(The Center Square) – A group of Wisconsin Democrats are pushing to fund the state’s Knowles-Nelson Stewardship public land purchasing program with $72 million each year for the next six years while creating a new board to oversee future land purchases.
The program has become the subject of a power struggle between Gov. Tony Evers and legislative Republicans over who should oversee what is purchased and how the program’s funds are spent.
No new funding for the program was authorized in the recent two-year state budget and funding for the program is set to end in July 2026.
Evers had put $100 million for the program in his initial budget proposal while a pair of Republican lawmakers proposed funding for the program in a separate bill in June.
That proposal would include a requirement that all future land purchases over $1 million go into an annual proposal that must be approved by the full Legislature, something that Sen. Jodi Habush Sinykin, D-Whitefish Bay, said would “not prove workable in most circumstances” and would create “partisan gridlock.”
Habush Sinykin said that the Democratic proposal is funded between Evers’ $100 million proposal and $28.5 million in the Republican proposal.
Democrats on Tuesday called their proposal the start of a conversation and not a finished product.
“We hope our colleagues across the aisle will see this important gesture, said Rep. Vincent Miresse, D-Stevens Point.
Republicans have pushed back on the program, saying that too much land has been purchased while not enough maintenance has been done on current public-owned land and parks.
The program has acquired 646,000 acres of land in the state, according to Badger Institute, with three-fourths of the land in northern counties, including 60,000 acres in Oneida County and 16% of all land in Iron County.
Overall, the state holds about 5.9 million acres, one-sixth of the state, in undeveloped government-owned land.
“You live in this beautiful area of the state,” Senate President Mary Felzkowski, R-Tomahawk, told Badger Institute. “Well, yeah, we do, but we still need to pave our roads. We still need to educate our children.”
The Knowles-Nelson team put out a statement on the process, saying that it was concerned about the Republican proposal for full Legislature approvals of purchases.
“This standalone legislation has some positive elements—it provides stable funding for land trusts and local governments, offers four-year planning certainty, and creates new grants to help manage already-protected lands,” the team said. “However, it also includes concerning provisions that could make it harder to protect new land by always prioritizing management over acquisition. The proposed oversight process for major purchases lacks clear timelines or guarantees that projects will even get a vote.”
Instead, the team said that it prefers a process with a bipartisan advisory board to approve purchases.
