"The North" says "No Line!"
Huge Ugly Transmission Line Wants to Slice Through Beautiful Wisconsin Wetlands and Lives
 |
At a public hearing in the northwest Wisconsin this fall the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources accepted public testimony on efforts by utilities to build the Arrowhead Weston 345,000 volt transmission line across northwest Wisconsin. The Public Service Commission has approved the line, but the decision is being appealed by grassroots organizations, Clean Wisconsin and SOUL. The American Transmission Company needs more state permits to build temporary bridges, dredge, and erect more than 300 steel poles in wetlands. The DNR may approve building the line without doing an environmental impact statement. Nick Vander Puy from the Superior Broadcast Network reports.
Click here: to listen to the five
minute live stream broadcast of this story To Download an MP3 of this five minute story click here Thank you to Eric Schubring of WOJB 88.9FM for recording. Eric you are a tireless voice for democracy. |
The Arrowhead Heart-Ache of the North
 |
 |
 |
Almost everybody who spoke at the hearing challenged the DNR’s decision to not do an environmental impact statement on the project. The speakers were incredulous that a project the magnitude of Arrowhead-Weston doesn’t require a “hard look.”
Dave Siebert is now energy project manager for the DNR. He supervises permits for building the Arrowhead Weston electric line.
Siebert says chapter NR 150 in the state statutes governs building the electric line. He says DNR is simply following the law by not requiring an Environmental Impact Statement or Environmental Assessment.
“What the law requires and what we’re dealing with here, we have legal responsibilities, we have to follow what the law says, and the law says no EIS or EA. That’s the requirement of the law.”
Ward Winton is an attorney representing Sand Lake township, a township on the line route with wetlands. Winton testified at the DNR hearing. He’s opposed to building the Arrowhead-Weston electric line.
He’s practiced almost thirty years in northwestern Wisconsin. He’s represented developers, town government, as well as some people opposed to development.
“The DNR has normally been a zealous guardian of the public resources. It may not always have been right, but it was in there fighting. I fail to see that in this case as more eloquent speakers earlier this evening have said, that a project of this magnitude could be done without an EIS boggles the mind.”
Part of the DNR permitting process involves building what they call “temporary roads” through northwestern Wisconsin swamps. This is necessary to erect more than three hundred poles. The poles ranging from a 120-180 feet tall for the Arrowhead Weston electric line. Each pole requires a substantial concrete footing. More than thirty truckloads of concrete.
“We are talking about roads through wetlands. Temporary roads? When you put When you put a road through a wetland, when do you build the road? Do you build it in the winter? Do you build it in the summer? After it’s built? By the way, has the DNR considered how you get a caterpillar or a cement truck out of a wetland after it goes down? Or what the impact is when it’s decided that it’s going to stay down there? How do you remove those roads? We’re not talking about bridges? We’re talking about roads that go through some of the most pristine wetlands that exist on the face of the planet. Who’s looking at that? And why not?”
Winton is also concerned that by a giving a preliminary yes to the project, the DNR is shifting the burden of proof. The way it now stands citizens must prove the project is unsafe, rather than the utilities.
Spencer Black is a state representative from Madison. Before being elected he was elected he worked as a field man for environmental groups.
Spencer Black points out that, back in the mid- nineteen eighties James Derouin was working for Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce. A business lobby. WMC’s Derouin called for a “streamlined” environmental permitting process, for “speeding” applicants through the process.*(see footnote) Derouin said Wisconsin must learn to adapt to the industry timetable.
According to Spencer Black WMC’s vision was fulfilled in the mid nineteen nineties, when the DNR secretary became a political appointee and the State Public Intervener office was gutted.
“First, you’ve got a DNR that is politically controlled. You have a very weak Secretary who does take his orders from the Governor’s office. And therefore the governor who’s been very supportive of the utilities and supportive of this powerline is basically telling DNR as the folks up in your area railroad this project through and you can see that happening. And then we had the public intervener who’s job as an independent attorney had the standing, the ability to go to court and the wherewithal to challenge state legislators breaking environmental law. And if we had the public intervener you can see this is surely something the public intervener would be in court on.”
And WMC is again seeking changes in the state’s utility laws.
I’m Nick Vander Puy for the Superior Broadcast Network
................................................................................
* (footnote) statement by former WMC attorney, James Derouin as reported in the press.
Green Bay Press Gazette Nov. 15, 1985
Cabinet role proposed for DNR chief (to view pdf file of original, click here)
MADISON (AP)--- Wisconsin's economic development team should include a head of the Department of Natural Resources chosen by the governor rather than by an appointed board, James Derouin says.
Derouin, an attorney for the last dozen years for the Wisconsin Association of Manufacturers and Commerce, said that if he were a corporation president who wanted to build a plant in Wisconsin, he would want to have the DNR secretary in his corner just as much as the governor and lieutenant governor, the Department of Development or Forward Wisconsin, Inc.
"That's why the DNR secretary should be made a member of the governor's cabinet, empowered to promise businesses speedy action on environmental permits and armed with the legal authority to deliver on that promise, Derouin said in an interview Thursday.
Wisconsin has a marvelous labor forces and lower taxes that make it attractive to business, he said.
But that is not enough to give it equal footing in the fierce competition for well-paying jobs, Derouin said.
"The state badly needs an expedited permit process: the state needs its DNR secretary to be incorporated into the economic development team, not for environmental breaks, but for purposes of speeding people through the process," he said.
It is the parting shot of a man who helped write many of the air- and water-quality and solid waste laws he is now criticizing and it is a view he admits is sharpened by hindsight...
...He says he is not leaving just because of Wisconsin's business climate.
But, he said he fervently believes the national economy has created an urgent need to stream-line the procedures that industry must follow to build in Wisconsin--not weaken the tough environmental standards it must meet.
"What we are really talking about is whether Wisconsin will remain a viable manufacturing state," he said.....