120,000 Acres Vanish from DNR’s Stewardship Program Records

As Republicans and Democrats get set for a potentially titanic budget fight over the Department of Natural Resources’ Stewardship program, the agency for 2024 has quietly recalculated the number of Stewardship acres it holds, acknowledging to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau (LFB) that much higher totals published in previous years were significantly in error—to the tune of nearly 120,000 acres of land.

Specifically, if one compares the LFB Stewardship information paper from January 2021 to the January 2025 version, 117,721 acres of land acquired under the Stewardship program vanished in those four short years. For 2020, the agency listed total Stewardship land acquisitions at 722,237 acres; for 2024 the number had dropped astonishingly to 604,516.

Easement acreages under the Stewardship program alone dropped by 12 percent over the four-year period.

The drop in acreage came despite the fact that conservation easements live in perpetuity and the DNR reported selling only 86 acres of land between 2020 and 2024. The precipitous drop in acreage also came as the agency added 54,898 acres in 2024 with the Pelican River Forest easement purchase in northern Wisconsin. The agency lists that as a 2024 Stewardship transaction, though no state dollars were used to purchase it.

What’s more, the same 2024 information paper shows that, while the DNR has increased its fee title landownership only minimally, from 1,509,600 acres to 1,559,343, overall DNR easement acquisitions (Stewardship and non-Stewardship) soared from 364,800 acres in 2020 to 468,213 acres in 2024, a jump of 28 percent.

So, the mystery is how overall DNR land purchases could remain level and overall easement acres could rise by 28 percent, while easement and land purchase acreages in Stewardship—the agency’s largest acquisition program by far—dropped by 16 percent, 12 percent in easement acreage and 20 percent in fee acres.

The data is published in biennial Stewardship information papers by the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau (LFB), primarily for use by lawmakers in passing the state’s biennial budget. MacIver Institute content director William Osmulski discovered the discrepancy as he compared the 2020 data with the 2024 figures.

Not surprisingly, because they use bureaucra-science, the DNR says there’s no mystery at all, just an accident. The 2020 Stewardship number of 722,237 acres numbers is wrong (and numbers for earlier years, too), the agency asserts. In presenting that number, the DNR says it mistakenly included both Stewardship-funded and non-Stewardship-funded land acquisitions in the calculation; the agency noticed the mistake, reported it to the LFB, and corrected the acreage totals after 2020.

At least that’s the assertion the LFB says the agency made to the fiscal bureau. The DNR did not respond to inquiries by this reporter.

So, as lawmakers hurry to read their informational papers to get up to date on historical Stewardship numbers, they might not want to rush too much—while the DNR corrected the numbers it gave the LFB for 2024, there’s no mention that it made a mistake in earlier papers, and the now-disclaimed acreage totals are left to stand unamended. And not only are many of the numbers from previous years just plain wrong—making comparisons impossible and current year numbers suspect—other data is omitted, and a lot of what remains is difficult to decipher.

The DNR’s assertion to the LFB demands verification, but, even if it is true, it begs several critical questions: Why has the agency made no attempt to correct the erroneous statistics for stakeholders, for the public, or even lawmakers who use them for policymaking? And, given the mess that led to an ongoing audit of the agency’s Fish & Wildlife account, can any numbers the DNR publishes now be trusted?

Let’s take a look.

Missing in Action

In perusing the DNR’s numbers, as presented by the LFB is its budget information papers, MacIver’s Osmulski noticed something peculiar.

Specifically, in 2020, the DNR listed Stewardship easement acquisition acres as 331,701, and fee simple purchases as 390,536 acres, for total Stewardship acquisitions of 722,237 acres as of June 30 of that year. By 2024, however, those numbers had dwindled significantly, to 291,965 acres in easement acquisitions and 312,551 acres in fee title purchases, for a total of 604,516.

Osmulski couldn’t look at the numbers in the 2023 LFB Stewardship information paper (for 2022) because the entire table of Stewardship land acquisitions acreage had also vanished.

