Bangstad asks county to waive parking requirements

A day after agreeing to meet the conditions of his administrative review permit if the town of Minocqua would give him more time on two issues related to parking and access, Minocqua Brewing Company owner Kirk Bangstad went to the county asking for the permit conditions to be amended so that the parking requirement could be waived altogether.

The previous day, he had requested an appearance before the county board of supervisors to request that zoning director Karl Jennrich be sanctioned for harassment and obstruction.

On Tuesday, June 7, the Minocqua town board voted 3-1 vote to recommend giving the Minocqua Brewing Company (MBC) and Bangstad more time to meet parking requirements at his Front Street retail location, meaning he could open provided he met other conditions of his administrative review permit.

Bangstad agreed to do so, and he also agreed to put a to-be-determined amount of money in an escrow account to ensure his compliance.

“I am agreeing with the town that I will not want to open until the stormwater management is in and the gravel is compressed over the top of it,” Bangstad told the board at the Tuesday meeting after the board did not take up his initial request to waive the parking altogether. “I want the town to allow me to put the blacktop and the curb cuts in at a later time.”

The town voted to allow Bangstad to open and to complete the blacktopping and curb cuts by October 31, with the escrow to be negotiated. It was a recommendation only; the county enforces the permit.

However, the next day Bangstad was taking a different approach with the county. In a mid-day email to Oneida County clerk Tracy Hartman, Bangstad said his architect would be inquiring with Jennrich about whether the ARP could be amended. Bangstad made no mention in that email what those proposed amendments were but in later correspondence he reiterated his oft-repeated desire for the county to waive all parking requirements at the location. 

In that email to Hartman, Bangstad also said he wanted the proposed ARP amendments added to the request he had already sent Hartman about appearing before the board to ask for sanctions against Jennrich.

“We may need to request an audience with the county board for this issue as well, as the town board of Minocqua seemingly has no appetite or courage to rule on the proposed amendments we submitted to Karl last night,” he wrote.

Less than an hour after the mid-day June 8 email, Jennrich responded to Bangstad with comments of his own. For starters, Jennrich said that any complaint Bangstad had about his job performance as it related to administration of the ordinance could be forwarded to zoning committee chairman Scott Holewinski and possibly to Lisa Charbarneau, director of the Labor Relations Employee Services Department.   

“If you believe I have done something unethical or against Oneida County Code of Conduct, you should probably submit a formal complaint with the Labor Relations and Employee Services director Lisa Charbarneau, to my oversight committee chairperson Scott Holewinski or the Oneida County Board chairperson Scott Holewinski,” Jennrich wrote.  

And if Bangstad wanted to discuss the aspects of the administrative review permit, he could start with Jennrich, or zoning committee chairman Scott Holewinski, or Mike Timmons, the vice chairman.

“If you believe there is a misapplication/misinterpretation of the zoning ordinance or you would like to appeal an administrative decision of myself or of the planning and development committee (my oversight committee) you can appeal a decision to the Oneida County Board of Adjustment,” he wrote.

In addition, Jennrich told Bangstad he had the right to address the county board but that it was his personal and professional opinion that they would kick it back to either the planning and development committee or to the department.  

And finally, Jennrich said some of Bangstad’s expectations weren’t reasonable.

“I also stated to you that it is not reasonable to have staff and for that matter the town of Minocqua to review a proposal approximately three or so hours prior to a meeting,” he wrote. “This department is in the middle of construction season and has been another record breaking year, I believe. Please have your consultant or attorney send me a proposal/formal amendment or something that you want the department to review.”

Good ideas
In his reply to Jennrich — which he also sent to Charbarneau, Holewinski, Hartman, Timmons, and corporation counsel Mike Fugle — Bangstad said he would take Jennrich up on all his suggestions.

To Holewinski and Charbarneau, Bangstad said he would like to file a formal complaint against Jennrich for applying a different set of rules to his company than he had for other companies. 

“In particular, he attempted to give me a citation for not pulling a permit for my temporary location at 317 Front Street when many other retail tenants over the past 30 years have not been required to pull ARPs to do business there,” he wrote. “If indeed every retail operation has to pull a permit, then he hasn’t been doing his job at this particular location for quite a long time.”

In addition, Bangstad said he would like to file an official complaint so that he could go beyond Jennrich to a higher level official — county board or state official — to amend the ARP at 329 Front Street. Specifically, Bangstad said Jennrich delayed the ARP process by three months after the ARP was approved in December 2021 “and seemingly took direction from or was influenced by town chairman Mark Hartzeim [sic] in applying unnecessary and irregular requirements to my ARP that now requires an unnecessary and irregularly shaped parking lot that delayed construction and is now causing me to lose revenue.”

