The Waupaca County Planning and Zoning Committee listened to 5 1/2 hours of testimony on Wednesday, July 12th on the proposed sand mine in the Township of Scandinavia and decided to table a decision on the permit application for at least another month.

The board will reconvene in a private session in early August to go over all the facts and legal applications and will announce a decision after that. The board has 60 days to make a decision and announce it to the public, so it could be September before this permit application is decided.

Staffers for the Planning and Zoning Committee read all 111 pages that was in its packet of information, which included Faulks Bros.’ permit application, the Township of Scandinavia’s decision to deny the permit, the conditional uses the Township recommended if the permit is allowed, maps of the premises and other area sand mines, and more. The board also heard a LOT of testimony from people present at the meeting or from people who sent in email letters to be read, but chose not to ask a lot of questions. Mark Weinreis of Faulks Bros. read most of their application word-for-word and after that there were no questions from the board. Chairman Jim Nygaard called the packet “very thorough.”

The board also never asked any questions of Township of Scandinavia Chairman Gary Marx, who authored the 61-page Recommendation Form denying the permit. The County placed the three questions on the Recommendation Form that asked if the permit was in compliance with three areas of the Township’s Comprehensive Plan and the Town Board answered NO on each question before denying the permit. Again, it was Waupaca County that provided that form and came up with the criteria on the Recommendation Form. The entire 61-page report was read into the record, but Marx was not asked to speak. Nygaard even asked that the conditional uses developed by the Township be read into the record TWICE, but he still never asked Marx a question.

Unbeknownst to anyone at the meeting, an 18-page “staffers’ recommendation” report was included in the County Board’s packet. According to Ryan Brown, Director of the Waupaca County Planning and Zoning Department, his staff sent the staffers’ recommendation to the board on July 6th, a full six days BEFORE the public meeting. He said they wanted the County Planning and Zoning Board to review the recommendation before the meeting. The recommendation from Brown and Zoning Administrator Jason Snyder was to grant the CUP to Faulks Bros and to override the Township’s recommendation of denying the permit. The staffers’ recommendation report became available to the public the next day, Thursday, July 13th, when Brown uploaded the packet to the Waupaca County Planning and Zoning Committee’s website. That’s where we found it.

The staffers’ recommendation to approve the CUP was never revealed to those in attendance and in fact Snyder told people that the board would not read any letters or look into the facts until the July 12th meeting. That is why everything was read into the record and recorded for the Board. But somehow, the recommendation to approve the CUP — which is a 360 degree decision from the Township of Scandinavia’s decision to deny the permit — was given to the five board members six days BEFORE the public meeting to “review.” Not only was the recommendation listed among these 18 pages, but 28 recommendations were included for Faulks Bros. to follow AFTER the permit is granted. All that was missing was the rubber stamp of approval from the five board members.

This staffers’ recommendation was done before anyone spoke at the public meeting or anyone heard the testimonials from the attendees. Five people spoke during the open forum in support of the sand mine: Joe Opperman and Ali Johnson of the Iola Car Show, and three Faulks Bros. employees. Not a single non-employee of those two companies spoke or wrote a testimonial in favor of the sand mine.

Eight people opposing the sand mine permit spoke at the meeting, but they were limited to three minutes each and were even cut off from speaking at the three minute mark by Brown. Thirty-seven other letters from an array of citizens who were against the sand mine permit were read into the record, and trust me, all of them went more than three minutes!

Those letters included support letters against the sand mine permit from the Village of Ogdensburg Board and from the St. Lawrence Township board. Both asked the County to honor the Township of Scandinavia’s decision to deny the permit.

The Township of Scandinavia Board unanimously denied the sand mine permit on May 10th, one week after the Township of Scandinavia Planning and Zoning Committee unanimously denied the permit. But the county Planning and Zoning Committee has the final say on this permit. The County board has yet to meet as a group to discuss the permit application and Nygaard admitted that they have a lot of information to go over before their early August meeting. But it’s disappointing that the public wasn’t allowed to have the staffers’ recommendation entered into the public record at the same time as the other vital information, since it was part of the board’s packet. Will that recommendation have an influence on how the board votes, and if so, why did they get the recommendation six days BEFORE they heard from the applicants or the public?

The County Board is hired to be the policy makers, but in this case it looks like the staffers are trying to help with this decision. The recommendation seems to say that the county ordinances trump the local Comprehensive Plan, which would be an unprecedented position and would send shockwaves throughout the state. That would mean that every local Comprehensive Plan is meaningless and every county can tell the municipality what to do with a sand mine, even though their elected officials followed their Comprehensive Plan. And the staffers’ recommendation seemed to state that Faulks’ Bros. was in compliance with county ordinances when even that can be questioned.

Nygaard stated that no new information can be included once the meeting concluded and so the board now has a 159-page packet in front of them and testimonials from 50 citizens. Oh, and they have a staffers’ recommendation to approve the CUP and completely ignore the Township’s decision to deny the permit. We will find out within the next 60 days how influential that recommendation form was in this decision. Stay tuned.

Click the button below to view the packet. You can find the staffers’ recommendation form on pages 111-128 (conclusion starts on page 120).