Here’s another brief story about the Office of the Legislative Auditor’s report on the Iron Range Resources loans to Excelsior Energy, this one from Business North. Again, the story mentions the fact that loan funds were used to lobby, but sports no exploration of that topic. That potentially vast amount of money spent on lobbying is the story on this deal. Since my column on Sunday about the topic and Rep. Tom Anzelc’s call for a special Iron Range Resources meeting on Monday, there has been a loud silence from all parties involved. This tells me either that some kind of strategy is being formed or else the hope is that people will forget this happened. At minimum, we can count on something coming up at the next scheduled Iron Range Resources meeting in late October.
Once again, this Excelsior Energy nonsense has popped up all over the place — in the Senate race, on the Range, and in the lobbying circles of St. Paul and Washington — and we can’t get the media to seriously chase the investigation. The confederation of lobbyists who formed the Mesaba Energy Project deduced seven years ago, correctly it seems, that if you make something sound complicated enough and centralize it in a part of the state with weak, understaffed media*, you can do pretty much anything you want with public money.
* Not that there is a preponderance of strong, overstaffed media left anywhere.
Speak Your Mind