John Gard: The golf tournament that almost wasn’t

By John Gard

Last week, the entire sports nation’s attention turned to Wisconsin as the PGA Championship came to Whistling Straits golf course in Haven, Wisconsin. It was the first time in 71 years that a men’s major championship was played in Wisconsin. The weather was beautiful. The crowds were huge. The tournament was thrilling. Golfers and fans alike raved about the course and our state. Conservative estimates pegged the economic windfall for Wisconsin from this event at $75 million.

And if it were up to some regulators in the state Department of Natural Resources none of it ever would have happened.

The golf course at Whistling Straits was the vision of Herbert V. Kohler Jr. In 1995, when Mr. Kohler bought the land that would one day host the world’s finest golfers, the 550 acre site was an abandoned wasteland full of garbage, toxic waste, and drug dealers making transfers between Chicago and Green Bay. Mr. Kohler spent his own money cleaning up this environmental disaster and designing a plan that would remake that long-neglected land into something beautiful for all of Wisconsin and the world to enjoy.

But then, in a scenario familiar to all too many Wisconsin landowners, the DNR stepped in.

The DNR claimed that a 7-acre, dry, one foot, dip in the property was a “wetland” and could not be disturbed. Mr. Kohler and golf course architect Pete Dye tried to work with the DNR to find a compromise solution, but they say they were met with “glazed eyes.”

In the end, the only reason the Whistling Straits was ever built was because Mr. Kohler turned to the U.S. Army Corps of engineers for a second opinion. The Army Corps noted that if the golf course was not built, wind and rain erosion would soon claim the disputed “wetland” and hundreds of other acres along the lakeside bluffs and wash them all into Lake Michigan.

Armed with these findings, Mr. Kohler was finally able to convince the DNR that saving this property from washing into the lake entirely was more valuable than saving an imperceptible “wetland” for a few more years. To make the decision even more of a no-brainer for the DNR, Messrs. Kohler and Dye also spent their own money to design a new 20-acre wetland further inland on the property. In the end, the course was built and Mr. Kohler transformed an eroding, contaminated dump into a stable, protected vista of unmatched natural beauty and enormous economic potential.

The Whistling Straits story had a happy ending. Sadly, most private citizens in Wisconsin do not have the resources to fight the DNR’s obstructions and see plans they have for their own property become a reality. Sadder still are the businesses looking to locate or expand jobs here in Wisconsin who get tied down in DNR’s tangle of red tape and finally just give up and take their jobs elsewhere.

Early this year, when the legislature passed the most comprehensive regulatory reforms in a generation, some critics scoffed that the bill was named “The Job Creation Act.” Others opposed the law’s requirements that the DNR and other state agencies work in a timely way, give folks a straight answer, and look for solutions instead of merely throwing up roadblocks. Even today, some of those same critics are trying to use the administrative rulemaking process to undo the reforms in the Job Creation Act.

One need look no further than Haven, Wisconsin to see how important this regulatory reform legislation is to job creation and how critical it is that the rules implementing the Job Creation Act accurately reflect those reform goals.

If the aggressive red tape dispensers at the DNR had had their way in 1995, there would have been no PGA Championship at Whistling Straits last week. There would have been none of the fawning national and international exposure for Wisconsin. There would have been none of the thousands of jobs associated with the golf course or the golf tournament. There would have been none of the $75 million in economic benefit to the taxpayers of Wisconsin. And, in an ironic twist, there would not even be the “wetland” the DNR wanted to use as the excuse for blocking the construction of the course – it would have long since been washed away into Lake Michigan.

That’s a golf lesson Wisconsin should never allow itself to forget.

–Gard is the speaker of the Wisconsin state Assembly.