Officials of all stripes engaged in back patting and speech-making on the Iron Range this week for the dedication of Mesabi Nugget, a new facility that makes iron nuggets from low grade iron ore near Hoyt Lakes. They also toured Minnesota Power’s new Taconite Ridge wind energy project by Virginia. This year we’re producing innovative new iron products on the Iron Range in the shadows of spinning wind turbines.
Gov. Tim Pawlenty called it a “renaissance” on the Iron Range, in this Duluth News-Tribune story.
Congressman Jim Oberstar compared the Hoyt Lakes area, badly hit by the closure of LTV six years ago, to the “the proverbial Phoenix rising from the ashes” in his remarks and subsequent press release.
And this week’s dedications at Mesabi Nugget and Taconite Ridge weren’t the only developments. A meeting of the Itasca County Railroad Authority revealed that there are 18 Essar Steel engineers working in Hibbing on the plans for the Minnesota Steel mine and proposed steel-making operation near Nashwauk. (On the Range, all news happens at meetings of the local railroad authority; I swear, some days it seems like we’re living in the Deep South of the 1930s around here). Essar claims it will be mining and making steel within five years while others are concerned that the facility will end up being a mine only. Insiders I’ve heard from tell me that we’ll know very soon because the steel making equipment would need to be ordered almost immediately if it was going to be ready in time. Either way, the symbolism of the former Butler Taconite site going active again is thick. Butler’s closure in 1982 was the beginning of a long period of decline on the Iron Range that didn’t end until, well, apparently Wednesday.
Just the same, I think Oberstar’s “Phoenix” reference is more apt that Pawlenty’s “renaissance.”
It would be very easy to join the chorus in celebrating what appears to be an era of growth on the Iron Range. We could certainly use a renaissance. Renaissance literally means “rebirth.” The original “Renaissance” in Europe was the time when people started writing more poetry and stopped using the street as a commode. But I would put our current period on the Iron Range as something more like a recovery.
In the 1970s, when all the original taconite operations were running strong, the Range was booming. Everyone was (relatively) happy. Our school districts were (relatively) flush with cash. Local governments had (relatively) all the resources they needed to provide services with (relatively) low property taxation. Then the recession of the late 1970s belatedly hit the Iron Range in the early 1980s and our whole economy up here shrunk. Fewer jobs. Smaller population. While the job loss has slowed, the Iron Range population has never increased since that time.
So all this stuff — Mesabi Nugget, Minnesota Steel, the Keetac expansion — is really just replacing stuff, and jobs, we had already lost. And, though the technology is light years ahead of the 1970s, by and large these operations are doing what was done by their predecessors: Mining for the purpose of making steel. Only it’s not the 1970s all over. Our school districts and local governments have been dramatically weakened by the economic strain of the past three decades. Many schools are in deep debt and the curriculum is but a shadow of its past self. The Iron Range schools of the 1970s sent poor kids off to be doctors and lawyers. Today, the only kids able to do that are the sons and daughters of the same doctors and lawyers. That is not the Iron Range I know and love.
Other exciting developments, such as the prospect of using magnetization to extract iron from old piles of mining overburden, fall under the category of high tech salvage. Still others, like Excelsior Energy’s Mesabi Energy Project, are just boondoggles unlikely to ever be built for a host of reasons.
So, I’ll go a little further than the governor in saying that what we need is a renaissance on the Iron Range. We need to figure out a way to create an economy that grows parallel to the natural resources economy that has existed here in some form for 125 years. Now is the perfect time to fire up this effort because it would appear that there may be some new money moving through our economy. But we aren’t there yet. We need this Phoenix to not only rise from the ashes, but lay down high speed Internet lines into people’s houses, attract telecommuters and creativity, improve the quality of life in our communities, and — most of all — secure our public schools for a new generation of learners.
That, my friends, is the renaissance we need.
I think you are very much on the right track, Aaron. There will never be the renaissance of the Iron Range if we continue to focus on just the mining industry if for no other reason than there is less demand for labor to produce the same amount of iron. What is happening is at best considered a partial recovery in that we can only hope to recover some of the lost jobs of the past.
In order to have a true renaissance, we need to focus more of our economic development efforts on things that benefit workers in more industries. The Italian renaissance was marked by a flourishing of the arts and knowledge. Perhaps this points the way for a true renaissance on the Range – focusing more economic development money on arts and education spending INTENDED TO KEEP PEOPLE HERE.
A novel idea? Perhaps. But money spent to keep arts alive on the Range keeps people here, creating something new, and really benefits the main street economy. That would be such a cool development. I bet we could buy the average arts job a lot less expensively than we buy the average steel industry job. What do you think?