We Just Filed a Restraining Order against Oneida County in Federal Court

When Tyranny Becomes Law, Rebellion Becomes Duty
--Thomas Jefferson

Hello everyone,

As Amy Thomas, Minocqua Brewing Company's statewide resistance coordinator, organized our citizen journalist volunteers to document the protests in Milwaukee over the last two days in support of Judge Dugan, I’ve been “Up North” in Minocqua fighting to legally open our flagship tap room for the summer tourism season.

As inconsequential as our fight to do business in Minocqua is to Trump's third-reich-like attempts to intimidate and remove judges that stand in his way, I can't help but see similarities in how both Trump's disciples and Oneida County's "old boys" are breaking laws to muzzle political opponents.

And like the army of lawyers suing Trump after every attempt he makes to see what laws he'll be allowed to break, I'm suing every member of both the Oneida County zoning board and the board of adjustment for violating my right to due process, selective enforcement, and my right to free speech.

Last Friday, the Minocqua Brewing Company followed up on our circuit court lawsuit against the Oneida County Board of Adjustment for violation of due process with a attempt to get a restraining order placed in Federal court against the Oneida County Zoning Board to stop them from shutting down my business.

As I mentioned in a lengthy recap of the events that lead to last Friday's legal action, our fight with Oneida County goes back to 2020, when I hung a huge Biden sign on the side of our old building to protest Trump’s handling of Covid and the damage he caused to the hospitality industry in Wisconsin.

The county told me I had to take the sign down, and they were humiliated when we publicly reminded them that the 2015 SCOTUS case Reed v Town of Gilbert made it illegal for municipal governments to regulate the size of political signs.

Ever since that humiliation, both the Town of Minocqua and Oneida County have tried to destroy my business by selectively enforcing zoning regulations that aren’t enforced against any other businesses in the area, and creating zoning obstacles for my company that have no basis in public safety, environmental protection, or aesthetics. Their efforts have been aided by Gregg Walker, publisher of the right-wing local newspaper, who has bombarded my company with endless lawsuits and bogus defamation complaints, as well as by local law enforcement working in “goose step” with him. They’ve perpetually drained my company’s profits in endless legal fees and even colluded to put me in the Oneida County jail.

The common goal of the town, the county board, the newspaper, and the sheriff?

To bankrupt the Minocqua Brewing Company and silence our loud, progressive voice that keeps shining a light on their rancid “Good Ole’ Boy” corruption that permeates every level of municipal government in this beautiful Northwoods vacation destination.

Here’s an update on how we’re attempting to once again open our business for the summer tourism season on May 1.

Last July, the Oneida County Zoning committee revoked our permit to do business based on frivolous zoning violations—including building a wooden fence in our beer garden vs. a metal one, laying landscaping rocks as opposed to permeable pavers, and not paving our driveway (many other driveways aren’t paved all around us).

Shutting my company down for these violations in the middle of the summer tourism season was an egregious act of political harassment meant to hurt our sales, but we expected it. The county did the same thing to us the previous summer, and we deposed a witness who overheard County Board Chairman Scott Holewinski suggest that by shutting us down in the summer, they'd inflict maximal pain.

After the County revoked our business permit, we immediately sued them in circuit court and Judge Bloom “stayed” their decision which allowed us to stay open for the rest of the summer. A week before that same judge retired, he lifted the "stay" and allowed our permit to be revoked, so we appealed the zoning committee’s decision to the County’s Board of Adjustment (BOA)—which was the next legal step we had to take in order to get our permit back.

We filed our appeal to the BOA on October 23, a few weeks after we closed for the season. The BOA didn’t actually hold the hearing for our appeal until February 20^th--four months later.

This delay followed a pattern:

For the last three years, the Town and County have slow-walked every proceeding during the winter offseason that has had anything to do with me legally running my businesses, and these delays always put me in a bind come summer when I run out of time to legally open for the tourism season.

