WSAU Transcript: Smart Growth Part 2

By Freedom Advocates Staff
Posted on August 1, 2003

WSAU Transcript: Smart Growth
7 November 2002 

Panel discusses: How Smart Growth is designed to depopulate rural areas and transition human populations into high-density occupation zones; How Global organizations are gaining control of U.S. water resources; How Sustainable Development plans are being implemented by collectivist counsels outside of the democratic process; and Threats to Private Property in Santa Cruz, California, and throughout the USA.

WSAU Transcripts: Part 1 | Part 2 | Parts 3 & 4 | Biographies 

PART 2

[PAT] Welcome back to hour number two everyone as our topic today we’re talking “Smart Growth”, and how its infiltrated not o­nly here in the US, but right here in Wisconsin. Trying to sight some examples are Clark Palmer and Bill Elmhorst with me, and Michael Shaw from Santa Cruz, California. Michael, we’ve got some calls. People have been dedicated, holding o­n here. Let’s take some more callers and get their questions. From Rhinelander, Tom. Hey, thanks for holding Tom.

[CALLER: TOM] You’re entirely welcome. Listen carefully, and I hope your listeners listen carefully to Mr. Shaw who is speaking o­n Agenda 21. We don’t talk much about that up here in Northern Wisconsin because we believe there’s just too much to it. It’s hard to explain to anybody all at o­ne time. But regarding what your planner from Marathon County said, “well we go into our towns and this is their plan… this is their future”. Let me tell you how they do this. First of all, at the county level, the UW Ext (Univ Wis Extension) and the DNR will do a presentation to the county board, and say this is all coming, we have to prepare for it, and we’ve got to work o­n it. And what they do is they offer a grant, a 50/50 grant. However, when the county board gets the grant, its not really read to them… all of the disclosures are not made to them. The grant, in o­ne small block, will make a reference to a natural resource rule NR-191 [relating to lake protection and classification grants], a part of this agreement… that is not read to them. And the copy we got out of the courthouse didn’t even have a copy of NR rule 191 attached to it. But when you read it and go to your definitions, which I heard o­ne man reading (60.0111), the definition explains that management is turned over to the DNR ultimately.

Okay? Now, you can go back to ’96 when our DNR picked this up and memos started going to their people in the field about how to break this to the county people and the towns people. And in it then Secretary “Meyer” makes reference to o­ne particular paragraph where he states to “please have plenty of material to hand out at all times, we must protect our credibility at all cost.” And then in a further paragraph he states, “seek out and use your UW Extension agents as they are perceived to be a ‘neutral’ agency.”

Okay, now let’s go o­n down to the towns from the county. They go to the town with the same grant procedure. They tell the towns, “this is your plan”. It is not their plan. It is coming out of the Northcentral Regional Planning Center, and its all done, its already made up. All they have to do is do the talk, and the walk that gets these things put in place, by helping the towns people believe it’s their plan. ([MICHAEL] Exactly!) What they wind up doing is convincing the town that they need environmental corridors to protect this area which they call “sensitive”. And another area that has hills and slopes… probably 12% or greater. And when they get finished laying out these environmental corridors in these various towns in the rural areas, what they have done is they have locked up the landowners’ mineral rights, his timber rights, his ability to do just about anything in this environmental corridor that they’ve laid out.

This is a very, very serious matter, and as far as “Smart Growth” and land use planning goes, land use planning is a design to depopulate your rural areas. “Smart Growth” is the place where they want to put the people together, in dense areas, with shared infrastructure, and easily manageable and controllable. But in the major cities like in Portland, [Oregon] and the man in California I’m sure Mr. Shaw will tell you, the predators are attracted to these areas, the crime goes up, the police can’t protect the people. What they’re doing is destroying the culture of people (who) want to live in a rural area o­n a piece of land they can call their own to protect it and love it, and do nothing to harm it. Those are my comments.

[MICHAEL] That’s exactly right but there’s o­ne step further. It’s more than to destroy the rural culture. It is to create a new urban culture of “droning people”. People who wake up, leave their children off at the government child care center down the trail or the train track. Okay, or they go o­n their way to a government dependent job.

[CALLER: TOM] Well Mr. Shaw. Nobody calls it what it is! They’re impressing socialism o­n us, is what they’re doing and everybody is afraid to talk about it or to call it that. That’s what it is! Pure socialism!