Bangstad asked Charbarneau to provide him with the proper form to submit a formal complaint with the Labor Relations and Employee Services department. In addition, he asked that the county drop the idea of the parking lot altogether.

“I would like to request to Scott Holewinski and Mike Timmons to be allowed to petition/request an amendment to my ARP to drop the parking lot requirement on 329 Front Street,” he wrote. “I have just spent an excrutiatingly [sic] painful two hours with an obstructionist Minocqua town board where instead of doing anything, they determined that they didn’t have jurisdiction over this matter and punted back to the county.”

In fact, while the matter of town jurisdiction did come up late at that meeting, it came from former town board member Bill Stengl. The town board also took two actions, one of which was the vote to give Bangstad until October 31 to finish curb cuts and blacktopping.

The town also voted to grant Bangstad a Revocable Occupancy Permit detailing the terms for use of a right-of way parcel for access to his business. One condition of that permit was for the ARP conditions to be met, which did the give the town direct jurisdiction in the matter.

In approaching the county, however, Bangstad said it was important for Holewinski and Timmons to oversee any request.

“Unfortunately the ‘county’ means ‘Karl Jennrich,’ and Karl apparently doesn’t do anything related to 329 Front Street without the coordination with town board chairman Mark Hartzeim [sic], so I have been in an endless loop of inaction/obstruction which has caused construction delays and a loss of revenue,” he wrote in the June 9 reply to Jennrich.

Then, too, Bangstad said he would like to appeal all current decisions from Jennrich as they related to 329 Front Street and 317 Front Street, especially those relating to what he called a forced parking lot on the former parcel and the ARP requirement for the latter. In addition, Bangstad wrote, the county code allows parking lot exemptions for old properties with zero lot lines, exactly like his 329 Front Street.  

“The town claimed in the meeting last Tuesday that they had no ability to make that exception, but the county has repeatedly told my team that this exception has to be made at the town level,” he wrote.  

Bangstad then accused Minocqua supervisor John Thompson of belonging to what Bangstad calls a Facebook “hate group” and that he had urged its members to come to the town board meeting on June 7 to intimidate him. Bangstad had also invited supporters to attend the meeting and had called for Thompson’s recusal.

“He recused himself from the meeting because he clearly violated due process, but between Mark Hartzeim [sic] and John Thompson’s obstruction, I now believe this inability to get a parking lot exemption granted is also due to political revenge and vendetta on the part of these two individuals, so I would like to appeal that decision and hope to offer an amended plan to put in a nice grassy area/park in front of my building with a gravel employee parking area of only two spots,” he wrote.

Thompson maintained he was recusing himself because he did not want his integrity further impugned.

In any event, Bangstad wrote that he did not believe he would be given fair treatment by the county zoning staff for all the reasons stated, “because of either political bias or ineptitude, so I’d like to explore ways to get approval process through a state employee or at the very least, the county board or county attorney working in conjunction with my attorney, Collin Schaeffer.”

Bangstad first wanted to go to the county board after he received correspondence from Jennrich requiring his temporary location to have an ARP and stating that he would have to pay a $750 after-the-fact permit fee to get one and to shutter operations until he did so.

In an earlier June 4 email to Minocqua town clerk Roben Haggart, Bangstad also said he was being treated differently. 

“The town seemingly didn’t require any permits to do business from Bee’s café, Wheelers Café, Dagney’s Café, Mike Scribner, CPA, a shoe repair store, Biwan and Asscociates, CPA, Wis. Benefit Planning, Amos retail internet sales,” he wrote. “Additionally, in this building, which includes 315 Front and 321 Front, was a retail paint store, Char-ade gift shop, lots of massage therapy/nail shops—many of which were retail in nature, like the Minocqua Brewing Company.”

Bangstad said he could not find any town or county permits required for “hardly” any of these businesses, even the retail shops like his  In fact, Bangstad wrote, he found that the last permit granted to a business to operate a retail shop was to a yarn company in the 1990s.

“If the town/county forces us to apply for a local permit to do business at 317 Front Street, it would be breaking 30 years of precedent, and of course would constitute harassment/obstruction on the part of the town/county, and the town/county would be on the hook for lost revenue if we had to challenge this demand/decision in court,” he wrote.

After receiving Jennrich’s correspondence about the ARP at the temporary location, Bangstad wrote to Hartman asking to appear before the board to ask for sanctions for harassment and obstruction against Jennrich for singling out his business for permitting at the temporary location, when he said a laissez fair approach to that address had been applied over the past 30 years.

“If you decide to require a permit for my temporary location, we will consider these actions harassment and obstruction and weigh our legal options given past precedent of laissez faire with respect to 317 Front Street,” he wrote.