The Duluth News Tribune reported yesterday that a crowd of miners packed the house at the Iron Trail Motors Event Center in Virginia this week. The miners warned that the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency — which has preliminarily denied a water permit variance for U.S. Steel’s Keetac iron ore mine — would lead to closures and lost jobs.
The kicker? The rule is intended to “limit the amount of sulfate” so that “wild rice waters downstream don’t exceed the state’s 10 parts per million (ppm) standard.” It’s the same attitude that American Experiment economist John Phelan writes about in “How the Range was lost.”
The rule has been on the books since 1973 but not enforced because, miners contend, it is “too stringent and expensive to achieve and would threaten thousands of mining jobs and the region’s economy.”
U.S. Steel said that installing the treatment facilities needed to comply with the rule would cost $800 million and drive the cost of iron ore up by $17.50 per ton, an increase that would make Minnesota’s iron uncompetitive on the global market. Union representatives warned starkly of a return to the economic collapse of the 1980s as cheap foreign steel flooded the market.
Luckily, perhaps, MPCA is willing to consider the “lived experience,” of miners as it moves to finalize the rule:
“We could receive additional economic information from the company, from anyone who has relevant information,” said Tom Johnson, government relations director at the MPCA. “Certainly, lived experience is part of that. Certainly, other economic drivers are part of that. So we, again, encourage you to supply that information to the agency so that we could formally consider it on the record.”
According to the Duluth News Tribune, environmentalists contended that the 10 ppm standard is both “modern and solid,” but another noted that the research underlying the standard fails to capture all factors affecting wild rice harvest: “To think that you can replicate it in a test tube, to me, is not sound science.”
State Rep. Spencer Igo, R-Wabana Township, hit the nail on the head at the hearing: “You talk about cost and you talk about economics… But the biggest thing that the MPCA missed the guide on is the community, the community that’s in this room tonight.”
The rule is open for public comment until September 22, 2025 for both the wastewater mine permit and the tailings basin permit. Residents should consider submitting a short paragraph or two of comments about your “lived experience” if the mines shuttered and the Iron Range’s economy collapsed.
