The Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund will likely come to an end this June. Earlier this year, the state senate failed to reauthorize funding for the program.
The stewardship fund has helped protect 750,000 acres of land statewide by investing roughly $1.3 billion to protect Wisconsin’s natural landscape. The stewardship fund has been working with government and nonprofits since 1989, but in recent years it has faced more politicization.
DNR facilities and lands bureau director, Terry Bay explained the impacts we could see in the state.
Maria Peralta-Arellano: Can you brief us through the news about the funding that has been failed to be reauthorized by the senate?
Terry Bay: So we're talking about the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship program, which was originally authorized in 1989 and since 1989, there's been a number of adjustments, reauthorizations of the program. Those readjustments and reauthorizations have now come to an end. Without reauthorization, the program ends on June 30th of this year. With that coming forward, the governor proposed in his biennial budget a reauthorization of the program, and what the governor had proposed is a 10 year reauthorization of the program, and that would be at $100 million a year. Since that was proposed and that was rejected in the budget by the full legislature, two separate bills have been introduced by the legislature. One from each side of the house for reauthorizing the program. Each of those reauthorization efforts had its own, I guess position on what the program should be doing and what the program shouldn't be doing at different authorized funding levels, nowhere near what the governor had proposed.
So are you able to describe where those party lines are forming, what Republicans want from any form of reauthorization, what Democrats may want?
The Republicans' concern about the program - that has been indicated to us - has been oversight of the program. So there was a case that came up to the [State] Supreme Court that questioned the Joint Finance Commission's authority on overseeing and approving land acquisitions for the department. [The] statute required, in general, the Joint Finance Commission to approve land acquisitions. That was challenged in the Supreme Court and the reason it was challenged was the Joint Finance Committee, at the time, was not putting land acquisitions on their agenda. We had a lot of land acquisitions that were sitting for literally years because they would not bring them up and put them on their agenda. It eventually rose up to the [State] Supreme Court and that really brought the stewardship program into focus, and kind of this punching bag, for those reasons.
How are you guys preparing for the end of the program? Is there any way that you guys are appealing to more donors outside of the state government? Is it possible that the public could donate or how are you guys preparing for that?
Donations can be received by the department, but we cannot solicit the donations and donations are a big part of the program. So we use those private dollars and match with stewardship funding or federal dollars, and those donations can be cash or land donations, or what we call bargain sales where a landowner will sell us their land at a much reduced rate. However, we cannot go out and actively solicit those donations. The other thing is it's a match. So those donations are matched against stewardship and federal, so it only covers part of the project. We don't have any funding to cover the other half of the stewardship besides the federal dollars, and the federal dollars, as we see in the news, have been limited as well.
Through the years that we have had the stewardship program, what have been the impacts on conservation that they have been able to help achieve for the state and how does this affect the future of conservation in Wisconsin and what we're able to do?
The stewardship program continues to bring awareness to the importance of natural resources that we have and enjoy in Wisconsin. Reducing or eliminating Knowles-Nelson will affect conservation, I think, in three key areas.
The first is obviously we'll see a reduced habitat or fragmentation of habitat. It greatly affects our natural ecological systems in the state that exists, our wildlife our plants and our animals need, and the loss of that specific habitat, or reduction of it or fragmentation of it, really threatens that wildlife and that biodiversity of species in our given regions of the state.
I think the second point is we really look at it's the protection of water quality in the state. The natural landscapes that we all enjoy, that include rivers and lakes, may be protected by stewardship through boundaries that we create around those watersheds to help improve that water runoff, and it also improves the resiliency of flooding by creating those areas, those bogs, those marshes, that help with the surges of floods that we see in areas.
And then finally, we just always see it as a support to the local economy. With no increases in stewardship, or any kind of stewardship, we're not going to see any increases in any kind of outdoor recreational opportunities.
What are your thoughts on the ending of the program fund? What worries you the most about this? What are you hoping for the future?
I think what worries me the most is... the great outdoor opportunities offered in the state of Wisconsin. It really concerns me how this will affect this absolute great state that we live in and that outdoor recreational value. We all saw the giant uptick in outdoor recreation during the pandemic. People got outdoors and we had all these opportunities in the state of Wisconsin to get outdoors and it really concerns me what that will do to the overall state.
