Bill aims to sell public land

DNR would buy it, funding scholarships

MADISON - The state would sell more than 70,000 acres of public land and use the money to create merit scholarships for Wisconsin students attending college in the University of Wisconsin System, under legislation announced by three GOP officials Tuesday.

The so-called “Wisconsin Merit Scholarships” would be awarded to state students who earn good grades and score high on standardized tests, rather than students who most need financial aid to attend college. The state’s flagship campus, UW-Madison, in recent years has stepped up efforts to recruit top Wisconsin students, rather than lose them to other states where they may be likelier to work after graduation.

The complex plan would not privatize the public land. Instead, it would have one state agency borrow money to buy land that another state agency owns outright.

Then the state would invest the proceeds of the land sale — essentially the money that the state had borrowed to pay itself — and use the earnings to fund the scholarships.

There were immediate unanswered questions about the proposal, including how much it would cost taxpayers in interest on the loans and whether the state lands, which include swamps, are really worth $80 million.

“These scholarships can go on forever,” said Assembly Speaker Pro Tempore Tyler August (R-Lake Geneva), one of the three conservative officials proposing the legislation.

August put forward the bill Tuesday with Sen. Steve Nass (R-Whitewater) and state Treasurer Matt Adamczyk, winning immediate backing from UW System President Ray Cross.

Under the plan, the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands would sell about 76,000 acres of land it owns in the northern half of the state, with the lion’s share in Forest and Oneida counties. The board manages these properties to earn money for public education through timber and land sales as well as to provide access to the public to hunt, hike and fish.

The lands wouldn’t become private, however, because they would be sold to the state Department of Natural Resources through the state’s KnowlesNelson Stewardship land purchase program, which would pay about $10 million a year over eight years to buy them. That program, which is funded through state borrowing, is designed to promote both conservation and public access for recreation.

The stewardship program has a budget of about $33 million that would drop to $10 million a year. Those funds would go to

buy land from the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands.

“This ends the stewardship program as we know it,” said George Meyer, executive director of the Wisconsin Wildlife Federation and former DNR secretary.

Adamczyk sits on the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands along with Secretary of State Doug La Follette and Attorney General Brad Schimel. Adamczyk said the state should have only one agency overseeing the lands rather than two.

“It makes more sense for the DNR to manage the land,” he said.

None of the bill’s sponsors could say how much it would cost the state in interest on the loans to buy the land. The loans would not be new, however, since they would come out of the loans and land purchases that the stewardship program is already making.

$5,000 scholarships

Money from about

6,000 of the board’s acres would go into a board fund for K-12 schools and the rest would go to a fund for the UW System. Under the bill, the board would invest UW’s money and would, in theory, have enough from the earnings to eventually to give out roughly $5 million a year in scholarships — that’s 1,000 scholarships of $5,000 each — to students based on their grades and scores on standardized tests like the ACT.

That pleased Cross of the UW System, who said state universities struggle to attract the best students because the state currently offers little in the way of merit scholarships.

The bill’s sponsors touted the idea of targeting aid toward the best students, saying other states are poaching some of Wisconsin’s brightest high school graduates by offering attractive scholarship packages.

“This is something I’ve long wanted to do: help everyone,” Nass, the GOP senator, said. “It’s going to be based on merit.”

UW-Madison in recent years has beefed up efforts to recruit top high school graduates after facing criticism for focusing

too much on going after out-of-state residents who pay top tuition, rather than courting Wisconsin’s best and brightest.

The focus on merit, rather than financial need, already is generating pushback.

“Giving some rich kid who’s had every advantage imaginable $5,000 that could go to someone where it might make the difference between whether they are the first member of their family to go to college or not, is a complete failure of priorities by the authors of this scheme,” said Scot Ross, executive director of One Wisconsin Now, a liberal organization that lobbies for relieving student loan debt.

UW System spokeswoman Stephanie Marquis said the Wisconsin Merit Scholarships “do not take one single dollar away from need-based financial aid,” but would be on top of the need-based Wisconsin Grant program and federal financial aid for low-income students.

“This is about retaining the state’s best and brightest,” Marquis said.