Marshall Helmberger
REGIONAL— Tribal nations from across Minnesota are accusing state regulators of bad faith over their continuing failure to address longstanding pollution concerns, many stemming from lax regulation of the Iron Range’s taconite industry.
Despite recent legal victories, tribal officials and their environmental allies contend that the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency continues to drag its feet on enforcement of sulfate standards to protect wild rice as well as other pollution concerns. At the same time, they argue that agency officials haven’t always been candid about the extent of pollution from major sources.
They cite U.S. Steel’s Minntac tailings basin as a case in point. For several years, MPCA officials had argued that they had addressed pollution discharges from that tailings basin into the Sand River, by requiring the company to pump outflows from a discharge point back behind the basin’s dike. The MPCA used that requirement as justification for their decision not to set sulfate discharge standards to the Sand River in a new permit the agency issued to U.S. Steel in late 2018.