(Note: Ah, the language deception and use of the Delphi Technique is alive and well in this article! Please read with care!)

February 23, 2003

By Paul Chronis

paul.chronis@cwnews.net

715-344-6100 Ext. 2512

Central Wisconsin Sunday

The Marshfield News Herald

111 West Third Street

Marshfield, WI 54449

715-384-3131 x 3131 or 800-967-2087

Fax: 715-387-4175

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A movement to stop Smart Growth is growing, attracting landowners and town officials who decry the land-use planning process as everything from a bureaucratic nightmare to a U.N. plot.

Many of those critics say Smart Growth is too top-heavy. Others say it will take the power to regulate planning and zoning away from small towns. Still more feel the law outlining the process is too vague and subject to misinterpretation.

Daniel Mielke, an assessor who lives in the Portage County town of Linwood, fears that Smart Growth will prevent him from passing on his 140-year old farm to his children.

"We are not talking about controlling nuclear sites and large pig farms," he said. "We are talking about where my children are allowed to live and raise a family. We are talking about government deciding where we should live and work."

Proponents say Smart Growth will actually give citizens more input into land-use decisions. The 1999 law requires each county, city, village and town to enact a land-use plan by 2010 for the next 20 years. Officials must address nine categories, including transportation, housing and natural resources.

"It's the same process we've used since 1978, but now the state requires the towns to look at other things in addition to land use," said Mike Hansen, a senior planner for Portage County. "It collects what the local communities feel are important for their future and puts it into a document they can use."

Meetings in central Wisconsin to discuss Smart Growth's potential problems have drawn dozens, many of whom have been town officials concerned about how the process will affect them. A February 13 session at the Country Aire ballroom near Stratford drew about 400 people.

Even though Smart Growth was passed as part of the 1999-2001 Wisconsin state budget, many are just now finding out about the process, in part because the measure was not debated separately by lawmakers.

Steve Schulte, co-owner of the Foxfire Gardens botanical gardens in the Marathon County town of McMillan, is upset by that. "It got dropped into our laps as law," he said.

Schulte also wants public input into the process to have more weight. He said so far, that input has largely taken the form of surveys and public meetings, none of which can force a local government to do anything. Schulte is trying to get town officials to set a vote to give people a binding say in the Smart Growth process.

Former state Sen. Brian Burke, D-Milwaukee, who authored Wisconsin's Smart Growth law, and Hal Cohen, planning director for 1000 Friends of Wisconsin, an environmental group which lobbied hard for the law, agreed that citizens must be involved in the process. "The goal of Smart Growth is to make sure local citizens have authority over local decisions and that it doesn't fall to bureaucrats and developers and take citizens out of the picture," Cohen said.

Burke said that used properly, Smart Growth will keep development compact and combat urban sprawl. "In the past, basically a big-box chain like a Wal-Mart would present a plan and a community would react to it," he said. "All Smart Growth is meant for is for communities to plan ahead, instead of reacting to growth pressures."

Wausau's WSAU-AM (550) talk show host Pat Snyder said control over growth is being taken away from small towns.

The power will become regional, not specific to each community, he said. "The state will eventually be saying what's good for the southwest of the state is good for the northeast."

Small towns and villages don't need the top-down legislative pressure, said Clark Palmer of the town of Pine Valley in Clark County. "They don't have to do comprehensive planning to get effective land use."

Hansen disagreed. "This process is as locally-driven as we can make it," he said. He noted that Portage County's Smart Growth process includes two committees, one each for urban and rural areas, made entirely up of local officials.

Clark and Portage counties received state grants to help pay for developing countywide Smart Growth plans. Portage County got a $514,000 grant, and signed up all 27 of the municipalities in its borders for a three-year process to develop their plan.

Palmer said he believes Clark County's process is flawed and that the county has largely wasted its $300,000 grant.

Bob Bowman helps edit a newsletter called Freedom Matters, which focuses on issues that include property rights and personal freedoms. The retired University of Wisconsin-Madison professor calls Smart Growth "a highly organized form of social planning" which will put severe limitations on economic development.

"It's a system to impose a property system on people instead of letting them develop it naturally," Bowman said. "That's a prescription for disaster."

Palmer said he believes Smart Growth started with a committee of the United Nations in the late 1980s that endorsed the initial concepts.

Those were later adopted by a federal commission appointed by then-President Clinton. The commission and the American Planning Association then developed a manual on how to implement Smart Growth nationwide. Wisconsin's process appears to parallel the manual.

"I'm willing to accept evidence that this is a well-coordinated effort that goes well beyond county government," Palmer said.

Greg Swank, a private businessman in the Wood County town of Rudolph, is making Smart Growth a central theme of his campaign for the state Senate.

"We in Rudolph have been planning for years, but we haven't had to plan according to a set agenda, nor have we had to combine it with the county," he said.

Schulte said the United Nations isn't controlling Smart Growth, but there is too much government bureaucracy in the process.

He said a bill that failed in the state Senate last year would have allowed the DNR to connect environmentally sensitive areas via rivers and lakes and control their development that way.

He said his home, which lies between the Mead and McMillan wildlife areas, would have been affected because the DNR could have made that connection with the Little Eau Pleine River.

"What will be the impact to those property owners along the river between Marshfield and Junction City?" he asked.

Cohen, however, sees their fears as unfounded. "Planning is the process that allows citizens to say what they hope for," he said. "Later on, when a developer or a city wants to do something else, having a plan on the books gives people the power to say 'Let's think about what we really hope to happen.' If that's not an expression of local power, I don't know what is."

http://www.wisinfo.com/newsherald/mnhlocal/281504276790033.shtml