A riverway runs through it

Thirty years ago government worked and the lower Wisconsin was protected

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In the summer of 1959, Bud Jordahl set his canoe in the Wisconsin River somewhere below the dam at Prairie du Sac and dipped his paddle into the water pushing toward Prairie du Chien roughly 90 miles away.

That was the start of three decades of an often bitter fight for the soul of the lower Wisconsin, but it culminated in landmark legislation protecting the riverway from development and assuring that anyone following in Jordahl’s wake would experience almost exactly what he did that summer 60 years ago.

What’s more remarkable is that the legislation creating the Lower Wisconsin Riverway was passed in 1989 by a Legislature controlled by Democrats who compromised with their Republican colleagues and stood together as the bill was signed into law by a Republican governor. And all of that amid some of the most polarized political rancor the state has ever seen, some of it bordering on violent.

The Wisconsin River has its headwaters in Lac Vieux Desert, a large lake straddling Wisconsin’s border with Michigan’s Upper Peninsula near Phelps. From there it flows south for more than 300 miles until it reaches Prairie du Sac, about 30 miles north of Madison, where it takes a sharp turn west and continues until it joins the Mississippi at Prairie du Chien.

Until it reaches Prairie du Sac, the Wisconsin is a hard-working river — 26 dams provide power for sawmills and cities. But south of that point it flows unimpeded, the longest stretch of free-flowing river in the Midwest, according to the state Department of Natural Resources.

It’s that specialness that Jordahl recognized as he paddled the river in 1959. Jordahl, who died in 2010, was an aide and confidant of Wisconsin Gov. and U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson and, later in his career, a highly regarded professor of urban and regional planning at UW-Madison.

One of his students was Spencer Black, who went on to work on the riverway project first for the Sierra Club and then as the riverway legislation’s lead author while serving as state representative from Madison’s west side. (I worked as an aide to Black from 1989 to 1993.)

Thirty years later, almost to the day that the legislation became law, Black, who retired from the Legislature in 2011 and is now a very fit 69, sits at a table in Arcadia Books in Spring Green along with Dale Schultz and Mark Cupp. Schultz, 66, was a Republican state representative and later a state senator from southwest Wisconsin. He left office in 2015 and has since bucked his party (but still considers himself a Republican) by advocating for bipartisanship generally and for a nonpartisan redistricting process. Cupp, now 59, was Schultz’s aide in the Assembly and later went to work for the late state Sen. Dick Kreul. For the last 30 years he has been the Lower Wisconsin Riverway Board’s first and only executive director.

They reminisce about the long fight to protect the riverway, what it means today and how politics has changed in the three decades since.

Black was easily among the Legislature’s most liberal members while Schultz describes himself as maybe the most conservative when he first took office in 1983. “I arrived with a big chip on my shoulder, reflecting what was going on in my district,” he says.

What was going on was a farm crisis. Land values had plummeted from around $600 per acre to about half that. Farmers and residents of rural communities that depended on a healthy farm economy were scared and angry and the last thing they wanted was the government and urban environmentalists, like Black, telling them what they could do with their property.

“They were one step short of a riot,” Schultz says, of his constituents. He recalls a packed meeting in Spring Green in the mid-1980s when he told his audience that he felt they should work together with riverway advocates to try to improve the legislation but not to kill it. “I was surprised that I got out of there alive,” he says.

In 1968, Congress passed the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, proposed by Sen. Nelson and written with the help of both Jordahl and Fred Madison, one of Nelson’s aides. Initially there were no wild and scenic rivers designated east of the Mississippi. U.S. Rep. Robert Kastenmeier then called for a study of the lower Wisconsin to determine if it qualified under the act. The study was carried out by the Interior Department and by 1977 the federal agencies agreed that the lower Wisconsin qualified for designation. 

But many property owners along the river feared that the designation would come with lots of onerous regulations and restrictions. The initial opposition was fierce.

Two hearings were held, one in Spring Green and the other Prairie du Chien, and there was overwhelming opposition. “I remember driving to the Spring Green High School with Bud,” Black recalls. “We got there and the parking lot was packed. It turned out there was a dance or something, but there were still plenty of people who showed up for our hearing.” The reaction was hostile.

The idea was shelved until 1983, when the Wisconsin DNR established a Citizens Advisory Committee to revisit the possibility of a wild river’s designation. A draft environmental impact study followed the next year. The committee and the study prompted a plethora of public meetings.

