From a string of war powers resolution votes to a nearly $1.8 billion settlement fund, U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore reacts to the Trump administration’s approach to governance. A bill to redesignate the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore as a National park has drawn renewed opposition at the northern tip of Wisconsin, and Bayfield County Board Chair Jan Lee describes why.

U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore
D-4th Congressional District

• Voters are confronted with a daily crush of headlines out of Washington, D.C. with less than six months until the 2026 midterm elections. There’s the IRS lawsuit deal to create a roughly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund that President Donald Trump wants to use to award people he deems unfairly prosecuted. At the international level, there are on-again-off-again negotiations with Iran sandwiched by threats of renewed bombing. Moore said the daily onslaught of controversy out of the White House is a feature not a bug.
• Moore: The whole political strategy of the Trump administration has been to flood the zone, to just keep us running like a rat on a treadmill so that we won’t be able to respond to their chaotic, mercurial governance strategy. “

Jan Lee
Chair, Bayfield County Board of Supervisors

• Bayfield County and the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa have signed on to a resolution opposing a proposal to redesignate the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore as a full-on national park. A bill sponsored by Wisconsin U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-7th Congressional District, to do that passed in the House Committee on Natural Resources in February. The idea has been controversial along Lake Superior’s south shore for years, though, and Lee said local concerns include what might happen if there are more tourists than can be accommodated and the status of environmental protections.
• Jan Lee: “The tourism area here in Bayfield in particular, at the gateway to the Apostle Islands, hasn’t been a problem in the summertime. There’s never been a problem with not having enough tourists up here in the late spring, summer, early fall, basically through Apple Fest every first weekend of October. As a matter of fact, we’re pretty much bursting at the seams in terms of what we can accommodate in terms of lodging and restaurants, and that affects workforce, of course. And we don’t have housing for people up here. It’s hard to have a workforce come in that can accommodate all these tourists for the businesses. So, and I know that Mr. Tiffany has touted this redesignation as a boon for tourism, but we’re basically looking for tourism in other directions. I, you know, I think as a whole, we’ve done a lot of work over the last 15 to 20 years trying to create tourism as an industry up here, getting people all the way up to northern Wisconsin to enjoy Lake Superior and the inland lakes that we have. And we’ve done a really good job of that, but what we’ve really been trying to do is subsequently also is to try to do that in the shoulder seasons and in the winter, to expand tourism in those areas. And the big problem with Mr. Tiffany’s bill at this point in time is that we don’t know where the infrastructure is gonna come to support it.”

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