It shouldn’t take an act of God to close a boat landing

From the Lakeland Times, Minocqua.

An interesting situation took place this past week. Sally Murwin, the Minocqua-Kawaguesaga Lakes Protection Association president, gave us a call and asked that we inspect the boat landing near the community building.

What we discovered was a bay full of Eurasian water milfoil. We began placing phone calls to our elected officials and to the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to get the landing closed until the invasive species could be treated.

One would think such a closing would be a no-brainer given the current invasive threat facing our area and with the prospect of hundreds of boats using that landing between now and the Fourth of July. This past weekend alone, two fishing tournaments alone brought more than 100 boats to Lake Minocqua.

The prospect of so many boats coming and going through that landing puts our entire area at risk, if the milfoil is transported to other area lakes that are now free of it. Closing the landing would not only reduce the risk of transport but would also minimize any further spreading in Lake Minocqua.

But the DNR, settling into its usual bureaucratic instransigence, no matter what the environmental outcome, refused to let the town close the landing this past weekend.

On Friday the town did what it could do and restricted access to some of the adjacent public docks and slips until the area can be treated.

Still, it shouldn’t take an act of God to close a boat landing, especially when an environmental emergency exists. It’s just one more example of the DNR’s disconnect from the real world and one more reason to fundamentally reform and reorganize the agency.