Don't Drink The Water in Manitowoc County

It is not often that I agree with County Executive Bob Zeigelbauer

so when that happens it is worth of note. Bob has placed an administrative block on supervisor Larry Bonde's Conservation Committee's proposal to repeal the county regulatory process requiring large dairies to file manure management plans and obtain the consent of their landlords themselves not the government. Bob remembers well the catastrophes that occurred prior to the creating of this rule. He and former exec Dan Fischer worked together to craft this. 

 These ever expanding farms had exceeded the capacity of their storage facilities land compensating by overspreading and winter spreading that resulted in private wells being contaminated sometimes over night. This landmark legislation required these mostly corporate entities to ensure that they had both the storage and disposal capacity to avoid those causal practices. 

Martel wants to repeal this!

 According to Ziegelbauer last year Bonde introduced the repeal saying that it was redundant with State requirements. Well, not really. The difference being that the companies were required to obtain the signatures of all of their land owners in order to pass muster. The State regs just pass it off to the local Ag agency. Only that agency is now reeling from Trump's DOGE cuts and does not even have the resources to help me design a duck wallow on my farm much less handle that responsibility as well. With some thirty CAFOs with more coming and potentially hundreds of land owners involved foisting it off on them would seem a bit of a reach right now. In fact the companies think so for their own reasons which is why they want to be rid of it. 

 

According to Ziegelbauer last May  no one even showed up to testify at the hearing and the vote was unanimously against the repeal. Now in July, some twenty five showed up with most in favor. Something changed. Comitte chair Larry Bonde claims to be a conservationist. That does not seem to pass the scoff test. Yes, he is on the Conservation Committee, the Deer Committee, a member of Fish and Game and the State Conservation Congress. But at the same time his day job is a service whose clients are the vary livestock operations pushing for this. That's a conflict of interest. 

 Moreover, it's a contradiction in terms. Bonde is at best a sportsman who seems mostly interested in preserving his right to shoot things now including sandhill cranes. Despite this regulation stopping the more catastrophic manure spills so called non-point pollution from field run off has caused the Manitowoc River and all of its tributaries have now been declared as impaired waters, unfit for most fish and lagely unfit to eat. Yet we hear nothing from from conservationist Bonde on that. 

 This is your water whether you fish in it, drink it, wash with it or swim in it Bob's administrative block is only good until he leaves office on April 20th. After that it will be up to incoming and unopposed exec Tyler Martel to maintain that. Tell him and all of your supervisors that this is a bad idea. Protect yourself not the special interests.

Strange Times in Manitowoc County

 

T

Official Manitowoc Co. photo

hese are strange times in Manitowoc County. After some twenty years of Bob Ziegelbaur we are about to receive our first ever un-elected county executive. Current county board chair Tyler Martel was the only candidate to file so he is by default the winner. Tyler brings with him a river of contradictions.

He is what F. Scott Fitzgerald called “a cracked plate [...] fit only for display,”explaining that it was not possible to function while holding two opposing ideas in your head.

With no background in business or public policy Martel has been running for office for a long time, winning some losing others while spouting TEA party jibbrish. Opportunistic, he won his current seat by attacking then supervisor Brunner as a tax and spend Liberal when he supported a County sales tax. But now faced with Ziegelbaur;s six million dollar budget hole decided its a pretty good idea and pretends that a new tax is not really a tax increase. A public school teacher, he supported Act 10 which raided State revenue sharing yet collects school vouchers for his adopted children in private school.

A gay married Trump Republican he is the darling of the local GOP. He gives them political cover for their homophobia and sexual smears on their opponents. His most ardent supporters on the board would under any other circumstances call him a DEI hire and would if they could invalidate his marriage, take his kids away and send him off to conversion therapy. He supported the now removed MPSD school board members whose tenure was marked by obsession with rainbow art and denying school lunch aid citing the federal deficit.

At the other end of this dysphoria is the Manitowoc Democratic party. Once able to fill the old Club Bil-Mar with its membership it is a shell of its former self. Names like Fischer, Aulik, Duchow, Baumgart, Bolle and Holsbach are distant memories. Leadership has aged out or simply left. More recent leaders have had no ties to this State much less Manitowoc. They've had no public image, no family connections, don't engage publicly and dont understand their jobs. State leadership has been AWOL in discipline and recruitment choosing instead to dump something north of $20,000/yr in a mostly unused headquarters.

What can we expect from this strange young man? Who knows? These are strange times. Manitowoc at least deserved a choice..

An earlier version published in the VAlders Journal appears to have gotten under Tyler's skin