Pelican River area in Wisconsin (Jay Brittain | Courtesy of the photographer)
When Gov. Tony Evers made his 2025-27 budget proposal in February, it included an annual $100 million appropriation to fund the broadly popular Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Grant program for another 10 years. The budget he signed after 1 a.m. Thursday included zero money for the program, which is set to lapse next summer.
While a separate piece of legislation to re-authorize the program has been introduced by Rep. Tony Kurtz (R-Wonewoc) and Sen. Patrick Testin (R-Stevens Point), the failure to provide added money in the budget has raised concerns that the program — which allows the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to provide grant funding to acquire, conserve and maintain public lands — could fail to survive the political tumult of divided government and die.
Even though the conservation of public lands is widely popular among both Democratic and Republican voters in the state, a handful of Republican legislators have grown increasingly hostile to the program, particularly since the state Supreme Court ruled last year that the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Finance doesn’t have the authority to hold up grants issued by the DNR through the program. Republicans complain that the acquisition of public land takes parcels off the property tax roles and prevents development projects.
The Kurtz and Testin proposal aims to reach a compromise by re-authorizing the program while adding more legislative oversight by requiring that any land purchases over $1 million be approved through legislation.
“While I recognize all that has gone into reaching this compromise budget, I must share that I am deeply disappointed that Republican leaders would not agree to reauthorize the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program — even for just one more year through 2027,” Sen. Jodi Habush Sinykin (D-Whitefish Bay) said in a statement. “Here’s the situation now: Knowles-Nelson reauthorization expires on June 20, 2026, giving the Legislature one year to take action before the deadline, and Republicans have indicated they will bring this back to the agenda this fall. Trust that I will keep up the pressure on Republicans and hold them to their word. I will continue to be a strong advocate for this long-standing bipartisan promise.”
The lack of stewardship program funds in the final state budget led Evers to use his partial veto authority to prevent spending money on five individual public lands projects that legislators had earmarked in the bill.
“I object to providing an earmark for a natural resources project when the Legislature has abandoned its responsibility to reauthorize and ensure the continuation of the immensely popular Warren Knowles-Gaylord Nelson Stewardship program,” Evers stated in his veto message. “Instead of renewing the program and helping the many, the Legislature has opted to benefit the politically connected few. The Legislature must do its job and renew the Warren Knowles-Gaylord Nelson Stewardship program.”
Timber strategic plan
The DNR budget also includes funds for a $1 million grant to the Great Lakes Timber Professionals Association (GLTPA) and the Wisconsin Paper Council to craft a Forestry Industrywide Strategic Plan.
This provision was included by the Joint Committee on Finance in its late night session last Friday and has raised concerns from some environmental groups that it is a giveaway to industry groups to push for increased extraction of resources from the state’s forest lands.
“Taxpayers should not be made to underwrite private industry studies with no public benefit or input. Would they decide how to manage local, state, and federal forests in this study? Would it be published?” Andy Olsen, senior policy advocate at the Environmental Law and Policy Center, said. “One million dollars is very generous with taxpayer dollars for a sketchy study with no public benefit.”
The GLTPA has been involved in efforts in Wisconsin’s Northwoods to oppose conservation projects and move local land use policies to be more pro-extraction by encouraging increased logging and the expansion of the state’s mining industry.
The association’s director, Henry Schienebeck, has been influential in Oneida County’s effort to rewrite its comprehensive plan to be friendlier to industry and worked with American Stewards of Liberty, a Texas-based right-wing anti-conservation group, to oppose land conservation such as the Pelican River Forest.
DNR spokesperson Andrea Sedlacek said the department is “monitoring this and all other relevant DNR budget motions as the process plays out” but did not yet have information on what the development of the strategic plan would look like or if other people or groups would be involved in its development.
But despite the grant being given only to industry groups, some environmental advocates say it’s a win.
Fred Clark, former executive director of Wisconsin Green Fire, said the development of such a plan is something the organization has been advocating for over the past several years. Clark pointed to a study of the health of the state’s forests Green Fire published last year and said that because the state’s paper mills have largely been shuttered, there are fewer places for the state’s foresters to bring their timber, destabilizing the industry.
Without a plan to find new uses for the state’s timber, the economics of Wisconsin’s working forest lands could change, resulting in land sales and development that results in forests being cut down to use the land for other purposes — ultimately harming the health of Wisconsin’s forests.
“The focus that we would like to see there is not necessarily on producing more timber, because we already grow a lot more timber than we harvest,” Clark said. “What we really think the state needs is a strategic focus on developing new forest products and helping expand and refine forest products markets so that we’ve got places for our wood to go.”
Clark said he foresees the development of the plan working through the state’s Council on Forestry, which includes members representing industry, environmental groups, state and federal agencies, legislators and landowners. He added that for the project to succeed it needs input from all those groups, including those with records such as the GLTPA.
“We need everybody at the table for this, and there’s a wide range of points of view in the forestry community,” Clark said. “Great Lakes Timber Professionals have been an active member of the Council on Forestry almost since day one. We won’t succeed if we don’t have a pretty strong consensus all the way from the environmental groups to groups like Great Lakes Timber Professionals. So I think there’s a lot of common ground there. The most important next step for us is to see that there’s a really broad based committee within the Council on forestry that’s helping guide this work.”
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