As Schultz’s aide in his first term, a young Mark Cupp attended many of those meetings on his behalf. “There was a lot of very harsh rhetoric,” Cupp says now. Schultz and Black laugh heartily. “That’s an understatement!” they say in unison.

“It didn’t get dumped in my lap [when he took office in 1983], it was more like a hurricane blowing in,” Schultz recalls. “The farmers thought they had done a good job of taking care of it — and they had — otherwise people wouldn’t even be here to try to protect it. So it was insulting to them.”

It didn’t help that the committee was dominated by people who didn’t live in the river valley. Cupp says that locals were calling committee members “urban maggots.” “One of the [committee] members responded by calling the local opponents ‘club wielding zealots,’” Cupp says. Things were getting even more tense. So, Kreul proposed a Local Officials Advisory Committee.

“The hell of it was that the local officials came up with a plan that was tougher than what Spencer proposed,” Schultz says. “When that happened lights went on for me.”

Meanwhile, Black had risen fast in the Assembly to become chair of the Natural Resources Committee. To push things along he introduced a strong riverway protection bill that he knew had no chance of becoming law. “The newspapers at the time pointed out that it wasn’t so much a push as a shove,” Black says with a laugh.

But then he did something unexpected. He took his strong bill out to the valley for public hearings and allowed people to vent at him. He willingly took the heat. That earned Schultz’s respect. “Spencer could have shoved it down our throats, but he didn’t. He worked with us. What he did to include local officials and local people earned an enormous amount of goodwill.”

Black didn’t do that just because he was a nice guy. He was a political realist and Republican Tommy Thompson was governor. The new governor had upset Gov. Tony Earl in the 1986 election. Up until then Thompson had had a pugnacious reputation as Assembly minority leader. He was widely called “Dr. No.”

While Black could have passed his legislation through the Assembly and Senate, which were controlled by Democrats, he still had to get Thompson to sign it.

Black and Schultz agree that Thompson was key to making the law a success. “You have to give Tommy Thompson a lot of credit,” says Schultz. “Dr. No grew in that office because he would listen, and he had the capacity to form friendships.”

Oddly, he had a successful working relationship with Black. “The newspapers used to call me one of Tommy’s fiercest critics and I was,” recalls Black. “But the reality was that anytime I wanted to talk to him I could. And a certain percentage of the time I could convince him.” 

Thompson remembers it the same way. When I interview the former governor over the phone, I mention that Black speaks highly of him now. “And I speak highly of him,” Thompson responds. “We developed a way to work together. When we met in my office, he could not have been nicer.”

Thompson then adds mischievously, “Of course, he shed that once he left.”

But while Thompson gave Schultz and other conservatives leverage over the majority Democrats, he would not be “Dr. No” on the riverway. Schultz says that Thompson made it clear from the start that, while he would listen to all sides, he thought the basic idea of protecting the lower Wisconsin was a good idea and that he would sign legislation that was bipartisan.

“I knew I wanted to be a bipartisan governor,” Thompson says. “I had to be.”

And Thompson has his own stories of confronting the most adamant of riverway opponents, the Private Landowners of Wisconsin (PLOW). He says that he made it a point of visiting southwest Wisconsin frequently “because I wanted to show them that I wasn’t intimidated.”

“Every time I went there the PLOW people would show up and I would always make it a point to sit down and talk with them,” he says. “Sometimes I even brought them a pot of coffee.”

With Thompson’s support and Democrats and Republicans working together, compromise legislation was fashioned and passed as part of the 1989-1991 biennial state budget. Thompson signed it into law in August 1989. The riverway was then protected by the new Lower Wisconsin State Riverway Board, which oversaw new construction, utilities and forestry practices, among other things.

The 1989 state budget also created a Stewardship Fund, part of which was designated to purchase and protect land within the riverway. Today the state owns about half of the 95,000 acres in the riverway.

I asked Thompson and the group at Arcadia if this could happen today.

Thompson hesitates before saying, “It would take strong leadership. It would be tough because you’d start out with more hostility and more harshness.” Then, recalling how bitter the opposition was 30 years ago, he adds, “but the PLOW people were tough.”

Black, who went on to lead Bud Jordahl’s course after Jordahl retired, says that he teaches his students about the concept of “political sustainability,” a sister concept to environmental sustainability. He and Schultz agree that the long and arduous process of holding hundreds of meetings, listening to opponents, and recruiting new allies — in short, the crucible of compromise — forged political sustainability for the riverway legislation. There has never been a serious attempt to weaken, much less repeal, it.

