Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers November 20 urged state lawmakers to “stop playing politics with the Native Nations in this state,” when a Joint Finance Committee of the legislature refused to release funds to two tribes, the Wisconsin Examiner reported December 8.
The committee held up funding to the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and the Bad River Band of Lake Superior after releasing funds from the same source to nine other tribes. Each tribe is supposed to get $1 million from tribal gaming revenues.
The committee said it wants to have a conversation about issues involving the tribes of local towns. Senators Howard Marklein and Mary Felzkowski and Rep. Chanz Green sent letters to the chairmen of the tribes, stating: “Before taking any action on this item, we want to allow this dialogue to take place.”
The chairs of the two tribes left out of the distribution wrote to the committee’s co-chairman asking for the funds and saying they were being discriminated against. They threatened to go to the courts.
That’s when the governor stepped in with his demand to “stop playing politics,” which so far has done nothing to change the situation.
For nearly a year the Lac du Flambeau have been fighting with the town of Lac Du Flambeau over road access that crosses the reservation, to the point where the tribe blocked the roads, trapping non-tribal property owners from leaving their places except for necessities. In the latest development, the tribe began charging a toll to use the roads.
Senator Felzkowski, writing to the tribe, criticized it for not exhausting other remedies before “taking the drastic and profound measures you took.” She continued, “Good actors don’t give their neighbors 24 hours’ notice that they are barricading them in their homes. Good actors reevaluate their strategies when an elderly veteran is forced to wait 40 minutes for the barricades to be lifted so he can get to the hospital. Good leaders don’t cower to extremists who urge them to set aside reason and harm innocent parties.”
In 2022 a federal appeals court ruled that the state can’t force residents of reservations to pay property taxes. This took away a significant source of income from some local communities such as Sanborn in Ashland County, a town entirely surrounded by the Bad River Tribe. After the ruling, the town lost 85 percent of its taxable property.
Some lawmakers were working on a way to cut the local tax burden when the Bad River Tribal Council approved a possessory interest tax on non-tribal members who own land within the reservation.
They say they are still willing to talk to reach some solution to “ensure the viability of the affected local governments, for the well-being of all residents and to carry out the necessary work that our constituents expect.”
