The Lower Wisconsin State Riverway during these winter months is mostly abandoned to snow, soaring eagles and deep silences, but the idea of protecting this peaceful and remote place was born 20 years ago in a noisy storm of controversy.

Early this year, Gov. Jim Doyle declared 2009 “The Year of the Riverway.”

Plans are in place to observe the anniversary throughout the year, celebrating the Riverway, which forever preserves the 92.3 miles of undammed and shining river that flows in braided channels and beneath wooded bluffs from Prairie du Sac to the Mississippi.

The consensus today, among proponents as well as most former opponents, is that the preservation effort has been a success that has kept the river at peaceful remove from the encroaching, developing world just beyond its broad floodplain.

But that success seemed a distant and dim prospect on a spring night in 1986 when the citizen advisory committee formed to consider protection for the river held one of its many tumultuous meetings.

At that meeting, in a high school cafeteria in Boscobel, an angry farmer — one of many in attendance — stood and faced down the committee.

“Why not leave it the way it is?” the farmer demanded. “There’s nothing wrong with it now!”

From the back of the room came a shout — “Amen!” And another. “Nothin’ wrong with it now!”

Suddenly, the meeting seemed like a landowner revival meeting. Members of the Riverway committee endured years of this. And worse.

“It was very, very controversial, just extremely heated at times,” recalled state Rep. Spencer Black, D-Madison, who helped lead efforts to protect the river. “To look at the results now, twenty years ago you would never have imagined this.”

At stake was a river that is a natural gem, set down within easy driving distance of several major cities, including Milwaukee, Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul.

The river and its bottomlands and adjacent bluffs are home to dozens of endangered species, ancient Indian mounds and stretches marked by little else but water, sky, sand and tangled forest.

Broad support now

Today, it is difficult to find anyone, even among those longtime residents in the river valley, who has anything bad to say about the 20-year effort to protect the river.

Most of the opposition all those years ago came from members of a property rights group called Private Landowners of Wisconsin.

And even former members of that group admit that a protection plan marked by compromise and attentiveness to the concerns of landowners has both defused much of the anger and, at the same time, allowed protection of the river and its valley.

Frank Shadewald is a longtime landowner in the river valley and the owner of the land on which some of the most striking ancient mounds are preserved, not far from Muscoda.

In the years leading up to the founding of the Riverway, Shadewald was one of those skeptical of the idea.

He feared local residents would be trading away control of the river and its valley to a state Department of Natural Resources that many people in the area distrusted and viewed as a bully.

“They came at us pretty heavy handed,” Shadewald recalled of the agency’s earliest efforts in the valley.

But that changed. In the end, according to Mark Cupp, the director of the Lower Wisconsin State Riverway Board, compromises on regulations and on management of the project would bring even some of the most stubborn opponents to view protection as workable and even necessary.

“I think I’ve changed,” said Shadewald. “I wasn’t one of the most cooperative people.”

Working with landowners

Many, including Shadewald, credit much of the success to Cupp, who has made working closely with landowners a priority.

Strangely enough, at the time of the contentious debates over protection, Cupp was a staffer for then State Sen. Richard Kruel, R-Fennimore, who was among the early opponents.

Cupp was skeptical of the initial plans, too.

Early ideas included more strict zoning laws with management of the property vested mostly in the DNR.

“I thought it was overly restrictive,” recalled Cupp. “It took too many landowner rights away.”

Differences over the management approach stalled the plan for years.

Eventually, however, compromises were struck and several important changes garnered the support of more landowners, legislators such as Kruel and others.

Cupp said the most important changes included the use of performance standards instead of zoning to control development and the creation of a citizen board to oversee the Riverway.

Instead of hard and fast zoning rules that would forbid development in numerous situations, the use of performance standards allows for the control of land use and development.

Under the standards, permits are required for construction of new buildings, modification of existing structures, placement of mobile homes, construction of utility facilities along with sidewalks or stairways that lead to the river.

Permits are also required for timber harvest within the 80,000 acres that comprise the Riverway.

The standards require that structures be “visually inconspicuous” when leaves are on the trees.

Screening vegetation is required as well as exterior colors that harmonize with the landscape (the board has developed a standardized color chart that defines the range of colors allowed, including nearly 50 shades of greens, browns and grays).

“From my perspective,” Cupp said, “we’ve allayed the fears of landowners that the new regulations were going to come with faceless bureaucrats working from an office in Madison. We go out and visit everyone who applies for a permit and we tell them that we’re going to find a way to accomplish their project and at the same time protect the aesthetic integrity of the Riverway.”

More challenges ahead

Bill Lundberg, who has been a member of the board from the beginning and is now chair, said the system is very effective. “In the end,” he said, “the landowners seem more than willing to work with the board.”

The creation of the Riverway Board was also an important step in changing minds, Cupp added.

The board is made up of a representative from each county along the Riverway and three at-large members.

Even with such a tested and successful approach, the future for the Riverway will be full of challenges, said Cupp and Lundberg.

Development pressures will grow, Lundberg said, and it will become more and more challenging to accommodate every request to build along the river.

Adding to the difficulties will be new structures such as cell towers and wind turbines, the threat of invasive species, and increasing public use (more than 400,000 visitors a year).

But, for now, the Riverway’s success can be seen in a landscape that returns one to another time.

Consider the development that blights many of the bluffs along the Mississippi River and the value of protecting the Lower Wisconsin becomes apparent, both Lundberg and Cupp said.

“I am 100 percent sure that were it not for the Riverway regulations, the river would look dramatically different,” said Cupp.