As expected, the Board of Adjustment rubber stamped the county’s zoning decision to pull my permit, refused to hear my appeal, and forcibly removed me from the meeting after I insisted on my right to due process.

My team immediately submitted an application for another permit to do business with the head of Oneida County Zoning, Karl Jennrich. It took approximately a month and a half for their staff to formally "accept" our application as "completed," although the application was practically a carbon copy of what was approved two years ago--after we agreed to drop our lawsuit against the County if they allowed us to build a beer garden.

Furthering the delay, Oneida County maintains a practice of sending all commercial zoning applications for review to the unincorporated Town of Minocqua, even though they have no jurisdiction over zoning. This process hung us up for TWO YEARS the first time we tried to get a conditional use permit to open a beer garden, because the "Old Boys" on the Minocqua Town Board ILLEGALLY told us we couldn't build a beer garden and instead demanded that we build a parking lot.

In this email exchange below, we were told that the Town of Minocqua wouldn't be meeting to look at our permit application until April 29th, more than two weeks after receiving that application from the county. I reminded both parties that there was absolutely no reason to wait for this meeting because the Town's "vote" had no legal effect on our permit, and we had already hashed out these very same issues at the town level years ago, which resulted in the their "ruling' being ignored by the county to avoid a lawsuit.

Seemingly in an attempt to ward off more lawsuits caused by the Town of Minocqua, Oneida County Board Chairman Scott Holewinski-- JUST LAST WEEK--acknowledged that the current system, which allows the Town of Minocqua to grant parking exemptions willy nilly with seemingly no other conditions required other than being a friend of Town Chairman Mark Hartzheim, is LEGALLY TROUBLESOME, to say the least.

I'm guessing he's bringing this up now because he knows that this exact issue was at the heart our first federal lawsuit against him, and Minocqua's refusal to give us an easement last year-- a run-of-the-mill thing that they have historically granted to every business that is required to have one --is at the heart of our CURRENT lawsuit against them.

The Town of Minocqua perpetually exerts power that it doesn't legally have, and is somehow allowed to be the tail that wags the dog of the County Zoning board. Holewinski knows this and is worried that the County will be on the hook for a large legal settlement as a result.

As a result of the Town and County's diabolical dawdling all winter, and as has been the case in April in each of the last three years, we've once again been left with no time to legally open for this summer tourism season...

....And THAT is why we filed a restraining order against Oneida County in Federal Court last Friday.

We hope that a federal judge finally intervenes and says "enough is enough" to these provincial small-town knuckleheads with the power to hurt but without the wisdom to govern.

With our without a restraining order in hand, we plan to open our doors this coming Thursday, May 1st, for four days a week (Thursdays through Sundays), and then open 7 days a week all summer after starting Memorial Day Weekend.

I can't help but worry that the county sheriff and Minocqua police, taking cues from Trump's FBI and ICE, might choose to be heavy handed with us when we open this Thursday.

For that reason, I'm asking any customers and supporters that may be in the area next week to try to stop by. You don't actually need to buy anything, but it would be nice to have a reasonable crowd for those four days to make sure local law enforcement knows they're going to cause chaos if they decide to intervene physically instead of letting this situation play out in the courts.

If you can't come hang out with us physically and build safety with numbers, consider contributing to our legal defense fund here. Between suing the Board of Adjustment and Oneida County Zoning, we've wracked up about $20K in legal fees that should have been completely unnecessary had we been dealing with honest local government.

As Thomas Jefferson said, "When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty."

I've been fighting political tyranny in Oneida County for a long time now, and those battles have taught me a thing or two about how to rebel against Trump's tyranny in Wisconsin.

I've learned that you can't back down when being bullied--whether by a bunch of low level municipal dunderheads or by Federal brown shirts-- because when you do, they just keep coming at you harder.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for sticking with the Minocqua Brewing Company.

Together, we must never back down in the face of tyranny and keep rebelling against it together--one beer at a time.

Kirk Bangstad
Owner, Minocqua Brewing Company
Founder, Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC