As regular readers know I have been a critic of the state Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund, which spends tens of millions of dollars every year to buy land to take it off the tax rolls.

Gov. James Doyle spent $86 million a year on buying land that, according to the Department of Natural Resources news releases I used to get at my former employer, is restricted from use by those paying for it to “low-impact recreational activities.” In other words, your tax dollars have been paying for decades for activities you can’t partake in — sometimes fishing, often hunting, and never anything that involved internal combustion engines — unless the DNR approves.

In part because of Stewardship Fund purchases, units of government owned, the last time I checked (and I’m sure since then the percentage hasn’t decreased), 16 percent of all the land in Wisconsin. In some counties that number is far greater — 36 percent in the Grant County Town of Millville, for instance, which means that all land-related government services are paid for by 64 percent of land-owners.

Finally Republicans are doing something to at least stop more state land-gobbling in the future. The Daily Reporter reports:

Two Republican legislators are looking to restrict state land purchases beyond the limits that Gov. Scott Walker has proposed, circulating a bill that would allow local government officials to veto stewardship acquisition deals.

Reps. Joe Sanfelippo and David Craig’s bill would bar the Department of Natural Resources from making payments to local leaders to compensate them for property taxes lost on land that enters stewardship after June 30. The locals would be allowed to veto any stewardship purchase. Without the compensation payments, land buys would look much less attractive to local officials.

Sanfelippo, R-New Berlin, said he believes the government has taken too much land out of private hands and the acquisitions are too costly. The bill gives the locals more control, he said.

“My personal opinion is I think we own enough land,” he said. “(The bill) just brings more local control into the process. They’re no longer forced to have land in this program.”

Kevin Binversie adds:

This bill would be in addition to Gov. Walker’s budget proposal of a purchasing moratorium on the stewardship program until 2028. It faces an uncertain future in the legislature since continued maintenance of stewardship funds was part of a legislative plan unveiled by Assembly Republican leadership last October.

Until a cut the MacIver Institute termed “modest” in the 2013-15 budget, the state was projected to spend more than $91 million in debt service on Stewardship Fund purchases in 2014 and 2015. That’s each year. That is as insane as spending eight digits every year to write checks to take land off the tax rolls.

Nearly every time I write about the Stewardship Fund I am attacked by some lefty environmentalist (but I repeat myself) who accuses me of not thinking about future generations, or being wasteful or greedy or selfish, or something else. At no time have any of these disciples of Gaylord Nelson ever proposed funding Stewardship Fund purchases that would take money out of their own pockets — for instance, an excise tax on the products used for those “low-impact recreational activities,” such as bicycles or canoes. They don’t want you to use what they think is their land, but they want you to pay for it.

Another critic accused me of not caring about one of the state’s big business three, tourism. We are to believe that before the DNR and the Department of Tourism came into existence, and before the state started gobbling up land like Pac Man, no one was smart enough to figure out that Lake Michigan, Lake Superior, the Wisconsin River, the Mississippi River, the Driftless Area, the forested Great White North and most other areas of this state were worth driving to see.

Simply put: Buying land with no possible return should not be a core function of government. At what level is government land ownership enough?