Government agencies often mediate conflicts between various property owners and interest groups, and this law would reduce government authority to do that, said Brian Ohm, an attorney who researches and teaches planning at UW-Madison.

Federal and state courts have chosen to give deference to state decisions on how the law should be interpreted, recognizing that the expertise and technical knowledge of agency officials who work with regulations every day is naturally much deeper than that of judges, who must be generalists, Ohm said.

A law telling courts not to give deference to state agencies may raise concerns that the Legislature is overstepping its role under the Constitutional principle of separation of powers, Ohm said.

Jarchow said the real separation-of-powers problem was state agencies that write, interpret and enforce the laws in a system under which the courts then “rubberstamp” decisions.

For all state agencies

AB 582 is one of a raft of pending bills Republicans are pushing to roll back DNR and local government authority to regulate private development decisions that can affect the environment, especially in shoreline development filling wetlands.