Naturally, we asked about those numbers, both the DNR and the LFB. No surprise really, but as stated, the DNR has not acknowledged the inquiry as of this writing. Could just be bureaucracy. But LFB fiscal analyst Jonathan Sandoval did answer, and he had some ready answers. Sandoval prepared the 2024 information paper but was not the author of earlier versions, it should be noted.

In 2022, Sandoval wrote, while preparing the 2023 version of the paper, the DNR reported information to his office that showed land acquisition acreage decreasing, similar to that published in 2025 for 2024 numbers.

“The decreased amount DNR provided was in conflict with totals reported earlier in previous iterations of Appendix II, and it departed from the acreage trend that Appendix II had shown for at least two decades,” Sandoval explained. “DNR informed us at that time that staff queries of the land records systems for earlier versions of the paper had selected for stewardship-funded acquisitions, as well as other acquisitions that did not use stewardship funding, and that the lower totals were more accurate given the intended purpose of Appendix II.”

In 2022, Sandoval said, the LFB did not have sufficient time to verify the new information, so they omitted Appendix II from the 2023 version of the paper.

“In 2024, DNR resubmitted information to our office that showed a similar acreage amount to the amount the department provided in 2022, and indicated that the department again had generated the report using parameters for only stewardship-funded acres,” he wrote. “We agreed that this was in line with the intent of the information and title for Appendix II (“DNR Land Acquisitions Under Stewardship”), and the paper now shows the amount provided to us by the department—604,500 stewardship acres acquired.”

What Sandoval describes indeed aligns with information in other tables of the information paper. Specifically, a table earlier in the paper that is intended to show additional acquisitions funded by other sources aligns with the higher acreage totals mistakenly reported under Stewardship prior to 2025. The 2024 general land acquisition expenditures table shows total acreage of 724.5 million acres (not including grants to non-profits), up slightly from 705.4 million acres in 2020 and 723 million acres in 2022.

The measure of acreage listed prior to 2024 for total Stewardship acquisitions is close to those numbers—722.2 million in 2020 compared to the 705.4 million overall that year and very close to the total Stewardship and non-Stewardship acreage totals for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2022.

Sandoval said the DNR also indicated it had made various changes to its land records system, with the intention of improving data consistency, and that dynamic may have accounted for other variations between multiple years’ reporting.

That makes sense, but there are still significant discrepancies that need accounting (to be clear, by the DNR, not the LFB, which is working with numbers the agency feeds it). For example, in 2020, the Stewardship acquisition table shows the agency with 331,701 easement acres (in addition to 390,536 fee title acres), but the paper elsewhere lists the agency’s total easement holdings as 364,800, a difference of 33,099 acres.

If the 2020 Stewardship easement acquisitions figure actually represented all Stewardship and non-Stewardship acres, as the DNR now says, those figures should match. Where did those 33,099 acres go?

Beyond those issues, the information papers are plagued by inconsistent data presentation that make it difficult, if not impossible, to track the agency’s land acquisitions. The quintessential example is the decision not to run the Stewardship land acquisitions table in 2022 after finding the aforementioned error. That was compounded by not pointing out the errors in earlier years and then presenting corrected information for the earlier years in the 2024 paper.

Then, too, in earlier years, the agency ran a table showing total “cumulative DNR land acquisitions” since 1990. That’s a completely different and useful number than the general land acquisition expenditure table and also the Stewardship acquisition table because it shows all land acquired through all sources including donations and gifts or purchases or acquired with federal grant funding, including the Federal Forest Legacy Program (FLP) grants; Habitat Conservation Planning grants (Endangered Species); Land and Water Conservation Fund (LAWCON) grants; National Coastal Wetlands Conservation grants; National Fish and Wildlife Foundation grants; North American Wetlands Conservation Act grants (NAWCA); Sport Fish Restoration grants for fishery projects and boating access; and Pittman-Robertson Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration grants.

The number is useful because it describes the long reach of the agency’s land-grabbing activities. In 2020, the DNR’s cumulative acquisitions, through fee simple title or easement, totaled 863.3 million acres. In 2022, it had edged up slightly to 879.2 million acres.

And so, what was the number in 2024? Well, we don’t know, because that table has vanished, too, though the general land acquisitions expenditures table remained. That removal may be on the LFB because, Sandoval explained, the topic of DNR-owned lands in general were not directly related to Stewardship and he said the topic was sufficiently covered elsewhere in the paper.

“[I]t is our understanding that the acreage amount in … Cumulative DNR Acquisitions … includes all acquisitions made by DNR and the acreage amount in … DNR General Land Acquisition Expenditures includes only acquisitions made by DNR that had a related cost associated with the acquisition,” Sandoval stated. “There is also a six-month difference between the start dates of the tables (January 1, 1990 and July 1, 1990). We chose to keep the DNR General Land Acquisition Expenditures table in the 2025 stewardship info paper, because it is focused more directly on stewardship-related acquisitions and the costs associated with these acquisitions.”

Still, in 2022, the cumulative acquisition table showed the DNR acquiring and controlling about 156,200 acres more than in the general land acquisition expenditures table, no matter whether there was a cost associated with it or not. That figure updated for 2024 would seem to be an important figure to have when considering how much land acquisition authority the DNR should have.

So, as lawmakers confront the 2025-27 Stewardship budget, they face several realities:

First, the Stewardship acreage numbers are far lower than in previous years, but this time, the agency assures us, they are accurate. Of course, other than to the LFB, the DNR has not made an attempt to confess and correct those earlier numbers, making accurate year-to-year comparisons impossible.

Second, the DNR’s numbers continue to shift concerning how much easement acreage the agency controls, with numbers varying by tens of thousands of acres. That’s important, given that the agency, by its own admission, has pivoted away from fee-title purchases to controlling land through easements. For example, in 2020, the agency tells us it has 331,701 acres under easement. It also tells us in that same paper it has 364,800 acres in easement. Which is it?

Then, too, because the DNR says the Stewardship figure is wrong, the earlier LFB information paper lacks any accounting whatsoever of Stewardship easement acreage. In 2022, total easement acreage comes in at 377,392, but in that year the LFB omitted any Stewardship acquisitions totals completely—again, in a paper touted as a Stewardship program information paper.

Third, just how much land has the agency acquired though all sources since 1990? That cumulative number topped out at 879,161 acres in 2022, but the number is missing for 2024.

It’s a lot of information to be wrong or missing in a paper lawmakers use to analyze the Stewardship budget.

State takes aim at another 200,000 acres

What is certain is that the DNR land-gobbling machine has been in high gear since 1990, and, with easement purchases, it launched into the stratosphere under Evers.

For example, the 879,161 cumulative acres acquired since 1990 (as of 2022) represents 2.5 percent of the state’s land area, and that’s just acquisitions on top of already existing state and other governmental holdings, which total 17 percent of the state’s land area.

In 2010, the year Scott Walker became governor, the state reported cumulative DNR purchases of 499,281 acres since 1990 and general land acquisitions of 294,400 acres. By 2018, cumulative purchases had skyrocketed to 826,231 acres and general land acquisitions to 669,806 acres. Thus, while the agency added an cumulative average of 24,964 acres per year during the first 20 years of the program, it averaged a cumulative acquisition total of 40,869 acres a year between 2010 and 2018.

For general land acquisitions, the agency averaged additional acquisitions of 14,720 acres a year between 1990 and 2010; between 2010 and 2018, it averaged 46,926 acres a year in general land acquisitions.

That’s not to say that Walker and his administration didn’t try and put the brakes on Stewardship spending. Again, we can’t really compare those overall acquisition numbers with Stewardship acquisitions because the agency doesn’t vouch for the earlier numbers and doesn’t clarify when the reporting errors began. Assuming the Stewardship numbers are right in 2018 and 2010—an assumption for argument’s sake only—Stewardship acres grew from 497,094 acres in 2010 to 685,569 acres in 2018, or by 23,559 acres a year, a whole lot less than overall agency acquisitions were growing.

Again, given the DNR’s complete lack of accuracy, the numbers are speculative.

But they are bolstered by Stewardship spending, which Walker and the Republicans were aggressively trying to curtail. And they did. The actual overall program spending of $23.3 million in 2018 was was down 71 percent from 2011, when Walker assumed office. The $2.9 million spent in 2018 on DNR land purchases was the least in the program’s history, the Wisconsin Policy Forum determined, and marked the first time DNR land purchases were not the program’s largest expenditure.

That was down from $34.1 million in 2008-09 and from $42.2 million in 2004-05 during Jim Doyle’s governorship.

The pivot to conservation easements is perhaps the biggest development since the election of Scott Walker in 2010. That pivot has been dramatic, and it has allowed the agency and environmentalists to proclaim not only that the property under perpetual easement remains in private hands but that the easement represents the ultimate property right—the right of the property owner to control the land forever, even after death.

That concept ignores that land control from beyond the grave denies property rights to future owners. It’s actually the ultimate anti-property right, but the deceptive pitch the left uses to describe something or someone as the exact opposite of what they are has proven to be a successful pitch.

Again, the growth is dramatic. On June 30, 2010, the department held easements on 201,800 acres; as reported above that number exploded to 364,800 acres in 2020, or an increase of 81 percent, to 468,213 acres in 2024, a jump of 132 percent since 2010.

Between 2020 and 2024, that’s a gain of 103,413 acres, and presumably includes the Pelican River Forest easement purchase of 54,898 acres. Even though in the end no Stewardship dollars were expended—it’s was funded solely by a Forest Legacy grant of $10.4 million— it is nonetheless listed as a Stewardship transaction in the LFB report.

All totaled, it’s a massive land grab. Through outright ownership and easements, the DNR now effectively controls more than 2 million acres of the state’s land—2,027,556 acres, to be exact—and, though the agency says it is pivoting away from land acquisitions, both purchase and easement, it is driving to acquire nearly 200,000 acres more, according to the latest Stewardship information paper.

Right now, through easement and fee simple ownership, the DNR effectively owns 5.8 percent of the state’s land area, and it hopes to boost that to well over 6 percent in the next few years. Here, the governor’s budget is instructive: The DNR under the governor’s proposal would still be spending $24 million a year—24 percent of the governor’s annual ask for the Stewardship program—on easement or fee simple acquisitions to help it get its acreage, if not more.

In the broader scheme of things, that’s really not all. All totaled, in addition to the 2 million acres the agency controls though ownership and easements, it holds leases on tens of thousands of acres, and a separate agency, the Board of Commissioners of Public Land, owns somewhat less than 78,000 acres more.

At what cost

Whatever the benefits—and those are increasingly in question (see below), all this comes at great cost to taxpayers. While the program’s spending wings were clipped by Gov. Walker and the GOP legislature, the debt is enormous, given that the Stewardship program is primarily a bonding program. In other words, the program borrows much of its money and pays it back over time.

And it’s quite a bill. Between 2015 and 2025, interest alone on the Stewardship debt has totaled about $230 million. As of January, the LFB reports, $414.7 million in principal on stewardship-related debt is outstanding.

Evers’s latest budget proposal, then, would exacerbate an already significant problem. Specifically, the governor is proposing to renew the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program at $100 million a year for 10 years, for a total cost of $1 billion. That includes $83 million in bonding each year, $9 million from the Conservation Fund, and $8 million in tax dollars.

The total cost of borrowing $83 million a year for 10 years could cost a total of between $973 million and $1 billion, assuming on municipal interest rates of about 3.5 percent. Add in the other $80 million in tax dollars over the decade and the direct costs to taxpayers are more than a billion dollars, at least $1.05 billion, and that’s not counting conservation fund allocations of $90 million more.

In other words, Evers’s proposed billion dollar boon for Stewardship will actually cost at least $1.1 billion, and likely more. Add in the outstanding debt headed into the next biennium and stewardship costs alone will race to $1.5 billion.

And for what?

Much is made of the need for public lands open to the public for hunting, fishing and outdoors recreation, all of which are important, but, according to the DNR’s 2024-28 state comprehensive outdoor recreation plan, released in December 2024, already the state has almost 7.5 million acres—21 percent of the state—–open to the public for a variety of different outdoor activities.

“These range for small neighborhood parks in cities and villages to the 1.5-million acre Chequamegon- Nicolet National Forest,” the plan states. “Similarly, they range from densely developed outdoor sports complexes to remote corners of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore that see only the most adventurous visitors. These places, publicly and privately owned, encompass many of the most popular, treasured, and scenic sites in Wisconsin.”

Excluding private lands, public lands total almost 6.1 million acres. For hunting, most estimates put the total number of acres open at about 5.1 million aces of land, or about 14.7 percent of the state’s land. All totaled, there’s close to one acre of land open for hunting for every person in the state of Wisconsin.

Doubting economics

Another argument for continuing the expansion of Stewardship lands is that ever more public land open to recreation brings ever more tourists to those lands, especially in northern Wisconsin. However, that’s an extraordinarily hard outcome to measure, and some economic development professionals have cast doubt on the assertion.

In fact, in 2023, when the Pelican River Forest easement was being considered in northern Wisconsin, Jeff Verdoorn, then the executive director of the Oneida County Economic Development Corporation, rejected the premise. In a statement to Oneida County Board of Supervisors chairman Scott Holewinski, Verdoorn said the state’s purchase of the proposed Pelican River Forest easement would permanently obstruct economic activity in Oneida County and condemn the region to one specific type of tourism—so-called low-density tourism that generates little in economic value because of its nature and because most of those users would be local.

Verdoorn also said the amount of the investment made it a questionable one from an environmental improvement standpoint, and he said it would impose an unfair burden on the county’s and town’s taxpayers.

In the statement, Verdoorn observed that the 70,000 acres involved made up roughly 8 percent of Oneida County, located between the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest to the northeast and large tracks of Oneida County forestland to the southwest. In addition to the managed forest property contained within the boundaries, the land features 68 miles of streams and 27,000 acres of forested wetlands, all to be placed in a forever conservation easement, Verdoorn added.

Verdoorn said that mattered because the usage of the land would remain basically unchanged from today, except for some additional access due to a promise of 70 ungated miles of managed single lane logging roads.

“This land will be locked in its current state forever,” Verdoorn wrote. “As a result, the land will be lower in value and generate less in property taxes over time as it is reassessed.”

What’s more, Verdoorn wrote, revenue from MFL [managed forest law] will not change, and any additional tourism generated via the easement will be “low density,” that is, low numbers of individuals compared to areas specifically developed for tourism. Verdoorn specifically addressed the economic impact of the proposed purchase, which would be insignificant compared to the overall public money spent for it.

“People say that these are not new tax dollars, however they are nonetheless dollars already owned by the taxpayers,” he wrote. “Because of the restrictions due to the easement structure, there will be few economic changes in the future, although the land value will decrease and potentially reduce future property tax revenue.”

The bottom line, according to Verdoorn?

“Traditional economic activity will be stifled forever, limited to only low-density tourism,” he wrote. “This land will not be available for housing or traditional economic development.”

There were environmental questions, too, Verdoorn wrote.

“Maintaining a large track [of] managed forest with significant water resources has significant long-term value to the overall environment,” he wrote. “This has significant perceived societal value well beyond Oneida County.”

However, Verdoorn added, there is no indication that the land use would change over time, with or without the easement.

“It is in its current state for a reason, with no current driver for significant change,” he wrote. “This makes the $15.6 million investment questionable from an environmental improvement perspective, at best.”

If Evers’s Stewardship budget passes, the state would have $240 million more in acquisition funds over a decade, meaning the state will likely acquire far more than 200,000 acres in fee title lands and especially conservation easements, based on recent easement purchase prices.

As they say, if you budget it, the DNR will spend it. When it does, it may or may not report the numbers accurately.