The Polarizing Express
DNR sued by advocates of a nonmotorized Amery to Dresser Trail
by Buz Swerkstrom Amidst winter's white, Paul Roelandt and other landowners along an abandoned rail corridor between Amery and Dresser had visions of green. The residents hoped for a greenway on the right-of-way, with a nonmotorized recreational trail at its center.
"Those of us that live along the trail, and those of us who are interested in providing recreational opportunities throughout the county, see this as a very good opportunity to do something a little different in the county," said Roelandt, a National Park Service employee who is now superintendent of the Cedar Breaks National Monument in Utah, in an interview in late January 2001.
Two weeks later, approximately 100 people turned out for a public hearing at the Osceola
Town Hall. The issue at hand was whether the township should change its comprehensive plan to accommodate development of a recreational trail for motorized and/or nonmotorized use. With passionate proponents on both sides eager to argue their points, the 90-minute hearing at times was hot enough to ignite tinder.
A railroad company still owned the right-of-way and already battle lines were drawn and the verbal combatants were firing rhetorical volleys.
If possible, the division
between silent sports enthusiasts and motorheads only deepened after the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources acquired the corridor property with stewardship funds in late 2003 with the understanding that Polk County would develop, operate and maintain a recreational trail and decide what uses to allow. At a string of meetings and public hearings between March of last year and January of this year the two factions clashed like feuding families, with the core issue being whether or not
ATVs would be allowed on the trail year-round.
During debate at the Polk County Board of Supervisors' January meeting, the chairman of the board's recreation committee, Bill Johnson, attributed the polarized atmosphere to the DNR. The state agency "dumped it on Polk County" rather than deal with the use issue itself, Johnson complained.
At that meeting, the county board voted 11-10, with two supervisors absent, to approve a master plan for the Amery to Dresser
Recreational Trail that calls for a multi-use dual surface trail parallel trails, if you will with ATV'ers allowed to use one of the trail treads all four seasons of the year.
Few people, if any, expected that to be the end of the story. And indeed it wasn't. The Friends of the Lincoln-Osceola-Garfield Greenway (LOG) citizens group, organized by Paul Roelandt and now headed by Brook Waalen, continues to pursue development of a nonmotorized trail. Its members still hope to reverse the
tide by changing the hearts and minds of decision makers.
Waalen continues to try to sway public sentiment and persuade officials that the county will pay a high price for maintenance, repair and enforcement of a recreational trail if ATVs are free to ride it very day of the year. (The western end of the trail property, by the way, is not in Dresser, but a couple of miles to the southeast, near Lotus Lake.)
His group has taken the legal track as well. LOG, another citizens'
group and a property owner filed a lawsuit on April 15 against the DNR in Polk County Circuit Court over its decisions concerning the trail. The plaintiffs include Richard Roos, a fifth generation farmer, and the Lotus Lake Association. The lawsuit was filed by attorney Glenn M. Stoddard of the Garvey & Stoddard law firm in Madison and another firm in Minneapolis.
The DNR, Stoddard said in a press release, "has apparently fallen all-over itself to allow this trail to be opened
for use by motorized vehicles without doing the required environmental review, and without any legal authority to allow motorized vehicles to be used on a designated state trail."
According to Stoddard, the DNR will have 20 days to file a response. Stoddard said it is unclear at this time how soon the case will be heard by the court. A response from the county or DNR could not be obtained by press time.
As of early April, DNR officials also had not responded to a letter
sent by the LOG Greenway group, the Lotus Lake Association and the city of Amery in early March requesting a thorough evaluation of environmental, cultural and historic resources within the corridor, which is 100 feet wide for most of its 13.5-mile length.
Polk County and the DNR finalized a lease agreement March 15.
After the DNR purchased the right-of-way, Polk County's first action was to create a 13-member Amery to Dresser trail committee charged with making trail use
recommendations. The committee consisted of township and city of Amery representatives, adjacent landowners and two members of the property committee. The committee, all of whose meetings were open to the public, decided early on to make trail-use decisions by consensus rather than by a majority vote.
Hundreds of people attended public hearings at the Amery and Osceola schools in late April, with group representatives and individuals making arguments for a total of some nine hours.
While the debate involved a lot of issues, what rose to the top was the insistence by snowmobile and ATV owners on access to the publicly owned trail. Their forces turned out in greater number at the public hearings. Silent sports enthusiasts, meanwhile, pointed out that ATVs are incompatible with such activities as hiking, bicycling and bird watching and that most adjacent landowners want a nonmotorized trail during the spring, summer and autumn.
"If you allow ATVs on this
trail in the summertime, multi-use is a misnomer because hikers and bicyclists will not use it," Gloria Nelson said at one trail committee meeting.
