Payday approaches for little projects

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By Adam Wise

The stabilizing rocks sink in the muck, dotting the access roads and parking lots with mud pits ready to gobble even the toughest of four-wheel drive tires.

Years and years go by, and gravel becomes part of a distant memory of sturdier times.

For 15 years, Mike Foy has watched nature slowly consume entrances and exits to some of the 8,000 acres of wildlife properties he manages for the state Department of Natural Resources. He, and others like him, have asked for money to reverse the trend, but these are small projects traditionally destined for the bottom of the pecking order.

Foy, who manages about a half-dozen DNR wildlife areas, primarily in Rock and Green counties, said there are projects that have waited for state money for as long as 18 years.

“A lot of our properties are on wetter ground,” he said. “We got them in many cases because the farmers got tired of trying to farm areas surrounding marshes, so a lot of the rock slowly sinks into the ground over the years and has to be replenished.”

But the small projects might finally get their day. The state Legislature has boosted the DNR’s Stewardship capital development budget from $18 million to $25 million this biennium. Of the $7 million increase, $5 million must be spent on access improvements.

The DNR plans to create or upgrade 294 gravel parking lots and 30.1 miles of gravel roads and to post more than 2,300 signs, according to DNR documents. The agency estimated each parking lot will cost $7,500, while one gravel road project costs about $35,000.

Such projects traditionally never rose to the top of the priority list, so many property managers stopped requesting money for the jobs, said Sanjay Olson, the DNR’s land division deputy administrator.

“It’s easier to get projects funded that are higher profile,” he said. “It’s more exciting to get a new bridge built rather than a layer of gravel being put on the road.”

DNR administrators put the call out to property managers in summer to identify the small projects, and they responded with $12 million worth of requests.

Despite imbalance between projects and available money, Olson said, the priorities won’t change once the $5 million is spent.

“We think if we do this well and get some of these needs addressed, hopefully we’ll get the same type of opportunity in the next biennium,” he said. “But to hope we get it again is clearly a hope at this point.”

David Clausen, chairman of the state Natural Resources Board, said he has heard the complaints of poor access to state properties, but there’s a good reason why the small projects have had to wait.

“When we look at our parks, you’ll find that there’s close to $100 million of deferred management, deferred repair and things like buildings that need to be replaced,” he said. “Every year, we are forced to prioritize, and the squeaky wheel gets the most grease.”

It’s that approach to projects, Foy said, that left him skeptical when he was told to create a project list.

“At first, it was a work exercise because we hear things like this every so often, and a lot of them don’t pan out to be anything,” he said. “So sometimes, you kind of roll your eyes at first. The bosses say count up all your parking lots, evaluate them. Well we did something similar to this five years ago, and nothing came of it.”

Foy said he came up with dozens of projects on his properties. For instance, for his Brooklyn Wildlife property, which includes about 3,500 acres in portions of Green and Dane counties, he requested improvements to nine of 10 parking lots.

According to a DNR project list, the Brooklyn property will receive two new lots.

“There’s times,” he said, “when they just turn into mud holes and nobody wants to go into them.”