This story ran 6/18/2012 on Dane101.com

Governor Scott Walker’s first year in office was not exactly kind to the wishes of environmental advocates in Wisconsin.

The Legislature approved a major rollback of wetland protections originally passed in 2001 that loosens the requirements for people seeking permits to fill wetlands, and, for one Green Bay-area development project, expressly permitted a much larger-than-normal fill.

The Legislature temporarily suspended the state’s first unified rules for wind turbines, causing several projects to leave the state. A bill that would have substantially altered the mining permit process, to the point where mine proposals would have been exempt from several water quality protections, was blocked by a single Republican senator’s stand against it. Several more passed that changed laws regulating renewable energy, carbon monoxide emissions, and public input on water pollution permitting.

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And so, in the June 5 recall election, groups like Clean Wisconsin and the League of Conservation Voters endorsed the other guy—Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett—and all four Democratic candidates in the senate recalls. Walker won handily, though, which leaves advocacy groups staring down three more years of Walker and his appointees, and, if Democrats lose the lead in the Senate they seem to have gained with John Lehman, another legislative session dominated by the people they did not endorse…

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