this entire process is a poster child for how a bill should never become law. The bill was written by a West Virginia coal company and modified to please the company. It is a sad day when this company with no roots in Wisconsin can have the power to control Wisconsin Government in an effort to weaken environmental policy, mute the public voice, and shortchange Wisconsin taxpayers.
When it comes to our natural resources, Wisconsin citizens do not seek a Republican or a Democratic law. They seek a cooperative process that ends up with a responsible law. The passage of this bill represents a major departure from our State’s long tradition of creating environmental policy through bi-partisan consensus. Republicans like former Governor Warren Knowles and Democrats like former Governor Gaylord Nelson understood that our state’s resources were simply too important to be left to partisan politics.
While mining is both controversial and complicated, the public expects their officials to pursue responsible and reasonable solutions that assure balance between job creation and protection of our public interests and to do so in an open and transparent way. In this case, the majority party in the legislature failed to live up to those expectations and the result is a deeply flawed law that will do little more than create jobs for lawyers.
For example, the provision allowing the mining company to fill in navigable streams (up to 2 miles long) and a navigable pond (up 2 acres in size) and mitigate the fill elsewhere is a blatant violation of the Wisconsin Constitution’s Public Trust Doctrine, which states that the waters of the state belong to the people of the state. As soon as a permit is issued that includes filling in navigable water and replacing it somewhere else there will be a constitutional challenge to the new law which could delay consideration of the project for at least 5-7 years.
http://wcmcoop.com/2013/03/12/sen-jauch-responds-to-mining-bill/
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