Lakeland Times: Our View

There was a revealing discussion at the Oneida County zoning committee last week, and, to boil it down to its essence, it was mostly about how to punish people — nefarious people! — who found ways to exploit vague provisions of the county’s shoreland ordinance.

In other words, these people weren’t really following the ordinance, but they weren’t really violating it, either.

As such, there was no way to deny a permit or issue a citation, and that really upset committee members to no end. Naturally, there was no self-reflection. There was no questioning whether what the people wanted might make some sense, no pondering of what the zoning ordinance is really meant to accomplish.

They just wanted to punish, the best way they could.

The specific topic was boathouse permits.

Officials are worried that some clever property owners might apply for a permit, excavate and clear a shoreland area under that authorization, and then simply never build the boathouse. Instant yard.

Oh, the fretting this caused! Once people realized they could get away with this, the practice would spread like wildfire, supervisors wailed. The shoreline would be covered in graffiti, otherwise known as clearings full of deck chairs.

And so they tried to figure out a way to make people regret their odious behavior. Could they deny permits? Could they issue citations? Could they force restoration? Could they require applicants to post a bond before a shovel ever hits the dirt?

Here’s the thing: When the government starts contemplating taking financial hostages to protect itself from the paranoia of apocalyptic misconduct, it has usually wandered far from common sense. It’s deep in the dense buffer zones of anti-reality.

Yep, here we are.

The irony is impossible to miss. The county (and state) is perfectly willing to allow excavation and clearing if the owner intends to build a boathouse. It is the exact same excavation. It is the exact same clearing. It is the exact same disturbance of the shoreline.

The only difference is what the property owner plans to do afterward.

Put another way, the county is saying that clearing the shoreline is acceptable if officials approve of your purpose, but unacceptable if they do not. That is not environmental protection but bureaucratic preference masquerading as environmental protection.

After all, the whole purpose of shoreland zoning is environmental protection, right? But if an environmental disturbance is permissible for a boathouse, the government has a hard time explaining why the identical disturbance becomes unacceptable merely because someone wants deck chairs instead.

Suppose a property owner wants a small flat area by the water with a couple of Adirondack chairs instead of a boathouse. Suppose they simply want a place to watch the sunset or read a book. The government says, fine, you can go sit on the rooftop of your boathouse and take it all in. 

But if that area is just cleared and there’s no structure, it’s “No sunset for you, you illiterate peasant!”

Nobody at the meeting managed to bring this topic up, for obvious reasons. To his credit, zoning committee chairman Scott Holewinski may have uttered the most important sentence of the entire discussion: “We keep making more rules, but then we have to make more rules to cover those rules.”

Precisely.

The government creates a regulation. Citizens discover an unintended consequence or a perfectly legal workaround. Officials then draft another regulation to plug that hole. Before long, they need yet another rule to explain the second rule and another enforcement mechanism to administer the third.

The regulatory code expands like an invasive species. All of a sudden, bureaucrats and bureaucratic thinkers are proposing bonds, mandatory inspections, additional permit conditions, longer enforcement periods, or new penalties. 

The reality is, of course, the county is not responding to any environmental damage but to the possibility that someone might use the rules in a way they dislike. 

The answer, for elected officials (because bureaucrats will never think this way), should not be another bundle of regulatory firewood but rather a rethinking of the regulation itself: Does the county really need any firewood?

Indeed, this episode exposes a deeper truth about shoreland zoning, and zoning generally.

Its defenders always argue that ever more restrictions are necessary to protect water quality. Yet the science is far more complicated than the simpleton notions of environmentalists and bureaucrats.

Water quality degrades at the watershed level, and the primary driver is impervious surface coverage and associated runoff. The DNR’s own research has long shown that degradation begins at  8-10 percent impervious coverage of a watershed.

Northern Wisconsin is nowhere close. Across the region, total impervious surface coverage is only around 2 percent.

If protecting water quality were truly the real mission, regulators would focus on watershed-scale impacts rather than obsessing over whether a lakeshore clearing contains a boathouse or a pair of lawn chairs.

Even more curious, southern Wisconsin — where impervious surface percentages are often substantially higher than 10 percent — frequently operates under more lenient regulatory standards.

That inconsistency tells us something important: Shoreland zoning today is less about measurable environmental outcomes than about dictating aesthetic preferences and controlling land use according to the planners’ vision rather than property owners’ choices.

And the boathouse issue in Oneida County is another perfect example of that.

That ought to concern anyone who values private property rights. Just consider what the committee spent its time debating last week. We don’t think the words ‘water quality’ were ever uttered. Not a mention of sediment. Nobody started to figure runoff calculations. 

All they were worried about was a wildfire of deck chairs on 35-foot clearings, as if every Northwoods property owner would rush to do just that. You really can’t get any more absurd than this spectacle. 

All of which brings us to the broader problem of zoning itself.

If ever you travel through the state of Indiana — sometimes all of us must suffer — a traveler is likely to pass a farmer’s sign proclaiming, “Zoning isn’t the solution; zoning is the problem.”

Go attend an Oneida County zoning meeting like last week’s, and it’s to argue with that sentiment. When we’ve reached the point where we think we may need to require bonds just to get a boathouse permit, we’ve lost it completely. The committee isn’t concerned about water quality; its meetings are now exercises in social engineering.

Sometimes zoning is exclusionary, using such things as minimum lot sizes to price ordinary families out of desirable areas. Sometimes it is inclusionary, forcing developers and homeowners to subsidize policy objectives unrelated to their own projects.

Sometimes it’s just plain punitive, as when our zoning committee goes after devious boathouse permit applicants. In all those cases, zoning drives up costs, expands bureaucracy, and chips away at the fundamental right to use one’s own property.

The committee should resist the temptation to solve one regulatory oddity by inventing another, as Holewinski wisely pointed out. Don’t require and do not pile new permit conditions atop old permit conditions.

Do not build another bureaucratic mousetrap, but answer the question you never asked: If excavating and clearing a limited portion of shoreline can be done responsibly for a boathouse, why shouldn’t responsible property owners enjoy similar flexibility for other reasonable uses?

The answer is to trust property owners more. They are the true stewards of land and water.

As Nolan Gray, senior director of legislation at California YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) states in his 2022 book, “Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It”:

“Zoning is a fundamentally flawed policy that deserves to be abolished. Set aside for a moment the debilitating local housing shortages, the stunted growth and innovation, the persistent racial and economic segregation, and the ever-expanding sprawl: The very concept of zoning — the idea that state planners can rationally separate land uses and efficiently allocate density — has repeatedly failed to materialize. Far from the fantastical device imagined by early 20th-century planners, zoning today has little to do with managing traditional externalities and works largely untethered from any guiding comprehensive plan.”

Yessiree. In Oneida County’s case, the social engineers in the kitchen can’t see the shoreland through the concoctions of senseless rules and regulations. They are always cooking something up, but they are spoiling the Northwoods dish for almost everybody.

Maybe we should require that they get bonded.