[Note: This editorial appears in the July 2000 issue of Wisconsin Trout, Trout Unlimited's Newsletter. The writer represents TU on the WSN steering committee.]
The past two months I’ve had the pleasure of helping the Wisconsin Stewardship Network conduct a survey of all Wisconsin state legislators on these two questions from last April’s statewide Conservation Congress meetings:
“58. Should the Secretary of the Department of Natural Resources be appointed by the Natural Resources Board rather than the Governor?”In case you didn’t hear, 19 out of every 20 Conservation Congress voters said “yes” to question 58. Almost 8 of 9 agreed with question 59.“59. Should the Office of the Public Intervenor be reinstated with all its powers as originally created in 1967, and with sufficient financing to allow it to carry out those powers?”
That’s some pretty serious dissatisfaction with the status quo. If your business hired a consultant to determine customer satisfaction with one of your company’s product changes and that consultant uncovered this level of customer dissatisfaction, you’d jump to react. You’d call the change a mistake, and you’d promise your customers you’ll never make such a blunder again. Then you’d sit back and hope the hell everyone was still your customer next week.
The WSN survey tried to find out how our legislators are responding to all of us “customers” now that we’ve had a chance to live with Governor Thompson’s 1995 budget bill “product changes.” Check the survey and two things will strike you. First, the majority of our legislators simply refused to respond to their conservation constituents from Trout Unlimited, the River Alliance, the Audubon Society, Pheasants Forever, the Izaak Walton League, and the many other WSN member organizations.
Secondly, of the legislators who did respond, only six of 37 were Republicans. One wonders whether these silent Republicans are still proud of their governor’s 1995 decision to politicize the DNR, or whether they would rather no one points out that they sat around a table agreeing with the governor that “New Coke” is a great idea.
I encourage you to ask your local state legislators to pay attention to their customer — you — on restoring DNR independence. The DNR employs our frontline water protection stewards, and we need to keep these folks from being leaned on by those who would take our water resources first and ask questions about the impacts later.
A good place to start would be for Rep. DuWayne Johnsrud to allow a DNR restoration bill to come up for a vote instead of blocking them. Johnsrud apparently feels that if no one in the state assembly votes, no one can tell the governor that his new clothes are invisible.
Instead, Johnsrud has tailored a barbless hook bill to convince us the legislature is weaving fine cloth. But compared to giving our DNR the political insulation it needs to regulate Perrier and the others who will surely come to drain the very water out of our trout streams, worrying about barbless hooks seems downright trivial.
Signed,Customer