"From my experience, if motorized recreation traffic is permitted on the trail, then that usually becomes the 'primary' use," the DNR's Tim Miller admitted in an e-mail message to Waalen. "There is usually hiking, biking and equestrian activities on the trail, but they tend to be more localized, meaning near their
residences and/or near centers of population."
Miller has said that the level of opposition expressed to ATVs on the Amery to Dresser Trail is the most intense he has seen for any trail in his region.
The LOG group, which has more than 200 members, secured more than $20,000 in pledges for a community greenway, and explained that the money could be used to leverage other resources, such as federal TEA-21 grants for alternative transportation projects.
The ATV forces
were bolstered by the presence at most meetings by Al Hogen, director of operations for Polaris Industries in Osceola and St. Croix Falls. Polaris, which manufactures both snowmobiles and ATVs, is Polk County's largest employer, with more than 800 people on its payroll. It stands to reason that the more ATV trails there are in the area, the more ATVs Polaris is likely to sell.
By late July, a consensus decision seemed as unreachable as a rainbow, so the committee dissolved without
deciding on a recommendation regarding ATV use. At the final meeting, seven members were insistent the trail be open to ATVs year-round, five wanted ATVs banned during the summer months and one committee member was absent.
That placed the burden of a decision on the five-member property committee. At its October meeting, the committee voted 3-2 to recommend that the full county board allow year-round ATV use.
The trail master plan then went to the DNR for review and came back
for property committee endorsement. To no one's surprise, the property committee voted in January to recommend county board approval by another 3-2 split.
With the meeting room packed with partisan onlookers, the county board voted 11-10 at its January meeting to adopt a master plan that will allow ATVs to operate year-round on one surface of a dual surface trail.
The plan is that hikers, bikers, cross-country skiers and snowshoers will use one trail tread, with snowmobilers,
ATV'ers and horseback riders on a separate tread. Topographical conditions will force all users to share a single path in a few spots. Waalen foresees problems with signage, trail width and overall compatibility.
Another provision added to the lease agreement requires the county to establish, post and enforce speed limits for motorized vehicles, in consultation with the DNR, for safety, dust and noise concerns.
The DNR, however, agreed to forego a provision at Polk County's
request that would have allowed the DNR to demand the county take corrective action for any trail damage done by violators and take legal action against the county if problems were not corrected within 70 days.
"If trails are being managed appropriately, why would (the county) not agree to that condition?" Waalen asked. "And why would the DNR sign over their rights to get retribution for damage done on their property? I don't get that."
Waalen showed members
of the property committee video footage of spring ATV damage along the Cattail Trail, a multi-use trail that heads eastward from Amery. Committee member Marlin Baillargeon said he took it as evidence that enforcement wasn't strong enough on that trail.
Amery mayor Harvey Stower, a former state representative and long-time supporter of environmental causes, said his community has wanted a summertime nonmotorized trail between Amery and Dresser since at least 1999. Despite claims that
ATV'ers spend money in towns adjacent to trails, Stower said the Cattail Trail has had "a minuscule effect on (Amery's) economy."
His city planned "to promote cycling heavily," he wrote in a letter to the county board, if the Amery To Dresser Trail was nonmotorized during the summer. "As a governmental entity," he wrote, "the City of Amery would not recommend nor mandate a trailhead in the middle of Osceola, St. Croix Falls, or any other municipality
or town which could not determine its usage. We would hope for the Golden Rule to be applied by others too."
One of the stated objectives in the trail master plan is "to respect the wishes and investments of landowners and communities through which the trail passes."
Amery city council member Kay Erickson, who served on the trail committee, said, "I feel I'm speaking for most of the homeowners along the trail who asked that it not be motorized. They were willing
to go along with snowmobiles in the winter, but some of them really pleaded that we keep it nonmotorized during the spring, summer and fall."
Stower, Erickson and council member Dave Meyers have said the DNR should cooperate with Amery on the trail issue after making the city jump through a lot of hoops with regard to a host of other issues.
One part of state law specifies that a Type II environmental assessment must be conducted after the DNR acquires property. But another
section of the statutes exempts the agency from that requirement if a master plan is prepared jointly with other local, state or federal agencies.
In an exchange of e-mail messages in early January, several DNR officials concluded that no further environmental analysis was required as part of the master plan prepared by Polk County.
Waalen believes that having master plans for trails completed by counties exempt from stringent environmental analysis regulations "kind of
sidesteps a lot of important planning that should be done on state properties."
Now Waalen is pushing for the master plan to require an engineering study be done before initial or long-term development of the trail occurs.
The tale of the Amery To Dresser Trail does not yet have a carved-in-stone ending. It may be getting dark for silent sports enthusiasts, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, but it's not completely dark yet.
Buz Swerkstrom is a freelance writer and part-time staff writer for the Osceola Sun.
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