JFC approves farm runoff settlements, dismissal of multi-state post office suit

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Wisconsin’s Joint Committee on Finance has approved three settlements and the Wisconsin Department of Justice’s request for dismissal of a multi-state lawsuit over post-office policies.

The committee took up the four cases during a Section 13.10 meeting on Wednesday. Under a law passed during a lame-duck legislative session in 2018, the DOJ must get approval from the JFC before settling certain lawsuits. The change was approved by Republicans in the weeks after Josh Kaul was elected attorney general and just before he took office.

Two of the submitted settlements involved manure runoff into Wisconsin waterways. The DOJ requested approval to settle with Meadow View Dairy and Christopher Vanden Elzen, and Lee N. Accola. The operations failed to notify the DNR of their discharges into the Suamico and Black rivers; failed to clean up the pollution; and didn’t apply for the proper permits to discharge manure into waterways. The penalty for Meadow View is $15,000 and approximately $7,000 in forfeitures. Accola must pay about $10,000 and $5,300 in forfeitures. He also agreed not to operate a dairy farm anymore.

The DOJ also planned to settle with Northland Excavating, one of the parties in State of Wisconsin v. Keith G. Steinmetz and Northland Excavating, LLC. Steinmetz hired the company to fill some of the roughly 6.5 acres of high-quality wetlands found on his property. Northland agreed to pay a $12,000 penalty and about $7,300 in forfeitures for discharging fill into the wetlands without a permit and conducting activity without seeing a proper permit from the landowner. The case against Steinmetz is ongoing.

The DOJ also asked the JFC for approval to dismiss State of Washington, et al. v. DeJoy, et al. Wisconsin was part of a group of states that challenged some of Post Master General Louis DeJoy’s actions before the election. Legislative counsel said the post office is enjoined from pursing the policies under scrutiny, which were mandating that mail trucks needed to leave exactly on time and could not wait for mail, and treating ballots as first-class mail. The states decided to seek dismissal from the courts because the injunctions are still in place.

The JFC approved the three settlements and the dismissal 15-0.

The actions come as Kaul filed documents on Tuesday replying to the Legislature’s cross-petition in his lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the lame-duck law.

Kaul said the cross-petition should be denied because it raises the same two abstract statutory-interpretation matters that the state Supreme Court declined to review in Vos v. Kaul.

“In effect, the Legislature asks this Court for an advisory opinion about the validity of a law it passed,” the reply memorandum said. “That would be improper and set a bad precedent for future legislatures who might also wonder about the validity of their legislative activity.”

The respondents were also opposed to the temporary-injunction request, which allows the DOJ to settle suits without the JFC’s approval while the case proceeds. The reply memorandum said the Legislature offers no facts to rebut the “ongoing, multiple harms” in negotiating resolutions or working with other possible plaintiffs, and it asks the court to grant the temporary injunction. Follow @WLJReporter