Assembly Passes Bold—and much needed—Stewardship Reform

Finally seeing the light

The only word that really comes to mind is Hallelujah.

It is exactly the word I shouted when I learned that the state Assembly this week passed a significantly reshaped reauthorization of the state’s Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program, the state’s gargantuan big government land-grab scheme.

The vote was 53-44, along party lines. It now goes to the state Senate.

Now, I’ve been pretty rough on Rep. Tony Kurtz (R-Wonewoc) and Sen. Patrick Testin (R-Stevens Point) after they offered up a version of Stewardship reauthorization this past summer that was a monstrosity, the proposed compromise being, in effect, to give the land trusts and easement weasels everything they wanted.

This bill is a beast of a different color. Last week Kurtz and Testin introduced substitute amendments (here and here) to their original bill, and those are the ones that passed. The new proposal reauthorizes Stewardship only through 2028. It would cut total annual funding for state land acquisition from $16 million to $1.25 million, eliminate all funding for nonprofit conservation organizations to buy land or easements, and limit future acquisitions to smaller, minor purchases that improve public access.

It’s a Boom! of a bill and enough to sing Hallelujah.

On the specific proposal, I can’t say there is no room for negotiation in the Senate, though I don’t believe that’s going to happen. Certainly, the substitute amendment is not perfect. But after a big fumble right after kickoff with their original bill, with some clear fouls for conducting rushed and suspicious hearings, not to mention a deeply flawed game plan that, if followed, would have been every environmentalist’s land-grabbing dream come true, Republican lawmakers took another look and this week took a meaningful step in the right direction.

It is three touchdowns ahead of that original bill and a gazillion points ahead of the fantastical whims of the governor and progressives. Even if it just a start, even if it fails, it represents the most serious effort in decades to rein in a land-acquisition program that has drifted far from its original mission. Let’s take a look at how this day came to be.

Squealing like a pig

Put simply, the state’s Stewardship program is now a 37-year-old land-acquisition hog that is long past its prime, heavily bonded and fueled by nonprofit land trusts that depend on a steady flow of state dollars.

Environmentalists have hijacked its original promise of responsible, time-limited, and targeted conservation and metastasized it as a cancer of perpetual government expansion, disabling private property rights, shrinking rural tax bases, and holding land hostage forever under easements that ignore changing technologies, environmental conditions, and communities.

It has rewired the very circuitry of a once-honest conservation movement, transforming it from a trustworthy guardian to a dangerous predator.

Even worse, many if not most of the landowners lining up to make a quick sale aren’t conservationists at all; they’re opportunists seeking the fastest cha-ching from the highest bidder—getting in line for the fake carbon-credits market—and the state, backed by bonding, has the deepest pockets in the room. It’s a marketplace distortion that punishes taxpayers and future generations.

Because of these realities, conservatives, especially in northern Wisconsin, have been howling about abuse of the Stewardship program for years. In Oneida County, for instance, well more than 30 percent of the land is already publicly owned or under a conservation easement. Some counties are more than 50 percent publicly owned. And yet the DNR’s stated goal is another 221,500 acres, mostly in northern Wisconsin.

All totaled, about 17 percent of Wisconsin’s land—about one in every six acres—is owned or controlled by government at the federal, state, county, or municipal level.

And all of this comes with a big price tag for taxpayers. It is not funded with spare change but is a bonding program created in 1989. Interest costs alone totaled in the neighborhood of $230 million between 2015 and 2025, and, as of last April, taxpayers were carrying more than $530 million in outstanding Stewardship debt.

Unfortunately for all of us, in his last budget proposal, Gov. Evers wanted more, a whole lot more. In fact, he proposed to triple annual spending from $33 million to $100 million per year for a decade—a $1 billion land-buying binge. Had it passed, total taxpayer costs would likely have exceeded $1.5 billion with interest.

That proposal alone should have ended any illusion that Stewardship is a modest conservation program. It is one of the largest government confiscation field operations in the nation.

Republicans on the Joint Finance Committee later removed the governor’s proposed funding from the bill, and it was not included in the budget compromise reached by the two sides.

At that point, with everybody at an impasse and with the programs set to expire June 30 without reauthorization, Testin and Kurtz tried to forge a middle ground. What they produced instead was a lowland of hodge-podgery that, when the muck was scraped off the fine print, gave environmentalists pretty much everything they wanted, despite reducing the program’s overall spending.

The original bill reduced overall Stewardship spending from $33.25 million year to $28.25 million a year, but that was deceptive. It actually preserved a substantial land acquisition pipeline—$11 million per year—leaving the nonprofit buying machine intact. It relied heavily on legislative enumeration of large acquisitions, not a bad notion, but many people still considered that constitutionally suspect, as an after-the-fact micromanagement of executive implementation of law.

Even worse, environmental groups applauded it. Land trusts praised it. The DNR warned only about administrative inconvenience. In other words, the original bill left the core of the problem untouched and even unrestrained, leaving many property rights advocates uneasy and some downright angry.

Many lawmakers privately admitted that it was a no-go from the start. And so it was no accident that the bill deadlocked 6–6 in committee in November, with Rep. Rob Swearingen (R-Rhinelander) and Rep. Calvin Callahan (R-Tomahawk) joining Democrats—for opposite reasons—in voting no.

Swearingen and Callahan were right to dissent. Their districts hold some of the state’s highest concentrations of public land. Swearingen alone has more than 66,500 Stewardship acres inside his district; Callahan has more than 56,100.

They listened to their constituents, and by doing so forced a reset.

The Great Reset could be a Beautiful Sunset

That brings us to the Great Reset, if I may call it that, because if these bills are enacted, it truly marks a new beginning for conservation—not its end, but its return to reasonableness and accountability.

Under current law, the Stewardship program authorizes the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to spend up to $33.25 million per year, including about $16 million annually for land and easement acquisition. Those funds are divided into three primary categories: approximately $6 million per year for DNR purchases, $7 million per year in grants to nonprofit conservation organizations, and about $3 million per year in grants to counties.

According to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau (LFB), in a January 14 memo to Kurtz and Testin, the new bill would reduce total stewardship funding to $28.25 million per year beginning in fiscal year 2026-27—$13.25 million for bonding—but the most consequential change would be where the money would go.

Under the proposal, total land acquisition funding would collapse from $16 million per year to $1.25 million, a staggering 92.2 percent reduction. The acquisition money would go solely to the DNR and even then would be severely restricted. Specifically, the bill provides $1 million in annual bonding authority and $250,000 in forestry segregated revenue for acquisitions. The bonding money would be reserved exclusively for Ice Age Trail acquisitions.

What’s more, the $250,000 forestry grant for land acquisitions could be used only for minor land acquisitions defined as parcels that are five acres or less in size; that improve access to hunting, fishing, or trapping opportunities; or are contiguous to land already owned by the state. Plus, the bill would sunset the language that allows the department to use un-obligated amounts from nonprofit land acquisition grants for county forest grants at the end of 2025–26.

Even more consequential, the substitute amendment eliminates $7 million per year that has long flowed to nonprofit conservation organizations for land and easement purchases. That would be 0 dollars, as in zero.

As in nothing.

For decades, nonprofit land trusts have served as the program’s most aggressive expansion arm, acquiring land and easements with Stewardship dollars and transferring them to the state or otherwise locking them into permanent restrictions.

For example, Stewardship funds were originally planned to fund a conservation easement for the Pelican River forest. One easement covered 54,898 acres of the forest, bringing the total to more than 67,000 acres permanently off-limits to most economic development. The purchase originally encompassed about 80 percent of the town of Monico, though a compromise later carved out about 12,000 acres to allow for development along roadway corridors.

Republicans blocked the use of Stewardship funds for the project, though Evers later rammed it through with federal funding. The state Supreme Court then limited the legislature’s ability to block Stewardship purchases through passive review, but, under the new bill, that Stewardship function would effectively end.

That pipeline would be shut down.

In total, the LFB calculates, the bills would cut $14.75 million per year from land and easement acquisition, from $16 million to $1.25 million. Instead, the bills create a new $5 million per year appropriation for nonprofit groups—not to buy land, but to manage wildlife habitat on land already publicly owned and open to the public.

“The bill would create an annual appropriation from the forestry account for NCO grants for wildlife habitat management,” the memo states. 

“The bill would specify that these NCO grants are to develop, manage, preserve, restore, and maintain wildlife habitat on fee-simple land or easements that provide public access for fishing or hunting owned by the state, local unit of government, lake sanitary district, or lake protection district that is open to the public for nature-based outdoor activities. The bill would define nature-based outdoor activities in the related section of statute as those activities that have a primary focus of the appreciation or enjoyment of nature, such as hunting, fishing, trapping, hiking, or cross-country skiing.”

The bill would also create an annual forestry SEG appropriation for DNR property development.

“Under current law, as a subset of the $5,000,000 annual bonding authority for DNR property development, DNR is required to establish a program, and allocate $500,000 each year in bonding authority, for grants to friends groups and NCOs for projects for property development on DNR properties,” the memo states. “Friends groups are nonprofit organizations that provide direct support to individual DNR properties, such as by organizing park cleanup and trail work days.”

Under this bill, the LFB stated, the department would provide up to $1,000,000 forestry SEG each year from the DNR property development appropriation for grants to friends groups and NCOs for projects related to property development on DNR properties.

In short, Stewardship would cease being Wisconsin’s primary tool for expanding government land ownership. It would become primarily a land development, recreation, and habitat management fund.

Indeed, while acquisition funding almost disappears, funding for property development and local assistance would grow substantially. Under current law, property development and local assistance receive about $14.25 million per year. Taken together, the substitute amendments would appropriate $24 million per year for property development, local assistance, and habitat management.

The bill increases annual funding for DNR property development to $7.75 million (including the $1 million to friends groups), up from $5 million. It expands funding for local assistance grants and adjusts match requirements to limit excessive grant-stacking. In practical terms, Stewardship money would go toward trails, campgrounds, boat launches, urban green spaces, park improvements, and habitat management—the unglamorous but badly needed work of maintaining and improving the lands Wisconsin already owns.

Why until now has no one recognized the absurdity of continuing to acquire ever more land while not maintaining what the state already had is beyond me. These bills finally flip those priorities.

Study, inventory, and transparency

There are more goodies in the hopper. The bills also require something long resisted by the DNR and its allies: a comprehensive inventory and public accounting. Specifically, the bills would require the DNR, in coordination with counties and nonprofit organizations that have received stewardship grants, to conduct a comprehensive stewardship program study and report on its findings.

The study would be required to include an inventory of all land that includes fee-simple land, conservation easements, and development rights acquired under the current and predecessor stewardship programs; proposed project boundaries and land acquisition priorities for the next two to five years; and proposed changes, if any, to the managed forest law, forest crop law, and aids in lieu of taxes programs, the memo stated.

The bills also would enable the DNR to submit a request to the Joint Committee on Finance to supplement the department’s conservation SEG general program operations appropriation under the Division of Internal Services for costs related to the study and report.

“The Committee may make a supplement available without the funding of an emergency in such an instance,” the memo states. “The department is required to submit the report detailing the study no later than two years after the effective date of the bill to the chief clerk of each house of the Legislature. The bill would also require that the Department publish stewardship program grant awardees publicly.”

For 37 years, Stewardship has expanded with remarkably little systematic accounting of what the state actually owns, controls, or owes. Even in the past year, as MacIver has reported, the DNR’s acreage figures have been shown to be nearly 120,000 acres off.

Whether the bills ultimately pass or not, something important happened this week: lawmakers finally acknowledged what citizens in northern Wisconsin have been saying for years. Stewardship is broken. It locks up too much property into perpetual easements, carries too much debt, and operates with too little transparency and respect for local communities and private property.

That recognition alone marks progress.

But there are also several existential reasons why Stewardship needs reform—reasons going far beyond its mission creep, far beyond excessive government control of land, far beyond debt and taxpayer indenture.

That is to say, Stewardship, if it continues as it currently exists, would slay private property rights altogether. Perpetual easements are hardwired into the program as indisputably valid conservation tools, when in fact they are nothing more than the effective transfer of property ownership from individuals to governments or government instruments. It is de facto ownership by the state, stripping rights from current and future owners while still leaving them with tax obligations.

In rural areas, those easements lock land into low-density tourism with limited economic impact, reducing property tax revenues and blocking housing or other development that could diversify local economies. Finally, perpetual easements and ongoing funding commitments bind future legislatures, landowners and taxpayers, bypassing democratic processes that could adjust land-use policy to changing needs and conditions.

All that said, the substitute amendments aren’t a silver bullet. They leave Stewardship alive—a merciful gesture itself—when it should have been terminated more than two decades ago. It still allows bonding, which has never made sense to me. If some land needs protection, the state should budget for it rather than incurring debt and interest.

Equally important, it does not ban perpetual easements by limiting their terms to a constitutionally appropriate 15-year renewable term or impose hard caps on total public ownership by requiring divestment as a precondition of adding new acreage.

But the bills the Assembly passed are, at last, honest. They acknowledge that the old model failed. And they begin the long process of restoring balance between conservation and liberty. For that, Kurtz and Testin deserve credit. So do Swearingen and Callahan for forcing this reckoning with their dissenting votes in November.

There’s a long way to go. Environmental groups and Democrats will fight to restore acquisition money. They already are. The DNR will warn of administrative burdens. Land trusts will claim conservation is collapsing and that doomsday is right around the corner.

None of that is true. What is collapsing is support for a system that confused preservation with control, and defined conservation as permanent government expansion. For the first time in 37 years, these amendments move us in the right direction. In Madison these days, that alone is worth noticing.

Every Republican lawmaker should be on board; every conservative who values private property rights should contact their legislators in support.