interview takes place tomorrow. Republican challenger Kim Simac visits the Investigator team Thursday and Friday.

Today, Holperin discusses job creation, mining, Medicaid, the Republican budget, hi-speed Internet and more. See Music and Podcasts.