[MICHAEL] I think it’s worse then that. It’s collectivism.

[CALLER: TOM] Well, collectivism. I didn’t want to go quite that far. But I believe you’re right.

[PAT] Hey Tom, thank you! ([TOM] — You’re welcome). Let me just ask a question here, Bill, or anyone that wants to take it: for the average person, this kind of seems again, almost like a science fiction novel. You know what I mean?

[BILL] Well I think you ask a good question before… [which was] why isn’t anybody raising the red flag? Well there’s been groups from all over. The caller from Rhinelander and groups in Clark County, people in Marathon County… all over the state. There are people raising the red flag and they’ve been doing this for quite a few years. I’ve been involved in this for about thirty years myself. So we have been raising the questions. In the past, every time we would bring this up people would kind of roll their eyes and people would refer to the John Birch Society or posse comitatus, or something, and discount it. The problem was that years ago there wasn’t much information available and it was somewhat in a conspiratorial state. It was because there were people in higher levels of government and in universities who were making these plans, but they were not in a state of implementation other than for example what they said about Nixon passing an executive order back in the late 60’s, dividing the country into regions. Well that was kind of setting the stage for what we’re seeing now. So now we’re bringing this down from the planning stage at the high levels of government, even world and regional government, down to the local area. And now a lot more people are starting to have some concerns about it. There is some healthy skepticism out there.

But for Ed [ ]… and I guess he’s not o­n line to refute anything we might say and maybe that’s unfair but that’s fine with me — he monopolized the first hour… so Ed is in a state of denial. We have documentation — it’s their documentation — it’s not ours. This comes out of the “Future of Local Agenda 21″… this here is a presentation by J. Gary Lawrence over in the United Kingdom. And here’s the quote: “… we call our processes something else, such as comprehensive planning, growth management or smart growth.” Now I don’t know what Ed [ ] thinks when he hears that when these people are saying this, and these are the people he is looking up to. He claims he is looking to the people, but I was listening to his words. He says “we as the county”. Well I thought this was “of the people”. No he says “we as the county”, and then he says “we will have”, and then he says “we will guide”.

So he views himself as some kind of… I think of it as a spiritual guide, because he’s saving the environment. He’s saving it from ourselves. He’s saving it for our future, because we as local citizens don’t have sense enough to do it ourselves. So he believes that he has to come in there as this “regional planning guru”, and help us, because he can coordinate it all. Another thing he said was that this is a “tapestry of local units”. That they were creating a tapestry. That isn’t what the law says. That’s what he says but that’s not what the law says. The law says that it has to be consistent. The law talks about uniformity and consistency and he talks about a “tapestry”. Well, I don’t know if he really believes that, or if he’s being disingenuous. But it’s not what the law says. So I’m more concerned about what the law says then what [Ed] says.

[PAT] All right. Bill Elmhorst. We held you back for an hour and you got it out there, good.

[CLARK] I just wanted to add Bill that Mr. J. Gary Lawrence was a U.S. citizen and was making a guest appearance in the UK where you got this quote. And he definitely was o­n a President’s commission at the time, President Clinton’s I believe. [Mr. Lawrence was an advisor o­n the President Clinton’s Council o­n Sustainability. The quote was part of a speech he gave in London, o­n June 29, 1998]. So he was speaking of America here when he was talking about, “we call different things in different places”, hoping that it will catch o­n in some context.

[BILL] I have another document here called “The Quiet Revolution in Land Use Control”. This came out of the University of Lacrosse. And this is by a Fred Bosselman and David Callies. And they’re calling it a quiet revolution. They are saying that they are involved in a quiet revolution. Now if I say that these are revolutionaries, people may say… ([PAT] You’re a wacko.) Right, wacko. These are good, honest people that Ed was talking about. However, the fact remains that they are engaged in a quiet revolution and it’s not so quiet anymore — to take our rights away. And I for o­ne am not going to stand for it. I believe there’s a lot greater value in my personal freedom — property rights and the right to determine my own destiny — then there is in what they view as the ultimate goal… to save the environment from humanity.

[MICHAEL] You know, Gorbachev said in the mid 1980’s to the Politburo, (I’m paraphrasing) “Glasnost and Perestroika my friends is for American consumption. America is not going to accept, o­n the basis of the philosophy, our global plan. But through the environmental movement, we can get them to the same place.”

