What Is The Substantial Evidence Of Harm? Reduced Property Values

We haven’t talked about Wisconsin Act 67 yet, but Ryan Brown of the Waupaca County Zoning Commission certainly did at the Township of Scandinavia meeting. He basically told the audience that Act 67 supersedes The Township’s Comprehensive Plan and unless the public could show “substantial evidence” that harm would be done then the application permit would have to be allowed.

Many people in the audience focused on dust and the effects of dust as “substantial evidence” of harm, but that one is tough to prove. In fact, people involved with the sand mine believe strongly that dust and its effects won’t have any harm on neighboring residents and we have no proof at this point that it will, even though there is a lot of literature about the potential effects.

I’m not going there. 

Instead, I think we have a very good chance to prove “substantial evidence” of harm when it comes to our property values. Will the Township of Scandinavia and/or the Village of Iola allow this permit to go through if it KNOWS FOR SURE that property values will go down? Would they allow this permit to go through knowing that property values will go down by millions of dollars? 

Let’s hope not. But first we have to prove that property values will go down and we are in the process of seeing how we can hire an independent assessor to do for us what was done in Packwaukee, Wisconsin earlier this year. Oh, and by the way, the Packwaukee mine was recently defeated. 

Here’s the deal: There was a recent Forensic Assessment that Marquette County had completed for a sand and gravel mining site in Packwaukee, WI in Marquette County.  That’s only 75 miles from here, so this information is very important. This assessment was conducted in March of 2022 by a forensic assessor in Neenah, so it’s extremely recent. The appraiser evaluated the values of homes within a quarter mile of the sand mine, a half mile of the sand mine and a mile from the sand mine and all home values went down. Here you can see the radius of the proposed Township of Scandinavia sand mine and the radius from the Village of Iola sand mine and how wide it encompasses our area of homes and properties. We should request a similar assessment by Waupaca County and it’s extremely likely that we’d see the same results in Scandinavia and Iola.

This slide shows the number of properties within a mile of the proposed Iola Car Show sand mine. While this is not considered a residential area, you can see that there are 43 properties within ¼ mile of the sand mine, again valued at over $6 million just based on their Assessed Fair Market Value in 2021, and there are 177 other properties within a mile, valued at another $27 million. We are showing you an average loss percentage of each of these homes in that area with the arrival of the sand mine and it comes out to over $3.5 million. 

While the Iola Car Show will benefit financially from this sand mine to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars per year and likely hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next 10+ years, hundreds of local homeowners will lose even more money in property values right away. This is not a Zero Sum Game. More people will be hurt by this sand mine than will benefit from this sand mine. And us homeowners and residents are the ones losing in this equation.

We are requesting Waupaca County to do what Marquette County did and hire an independent assessor to determine loss of property values due to this proposed sand mine. Faulks Bros. is on record as saying there won’t be a loss of property values and there are instances that they’ve seen where property values go up over time around a sand mine. We’re not buying it with the location of this sand mine. Let’s all wait until we get this independent assessment of the mine’s impact on area home values before anyone does anything. 

The facts will bear out “substantial evidence” of harm and we are convinced that even if the law allows this permit to be allowed, common sense will prevail. Who could allow this sand mine to go through if our property values go down as much as they did in Marquette County? It would be inconceivable to approve such a project.

To read the Wisconsin Act 67 click here: https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/2017/related/acts/67