The captain’s chair at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) remains empty a year after former DNR secretary Adam Payne gave 10 days notice before retiring on November 1, 2023.
Payne served only 10 months after accepting the nomination of Governor Tony Evers on December 27, 2022. In his October 20, 2023 resignation letter, he made no mention of job dissatisfaction or age- or health-related issues. He was 55 years venerable when he accepted this job.
Payne’s letter simply said that his top position at the DNR helped him realize that he needed to spend more time with his aging parents and aid with his wife’s care. He also said he wanted to spend more time with his four teenage grandchildren and focus more on his own health.
Meanwhile, Evers has said little about the government vacancy, even though the DNR is Wisconsin’s most observable and publicly engaged agency. Whether you hunt, fish, fish, camp, kayak, breathe the air, drink the water, love wolves, or spread manure, you will pay fees, complain about DNR data, and try to follow or avoid countless rules and regulations.
When asked about the cabinet vacancy in April, Evers blamed the GOP majority in the state Senate. He basically said it’s arduous to fill such positions when Republican senators ignore his nominees for months or even years and, after exhausting all reasonable delaying tactics, reject them out of spite.
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Asked again in overdue May whether he was closer to appointing a fresh DNR chief, Evers replied that he “wished it would happen at this time.” When that moment passed, he said he would be content if it could be done “in the next few weeks.”
That was five months ago.
Apparently, Evers simply had an “idea” for the candidate.
Given the tiresome partisan atmosphere in the state, prudent people are cutting Evers some slack. After all, three days before Payne resigned, the state Senate took unprecedented action rejection of four Evers nominations Natural Resources Board (NRB).
Let’s explain “unprecedented.” In 1967, Republican Governor Warren Knowles directed a group called the Kellett Commission to develop a system for setting natural resources policy for Wisconsin. The commissioners created the Department of Natural Resources from the venerable Wisconsin Department of Conservation and appointed an unpaid board of seven citizens to set policy for the fresh DNR agency.
This gave the governor the power to appoint NRB members for staggered six-year terms. But the NRB, not the governor, hired and fired the DNR secretary.
In the 56 years since the NRB was created, the Senate has rejected only one of at least 60 nominations made by governors of both parties. Another withdrew under pressure before the Senate could end his misery. In other words, the Senate, in one action last October, quadrupled the number of NRB rejections from the previous six decades.
Once appointed by the Governor, NRB members typically begin their terms awaiting consideration and confirmation by the Senate. Of the seven NRB members in office while Payne was secretary, the Senate only confirmed its chairman, Bill Smith, in 2019, vice chairman Marcy West in 2020 and Paul Buhr in October 2023 (Buhr resigned without explanation the week of from October 14, and Evers appointed New London farmer Rachel Bouressa to replace him on Friday, October 18. Buhr served approximately year).
Of the four Evers nominees rejected by the Senate committee on October 17, 2023, Sharon Adams has already served 2.5 years without a Senate hearing. Another, Sandra Dee Naas, served nearly a year without a hearing after her predecessor, Fred Prehn, refused – as required by law – to resign for 19 months from his term, which expired because his replacement had not been approved by the Senate. The other two rejects, Dylan Jennings and Jim Vanden Brook, served just over five months without hearings after being nominated on May 9, 2023.
Evers must have anticipated these four Senate rejections, and on the same day he replaced them with Todd Ambs, Robin Schmidt, Patty Schachtner and Douglas Cox. Four months later, the Senate rejected Ambs but accepted Cox, Schmidt and Schachtner. Evers immediately appointed Deb Dassow to replace Ambs. Three weeks later, the Legislature went into recess and would not reconvene until January 6, 2025, leaving Dassow in office pending a hearing – as did the newly appointed Bouressa.
While Evers thwarted the Senate’s rejection with five immediate NRB replacements last year, he has not demonstrated an equally urgent need to replace Payne, who was never given a confirmation hearing by the Senate. Former NRB members and retired DNR administrators have speculated privately that Evers would wait until the Legislature’s recess this March to appoint a fresh secretary, knowing the Senate wouldn’t be able to do anything until January.
So much for this idea. Seven months have passed since the Senate last worked. Asked last week about Evers’ plans to fill the position, his communications director, Britt Cudaback, emailed a response:
“Gub. Evers works diligently to find the best candidates for each position… and continues to work seriously on recruiting and interviewing a fresh secretary (DNR).
Cudaback accused the Senate of complicating the task, writing: “Finding a suitable, talented and well-qualified person who is willing to leave his current employment for a full-time position in the public service is arduous in itself, but finding someone willing to take on a fresh position a position in which they can perform exceptionally well at their job and yet be suddenly fired solely due to negligible, partisan politics continues to make this search particularly arduous.”
Everything is true, but also obvious and superficial. Are we to believe that the governor cannot find a former DNR secretary, a former NRB member, or a high-ranking retired DNR deputy director or legislator with environmental credentials to fill the void, no matter how ephemeral?
Worse still, successive self-sacrificing DNR secretaries would remind our petty, partisan, snooty senators that Evers can summon talent to plug any leak, plug any hole, or fill any void they punch in his hull.
Evers’ inaction is confirmed by the insanity of Gov. Tommy Thompson’s 1995 state budget. That’s when Thompson made the DNR secretary part of the governor’s cabinet, stripping the NRB of the power to hire and fire the secretary. These moves echo the lessons of history that the Kellett Commission heeded in 1967, when it created the DNR and its citizen-led management board to insulate the agency from politics.
Thompson’s mistake could have been corrected by any governor who has served since then. Former Gov. Jim Doyle promised – twice – to transfer the responsibility for hiring the DNR secretary back to the NRB, but he never followed through on that promise. Hell, even Evers could make a move like that. Instead, no one has led the agency since Payne resigned.
The political dangers were well known 60 years ago, but they are even more sedate now, after 12 years of computer-assisted elections that have spawned toxic partisanship that has stalled the Legislature and the governor.
In the face of PFAS contamination, deteriorating state parks, fecal-contaminated drinking water, ever-spreading chronic wasting disease, and a rapidly escalating financial crisis as participation in hunting, fishing, and trapping declines, we need more action and fewer excuses from the governor.
Contact Patrick Durkin at patrickdurkin56@gmail.