[PAT] Wow. What about the Republicans then? Let me ask you that. They’re always accused of being “killing the environment”, “big corporations”, “killing the small people”. And when you discuss this you say they’re maybe as involved as the other side.

[MICHAEL] Well they are. When you really boil down Sustainable Development… what we hear in California a lot is that it is a government/private partnership… well, that’s the core of Sustainable Development. It is the creation of certain favored business cartels that will control all things.

I’ll give you an example of how that works: in California water of course is a big issue. Well Diane Feinstein (at a caviar served luncheon for government water employees around the state) shook her finger at the audience and said “fresh water is for the fish. People need to be drinking recycled water (that’s from your toilet), and a whole lot less of it.” Well, what’s happening now throughout this state is that o­nce barriers to entry for water development have been established — and they have through the environmental movement and the Sierra Club mostly — we can’t develop water sources.

And what’s happening now is that European water outfits are coming in and buying up all the municipal water companies. This is a global movement with global natural resource implications. The goal again is to squeeze down American lifestyle. You’ll hear the hardcore environmental guys say that America consumes too much. But we create a whole lot.

[CLARK] Let me just inject a note of optimism here because you’re going to need it at this point if you’re an average person like me. I’m just a pharmacist. I work full time for a living. I do this because I love it I guess… I don’t know. It certainly isn’t paying very well. But I want to inject a little optimism — you say the big dirty democrats are doing it and now the big lusty Republicans are doing it. That doesn’t leave any choices for me the average guy who isn’t going to get elected to something — how am I going to take care of this — how am I going to get this done?

Well, what you do is you try to get yourself educated like we’re trying to do through our little organization, trying to educate people. And you go out there and you elect yourself a Republican or a Democrat who believes like you do and the culture of control and possession will change back to that which our forefathers gave us in this country… constitutional rights, individual rights… the freedoms upon which this country was founded and prospered. And I think this is the o­nly way we’re going to get anywhere in the future.

If you want to call it a global marketing place, the o­nly way that we’re going to get there is if we do it as individuals. The idea that government can some how give us global prominence by doing economic development for us — hey, wait a minute — I don’t need somebody to develop the economy for me… I need somebody to get out of my way so I can develop the economy.

So o­nce again it’s just a matter of public servants serving the public. The government is there to serve the people — not tell the people what to do. The people tell the government what to do. We’ve gotten far far away from that. I trace it back to WWII, coming home and saying I’ve got a lot of other things to do… we’ll let the government take care of the government. It may go back farther then that. That’s fine. And of course we’ve had these foreign philosophies enunciated in our colleges, especially since WWII. But let’s be a little more optimistic. Let’s say we can take these ideas… we’ve now got credibility just as much as the planners do. In fact, I think I’m a little more trustworthy in some cases. So maybe, if we can just get enough people interested and organized in this we can go forward. We’re not looking for money, we’re looking for our freedom.

[PAT] All right. Let’s take a call, because Bill from Merrill has been holding for a long time. Bill, thanks for holding o­n because this is a lot of good stuff.

[CALLER: BILL] A lot of good stuff, because Pat, you know I’ve been trying to tell you [about this]. I want to point out something here and I wish Ed [ ] was still o­n the line ([PAT] well he’s listening). Well I hope he’s listening. This idea where it’s not happening in Wisconsin, and it’s not something that we do here is so much “bull pucky”. Let me tell you what happened here up in Lincoln County. There was a newspaper article announcing “Citizen Participation in a Zoning Plan for the Future”. So I called the Court House to find out who I’m supposed to talk to. They say I live in the Town of Pine River — which I do — (so) call the Pine River Board Chairman — which I did.

Now this man is a personal friend of mine. We do business making hay, and things like that. But almost immediately — you know, I told him I want to serve o­n this. “Citizen participation”…they talk and prattle about democracy, about the people getting involved. But let me tell you what happens here. He (asked), “well what are your views o­n zoning?” And kept pumping me and pumping me. And my views o­n zoning… for all the world… if a man owns a chunk of land down the road from me, and he’s got a trailer house that looks like hell, that’s his property. If I’m up the road, and I’ve got something else, that’s my property. And that’s the way it should be. And actually, that’s the way it is. I’ve got someone down the road who can’t keep their livestock in, and a lot of things.

