Welcome to beautiful Crow Wing County, MN!
Crow Wing County is blessed with 104,000 acres of county land that is open to for the enjoyment of the public. Our county officials should be dedicated to protecting our forest land and forest trails so that future generations can continue to enjoy the abundance that we inherited for many generations to come. Instead they seemed to be determined to turn Crow Wing County into "hillbilly heaven" by allowing a tiny special interest group (<2%) turn our forest trails and wetlands into endless ATV ruts. The commissioners don't seem to understand that the watershed delivers clean water to our lakes and wells. They also don't seem to understand that Crow Wing County already has a tourism base worth 100+ million dollars a year and while most of that is related to water recreation a sizeable amount is directly related to our forest trails. By allowing those trails to be vandalized they jeopardize that contribution to our county funding. The lack of foresight shown by our county commissioners and land commissioner in protecting our public land speaks volumes of their inability to govern for the benefit of all people and to think long term.
Commissioner Paul Thiede campaigned on the promise of fiscal responsibility yet he sits back and allows a public asset (our forests) worth at least a billion dollars to be degraded by a small but demanding and sometimes violent group of 4 wheeled vandals. There is nothing fiscally responsible about vandals to drive existing recreational users out of our forests and to allow those same vandals to destroy our forest trails.
Now we even have Cass County Commissioners trying to push their irresponsible policies on Crow Wing County. Cass County Commissioner Bob Kangas is trying to get our county commissioners to adopt his vision of unregulated ATV use so that ATV riders can ride to the bars in Crosslake. Cass County has a stated policy of turning 90% of it's public land over to unregulated ATV use. The photos below were taken in the area that he wants to turn into a designated ATV playground.
Tell Bob to take a hike. bob.kangas@co.cass.mn.us
ATV riders and county commissioners are quick to point out the fabulous economic benefits of allowing ATV riders to destroy our ditches, driveways and forest trails but that is phony beyond words. How can anyone possibly say there are economic benefits when the cost or repairing the massive amount of ATV damage isn't factored into the economic equation? Even a first year lemonade stand operator knows that you have to subtract the costs from the income before you know if you've made a profit or not. By my estimation just the ditches of our county have sustained $2 million in damages and it continues to grow. That doesn't factor in the cost of repairing driveways nor does it factor in the cost of repairing forest trails, wetlands or the degraded water flowing out of our watershed into our lakes.
Please come with me on a photo tour of your Crow Wing County forest trails. You’ll be outraged at the deliberate negligence of our county commissioners to protect this immeasurably valuable public asset.
This land belongs to you so if you want to tell our county officials that they need to do their job you can use the links below.
Crow Wing County commissioners can be reached at:.
http://www.co.crow-wing.mn.us/county_commisioners/index2.html
Phil.Trusty@co.crow-wing.mn.us
Paul.Thiede@co.crow-wing.mn.us
Rachel.Nystrom@co.crow-wing.mn.us
Rosemary.Franzen@co.crow-wing.mn.us
Doug.Houge@co.crow-wing.mn.us
The new land commissioner is Mr. Mark Liedl. He needs to hear from us so that he understands that the majority of county residents are fed up with the ATV damage to our public lands.
He can be reached at mark.liedl@co.crow-wing.mn.us
Trail photos (page 1, page 2, page 3, page 4)