Ad hoc committee is county's last hope
Such litigation has every potential for costing the people of Bayfield County millions of dollars. Worse, it could forever poison relations between owners of properties along the former Chicago-Northwestern rail corridor, their county government, recreational interests, as well as ordinary taxpayers elsewhere in the county who will have to foot the bill and Allah alone knows who else. It is easy to foresee a scenario where everybody winds up being mad at everybody else, while the lawyers are laughing all the way to the bank.
Not a pretty picture.
Avoiding this mess is the reason the Bayfield County Board has brought representatives from all factions together. The goal is to see if there is enough common ground to come up with alternatives to a series of prolonged court fights.
Given that to date there has been more heat than light from the contending interests, one has to be a real optimist to conclude it's anything but a longshot that much positive will come of these meetings. Still, as one committee member said, it's worth the effort.
Unfortunately, given the results from the first meeting, it is clear that the committee has a long way to go to meet its goal of resolving the trail issue without litigation.
Some random observations:
The committee has sensibly agreed not to let its meetings become a debating society for arguing arcane federal court precedents and other incomprehensible legalities.
"None of us are lawyers here, this is not a forum to debate legal issues," noted County Administrator Mark Abeles Allison.
Still, it is hard, in a matter so bound up with complexities of the law, to keep all discussion of jurisprudence out of the mix. All of the sides have fixed ideas about the legal rightness of their views ever bubbling right below the surface, threatening to erupt into full blown lawsuits at any moment. Navigating through this legal minefield may well prove most difficult challenge of all, especially with all those lawyers circling sharklike, sensing fat trial fees like a fresh blood trail.
The inflexibility of positions may well be the group's undoing.
One of the property owner representatives said using the ownership issue as a club to get trail concessions was "completely unacceptable." A county representative preferred to characterize the unspoken but all too real implications of the county's purported rights to the CNW corridor as "incentives."
As one county board member noted, the odds of getting the whole board to abandon those potential rights out of hand, especially when they have a legal opinion that they have a very good case is slight indeed. Why would you throw in a potentially winning hand without something in return?
The question of quid pro quo is at the heart of the county's fallback position. Without that "incentive" or "club" the county has no basis with which to negotiate changes to the presently unacceptable trail routes. Without the county's only bargaining chip, property owners can tell the county to go pound sand when they come hat in hand to renegotiate snowmobile routes.
The question has to be asked: Can the county deliver the goods and quiet the land titles in question, even if they wanted to?
If one accepts and follows the logic of the Mauler Case, which set off this brouhaha, it is the federal government which owns the corridor, not the county; which at best has the right to obtain use of the land for a public highway recreational trails. How the county could extinguish the federal government's rights to that corridor is something that has never been made clear. It seems to me at best, they could make some sort of solemn compact giving up their intention to ever use the corridor for that purpose. Whether such an act could bind future county governments, let alone the state or anyone else who could lay claim to the corridor is something that has never been discussed at length.
The county's action at the August 31 County Board meeting in reaffirming their commitment to a negotiated outcome is perhaps one of the best signs to date that the county is serious about negotiation. Another good, if tardy, move on the part of the county is the release of a legal opinion that states their case for believing they have a right to the corridor. Failure in the past to do this has seriously hurt their credibility. Whatever good reason they may have had for delaying the public release of this document it has created no end of suspicion and ill will among residents who are affected by the corridor mess.
Let's hope the well has not been poisoned to the point that good-faith negotiations are no longer possible. A court fight will produce few winners and plenty of losers among the good residents of Bayfield County.
Rick Olivo is a Daily Press staff writer, covering Ashland and Bayfield counties. He can be reached at (715) 682-2313.