But while Black acknowledges that strong disagreements can create stronger legislation, he’s less optimistic about today’s flavor of polarization. “We were hardly nonpartisan,” Black says. “But Dale never hesitated to come down and talk. We did talk. We’d have a beer. Sometimes we wouldn’t even talk about the bill. We’d talk hunting and fishing.”

Black and the others say that that kind of comity just isn’t possible today. Cupp, the former GOP staffer, says, “Today it’s difficult for a staff person to fraternize with the enemy. It’s discouraged” by legislative leadership. He recalls the time of the Lower Wisconsin compromise as one in which staffers from both parties played softball and went out drinking together after work. “It’s hard to hate somebody who’s on your softball team,” Cupp says.

All three men attribute the change to intense gerrymandering, which makes legislative districts competitive only among partisan zealots, and to the increased role of money in politics and control of that money by top legislative leaders. Schultz also blames the “Hastert Rule,” attributed to former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert and adhered to by many state legislative leaders around the country. The informal rule discourages bipartisanship by prohibiting any bill from even coming up for a vote unless it has enough votes to pass with majority party members alone.

“Politics was always a sharp-elbowed sport,” Schultz admits. “But there was a boundary that people lived within. We had shared values encompassed by Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Inside of those boundaries you could fight like hell. But now we don’t even have these shared values.”

Black agrees. “We used to fight between the 30- or 40-yard lines, but now it’s between the end zones and sometimes we’re not even in the stadium.”

On a perfect late August Saturday, Brenda Dobyns sits on a boulder at Ferry Bluff taking in the panorama. Dozens of canoes float 300 feet below, dark specks on the blue water, but the voices of the canoeists, drifting south in happy bunches, rise as if on the same updrafts that lift a hawk circling above the bluffs. We can hear their voices so clearly that we can almost make out the words, and while we can’t quite do that it’s clear enough that they’re not talking about work, worry or Donald Trump.

“They might stop for a cold beer,” says Dobyns, “but not on that sandbar I hope.” Dobyns gestures toward a long treeless sandbar, one of several in the river channel below. A native of Reedsburg where she works as an occupational therapist for the school district there, Dobyns is a river veteran. She explains that sandbars without trees might be undercut and that people can sink right through them even if they look solid from the water.

These days Dobyns is mostly a hiker, but she looks forward to getting back down on the river and introducing her college-aged kids to the wonders of seeing the river from the river.

She has watched the river corridor improve over the last 30 years. “You used to see more junky buildings and old farm equipment laying around,” she says. When I ask her about the entity called the Lower Wisconsin Riverway, she confesses that she doesn’t know much about it.

Maybe that’s as it should be. After all, we can’t expect the public to know the details of complex legislation currently in play, much less a law that was passed three decades ago. But they experience the results.

Those results don’t just include the pleasures of paddling or hiking in a corridor that doesn’t look much different from what Father Marquette experienced 400 years ago. The riverway law has been “absolutely” beneficial to the local economy, adds Schultz. He points to the Arcadia bookstore where we are meeting as an example of a business that thrives in part because of the riverway. As the owner of a nearby farm, Schultz adds that property values now exceed $3,500 an acre, 10 times what they were when opponents argued that riverway regulations would make their land all but worthless.

As we get to the end of our conversation Cupp turns philosophical. “We’re protecting the river for today, but really for future generations, maybe even down to the seventh generation, who will be paddling this river beneath these beautiful skies, see the eagle and the heron and the deer and the emerald bound shores and say ‘thank you.’”

Well, maybe. Or more likely they won’t know who to thank or they might not even know that there’s a reason to thank anyone. For those like Bud Jordahl, Fred Madison, Spencer Black, Dale Schultz, Mark Cupp and Tommy Thompson who labored and argued and compromised to make it happen, they might have to settle for protection so secure that it is taken for granted. Maybe that’s the best example of “political sustainability” that anyone can ask for.

Cupp has committed long passages from Father Marquette, August Derleth, Aldo Leopold and others to memory and he enjoys reciting them out loud. “Yet there remains the river,” Cupp begins, reciting a Leopold quote. “In a few spots hardly changed since Paul Bunyan’s day; at early dawn ... one can still hear it singing in the wilderness. Perhaps our grandsons, having never seen a river, will never miss the chance to set a canoe in singing waters.”

Sixty years ago, Bud Jordahl set his canoe in the waters of the lower Wisconsin. Those waters still sing because 30 years ago politics worked. Could it happen again?