Unsafe policy
On Tuesday, the Marathon County Board of Supervisors voted for an ordinance to open up the vast majority of county highways to ATV/UTVs. That was the wrong call.
Advocates for the ordinance had their arguments and, with petitions signed by over 1,000 residents, plenty of public support. But they failed to heed the commonsense safety concerns voiced by Sheriff Scott Parks, himself a four-wheeler enthusiast.
Last week, Sheriff Parks told supervisors that his officers did not have the legal power to enforce the proposed ATV/UTV ordinance. The ordinance calls for a 35-mile-per-hour speed limit on county highways but, he said, his deputies are only able to enforce the 55 mile per hour speed limit posted on road signs. Parks acknowledged that Sen. Jerry Petrowski is working on a bill to fix this, but underscored that current law was current law.
Sheriff Parks rebuffed arguments from ATV/ UTV advocates who reported that nearly all of Marathon County’s neighbors have opened their county roads to the vehicles. He said Marathon County is different. While other counties have extensive trail systems, Marathon County doesn’t. This means, Parks said, local ATV/UTV users will use “well travelled roads, including county highways” to get around. He said Marathon County has far more motorists than other counties.
Further, Parks responded to supervisors who quoted statistics documenting that most ATV/UTV fatalities in the state were the result of alcohol use and driver error, not collisions with trucks or cars. He admitted that the realistic increase in fatalities in the county under the proposed ordinance might be “minimal,” but reminded the supervisors that their official “vision” included being the safest county in the state. “Minimal isn’t good enough,” he said. Parks asked supervisors to think about offi cers who might have to tell families that a loved one had died in an ATV crash.
The sheriff said he has been contacted by trucking companies concerned that their rigs travelling 55 miles an hour were in danger of running down ATVs moving at only 35 miles per hour, especially at night. He said this scenario scared him.
To us, the sheriff was persuasive. He argued for valuing life, for taking commonsense safety measures to protect life. The county board blew him off and that’s disappointing.
It was tough to watch county supervisors, including those who never fail to earn easy political points by reminding us of their reverence for law enforcement, vote for an ordinance that the county’s top cop not once, but several times has said will jeopardize safety. Not one supervisor publicly had the sheriff’s back.
The county board’s vote disappoints us at a deeper level. The board has a Public Safety Committee and Highway Safety Commission that, working with the county’s Infrastructure Committee, is supposed to come up with rules, policies and laws meant to keep the public highways safe. But these three bodies never came to any consensus on the ATV/UTV question. Suggestions made by the Public Safety Committee to strengthen a proposed ATV/UTV ordinance were batted away by the Infrastructure Committee. Did the county board care? Did even one supervisor publicly question whether the process put in place to keep us all safe was working? Not one. That invites us to question the county’s extra-ambitious “vision” of attempting to be the state’s “healthiest, safest and most prosperous county.” What a load of horseradish.
If the county board would have adopted the Public Safety Committee’s suggestions to the ATV/ UTV ordinance, a compromise could have been reached that would have pleased 99 percent of county ATV/UTV riders while allowing the sitting sheriff to sleep at night. Supervisors, however, got impatient, ignored this commonsense advice and adopted a seriously flawed ordinance.
We are in trouble when our safety hangs on how long a handful of county supervisors can stay on task.
Editorials by Peter Weinschenk, The Record-Review
