Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 43. Sunrise is 7:23 and sunset is 4:25 for 9 hours 2 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 11 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1688, as part of the Glorious Revolution, King James II of England flees from England to Paris after being deposed in favor of his son-in-law and nephew, William of Orange and James II’s daughter Mary.
FREE WHITEWATER has published before about Wisconsin’s popular, but legislatively challenged, Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Grant program. See The Knowles Nelson Stewardship Fund Deserves Renewed Support (7.11.25), The Push to Save a Wisconsin Conservation Program (8.27.25), and Wisconsin Conservation Program’s Future Uncertain (12.10.25).
A question presents itself: if the Knowles-Nelson program is popular with the public, why does it lack legislative support? The answer is that a faction within the WISGOP legislative caucus relies on false claims about the program’s supposed impact in northern Wisconsin:
At a Wisconsin Assembly committee meeting in November to consider a proposal to extend the widely popular Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Grant program, Rep. Rob Swearingen (R-Rhinelander) complained that too much land in his district has been conserved through the program.
That sentiment has become increasingly common among a subset of Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature, most of them representing the far northern reaches of the state. The complaint they often make is that Knowles-Nelson has taken too much land off local property tax rolls, depriving already struggling local governments of important revenue.
Reliable data about the program show, in fact, that these claims are false:
The complaints that Knowles-Nelson has conserved too much Northwoods land may prove fatal to the program in a Legislature that has been unable to find common ground on environmental issues.
But an analysis of public lands data shows that the Knowles-Nelson program plays a comparatively small role in Wisconsin’s conserved land portfolio. Despite the claims of critics, the program’s land purchases have been made in all corners of the state.
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Swearingen’s 34th district, which covers north central Wisconsin from Rhinelander up to the Michigan border, has more land conserved by the DNR than any other district in the state — almost 335,000 acres, nearly 24% of the district. That includes land set aside for state parks, natural areas, forests and similar uses.
But only 4.7% of the district is conserved through Knowles-Nelson. Another 4.6% of his district is conserved by the federal government, and 8.6% is conserved county forest land.
Despite the claims that Knowles-Nelson has devoured valuable land across the state, no Assembly district has had more than 5.1% of its land conserved through the program, data shows. The average amount of Knowles-Nelson conserved land across all 99 Assembly districts is 1.13%.
See Henry Redman, Republicans attack ‘strawman’ Knowles-Nelson for land conservation (‘Public lands data shows stewardship program just a small portion of conserved land across the state’), Wisconsin Examiner, December 22, 2025.
It’s much easier to claim falsely that the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship program is responsible for too much conservation land, and kill that program, than to assess accurately which ways that land became conservation-protected, or to declare openly that you’d rather not have conservation at all.
The impulse to assert without proof, and hope (or assume) that you must be right, is a lazy approach1.
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- The Whitewater version of this is for a local landlord to walk up to the lectern at a council meeting and assert erroneously that “I think you have gone in a lot of your employment brackets where you’re hiring or you have staff that you are moving a lot of people up to the top part of the bracket.” See A Baseless Speculation About the City of Whitewater’s Salary Scale, Video @ 28:13, December 2, 2025 Common Council meeting. It’s so easy to speak those words into a microphone. It takes genuine effort, by contrast, to research first and speak only afterward. ↩︎
The world’s largest spider web discovered in a cave: