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T he reserve languished in administrative limbo throughout the 1980s. No one could agree on its purpose, its management, or its future. Many people continued to deplore the passing of the La Farge dam. At times their rhetoric sounded like a midwestern replay of old western land wars between the federal government and local people. But this saga had a few twists left. Oblivious to any irony in the Kickapoo Valley, the Corps of Engineers had adopted new language in the 1980s to publicize its mission. “Project delivery is the Corps’ business,” a glossy brochure announced. “From conception of a project until its completion and turnover to the ultimate user; the Corps provides complete project management services.” Rather than districts, or engineers, or planners, the Corps now used, according to the brochure, “Corps Life Cycle Project Managers,” who served “as points of contact for customers to ensure that they are fully informed and involved, forecast trends and resolve problems , and oversee all phases of project development, ensuring the delivery of ‘a quality product, on time and within budget.’”1 This advertisement is significant not because it embraced the new business jargon of the times but because project completion and turnover were precisely the aims for anyone interested in the reserve, which meant everyone who lived in Stark. In 1993, residents across the Kickapoo Valley began meeting to develop a plan. They wanted the Corps to complete the La Farge dam’s life cycle, even if the dam itself must remain unfinished. They hoped to convince the federal government to transfer the reserve to the state, after which they hoped the state would appoint a local board to manage it.2 Doing its part to resolve the long-festering issue, Wisconsin petitioned for the land’s release from federal control. 173 8 (Re)Enter the Ho-Chunk It is worth pondering the implication of the local plan and the state’s request. Wisconsin was asking Congress to devolve control over a highly contested piece of public land, something state governors have expressed interest in for a hundred years. They have rarely succeeded. The general purpose of federal lands—the question of who makes up their legitimate constituents—has always been a point of contention in the country, but devolution is a more sensitive topic yet. The negotiations involved would entail competition between levels of government, agencies, users, local communities, and nonlocal interests of every kind. Apart from the political arena of Congress, there was another process available for settling the status of the reserve. When federal land is not in use for ten years or more it becomes classified as “excess real property.” Upon this designation the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) will search for a new custodian. There is a pecking order in the search. The GSA will look first to other federal agencies, which have the right of refusal. Only then will the GSA designate the property “surplus.” Then state and local governments or certain nonprofit organizations can step forward.3 No doubt Kickapoo Valley communities did not want to watch from afar as one federal agency, the Army Corps of Engineers, transferred its land to another federal agency. They did not want to wake up and find a national park in their midst. Not to put too fine a point on the matter, the La Farge dam fiasco still burned in the local psyche. Any hint of a federal alternative to the Corps would have fueled the political equivalent of a forest crown fire. Devolution was what people wanted, emphatically. This was clear to all the politicians who found themselves engulfed by the issue. Russell Feingold had been trapped on the very day he was first elected U.S. senator, when a constituent approached him in his own garage and asked him to introduce legislation transferring the Corps land to the state of Wisconsin.4 Feingold responded to his constituent with impressive alacrity. He drafted a provision to deauthorize the La Farge dam project with language setting the terms of the transfer in the Water Resources Development Act of 1994. He was unsuccessful in inserting the language that year, so he planned to try again in the 1996 act. In this way the reserve would become an exception to the rule against political rather than administrative devolution in our system of federal holdings. (Although making an exception establishes a process others may follow in the future.) While Feingold was working on federal legislation...

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