So he kept pumping me. And I said, “I want to serve o­n this commission for the town of Pine River.” Well he said, “Such and such a person is in charge, I’ll pass o­n your name.” Well I never heard anything. He was making a decision… he knew where I stood o­n this. I’m outspoken up here. And the fella from California is right. This is a consensus type of thing and he wanted to eliminate putting me o­n there right from the start so that I wouldn’t interrupt the consensus. “We want to do”, he said, “what is best for the township of Pine River.” So he decides. We’ve got a little dictator here who has decided who is going to participate, what views are going to be expressed, and that’s the way it’s going to be. The whole idea that it’s not happening in Wisconsin… ?! And he [Ed] was trying to make fun of the fella from California… “the stakeholder gig”… “the stakeholder gig.” Well, having taught in public school a number of years ago, they set up these committees looking into problems… they use group therapy to come to a consensus. And if you oppose anything they say, then they isolate you.

[MICHAEL] Exactly. It’s a soft version of the Orwell story, “1984”.

[CALLER: BILL] Everybody should read… go to their library — read “1984”. You know, it’s happening! It’s happening.

[PAT] Let me ask you this. When I’ve talked to some people about development, they say what they want to do for that and zoning is maybe prevent somebody — a commercial organization buying property that could doing something to harm the water table, or drain the water table from a neighbor because it wasn’t zoned properly, or keep a water treatment plant from going in next to a residential home for the elderly — do you see what they mean by that? I mean, is that wrong?

[MICHAEL] No that wouldn’t be wrong Pat. When you have private property, private property has limitations o­n use that are defined by a common law “doctrine of nuisance”. So I can’t poison the air, I can’t poison somebody else’s water. And I can’t bring risk or serious harm to a neighbor by virtue of my activities. Some activities are incompatible. But those are few and far between and don’t give license to a “comprehensive planning or comprehensive control paradigm”, and that’s what the American Planning Association (APA) is trying to jam down the throats of the American people.

[CLARK] Mike? You’re from Iowa, right? ([MICHAEL] I was born in Iowa). Well you understand now that in Iowa in most of the counties there you can’t change your own oil in your own driveway anymore. You aware of that?

[MICHAEL] Well, I know that the University of Iowa, along with the University of California and the University of Wisconsin, are some of the leading Agenda 21 designers in America.

[BILL] Can I respond to Bill’s (caller) question? ([PAT] Right) He talked about “citizens participation”, and this is why its such a sham. He saw the same thing that we saw over in Clark County. They have a Citizens Advisory Committee (CAC) over there. However, if you want to serve o­n that committee you must be in agreement or favorable to the plan. (Bill (caller) — Right!) So that excludes probably at least 50% of the people right off the bat. I think it’s probably a lot more then that.

And the other thing is that Ed [ ], he talked about citizen participation. Well, the problem is it never followed the requirements for due process, in that citizens are to be involved in every step. Okay — every step. And the thing of it is is that in order to follow it every step you would first have to present the very idea to the citizens. Well this was never done. It was passed at the world/global and federal levels, it came down to the states, it was passed at the state level [without debate], it came down to the counties and the counties began to push it, and they’re calling this a local plan! Well I don’t know at which part it became local, because even at that point its not become local because of the consistency.

So “due process” — requiring that people be fully informed. Who’s fully informed?! I’m not fully informed and I’ve probably studied this as much as anybody. Clark wouldn’t say that he’s fully informed but we’re working o­n it. And I think that we do have a better handle o­n it then quite a few people. But that’s a requirement of due process! Now Ed [ ] says he goes to the people and he’s going to guide them. Well he’s never followed the first steps of due process and asked them if they want the plan in the first place!

[MICHAEL] There’s an issue of substance in due process. We can do all the advising and engagement with citizens, but if the plan is for ten guys to pick the pocket of another guy, that’s not right. In California there was a recent Supreme Court decision — 6 to 1 — it was a decision that stripped property from a citizen. And o­ne courageous justice, an African American woman who sits o­n the California Supreme Court said, “it’s a very sad day. Private property in California is dead.” Freedom and private property are inseparable. That’s what this is all about.

[PAT] Okay, we’ve got to take a break for news, and Bill, thanks for your call.

— Break —

WSAU Transcripts: Part 1 | Part 2 | Parts 3 & 4 | Biographies

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