-
Steelworkers negotiations underway in Pittsburgh
After a spring and early summer in which Iron Range mine owners tightened belts, idled workers and sought relief from taxes and environmental regulations, now we come to a new phase of the region’s simmering crisis. This week in Pittsburgh, the United Steelworkers, the union that represents most Iron Range miners, opened negotiations with ArcelorMittal…
-
Summer of trials and tribulations on the Iron Range
The last few months of Iron Range politics and economics have been discouraging. That’s as polite as I can be in describing what’s happened: the repetitive, lazy assumptions of local media, the underreported stories of inside dealings, the overstatement of future economic growth from new kinds of mining and the understatement of the tremendous market pressures…
-
Range business, gov’t leaders call for summit
In Sunday’s paper, the Mesabi Daily News published a story about the fact that Minnesota Power (Allete) executive Al Hodnick, former State Sen. Doug Johnson and IRRRB Commissioner Mark Phillips were joining to call for an Iron Range economic summit. From the Bill Hanna story: Hodnik wants an Iron Range economic summit soon to provide…
-
With contracts looming, Range mines crunch numbers
No matter your job or politics, ten dollars is always ten dollars. By some reports, that’s how much money some Iron Range mines need to shave off their cost for a ton of taconite iron ore to survive the coming global steel industry contraction. John Myers at the Duluth News Tribune reported on this last weekend, highlighting…
-
Shining steel in the summer of change
On a map the thin red line of the Mesabi iron Range seems to cradle the vast green forests and dark blue lakes of Northern Minnesota. Mesabi, an industrial frontier these last 125 years, has always been where nature meets human progress — for better and worse. So it continues this ever-warming summer of 2015.…
-
What’s behind Mesabi Nugget’s long term idle?
This week, Indiana-based Steel Dynamics announced the indefinite idling of its Minnesota properties, including Mesabi Nugget in Hoyt Lakes and Mining Resources near Chisholm, a scram mining operation that produced iron concentrate used by Mesabi Nugget. About 200 people will lose their jobs and there is no clear sense of when these properties will reopen, though Steel…
-
On shapes and letters, sound and fury
Today, the Minnesota’s legislative leaders and Gov. Mark Dayton remain in a standoff over education funding. GOP House Speaker and DFL Senate Majority Leader Tom Bakk announced a comprehensive budget agreement in principle late last week, but they neglected to ensure that DFL Gov. Mark Dayton would sign the deal. That prospect is now in doubt. Dayton’s well-quoted…
-
The emperor has no bandwidth
As I prepare to embark upon another summer of media production and online teaching from my rural Northern Minnesota home, my thoughts again turn to broadband. We already wrote about the blasé outcome for broadband projects in this year’s legislative session. Of course, the technology costs money — a sizable investment for private companies or government to build…
-
Cliffs lays off 100 Iron Range salaried workers
On Monday, Cliffs Natural Resources announced 100 job cuts at its Northern Minnesota mines affecting salaried workers at Hibbing Taconite, United Taconite in Eveleth and Northshore Mining in Babbitt and Silver Bay. Cliffs had declared optimism about avoiding Iron Range shutdowns just last week, but also unveiled a mine closure in Michigan and huge first quarter losses.…
-
Life is for people, not industries or ideologies
Northland’s NewsCenter recently completed a four-part series “Boom, Bust, and Beyond” about the causes and effects of the coming mining downturn on the Iron Range and ways to deal with it. The last piece focused on economic diversification, a frequent topic here at MinnesotaBrown, and featured an interview with yours truly, along with other Range officials…
-
Dismal legislative effort on broadband continues
Waiting for the Minnesota legislature to act on broadband infrastructure for rural Minnesota is a lot like trying to update your operating system on a rural computer. It takes forever and halfway through you have to start over because of some stupid error message. One thing seems readily apparent from the last few days of…
-
Late night wars go international
Yesterday, Comedy Central surprised nearly everyone by announcing Trevor Noah as the next host of its flagship “The Daily Show,” succeeding the accomplished Jon Stewart. Noah is a Daily Show correspondent, but had only filed three pieces before the announcement. He’s no rookie though, having extensively toured the world as a stand-up comedian and hosted his own news comedy…
-
Time to retire state’s ‘flag by committee’
If you ask folks to name something about the Minnesota state flag, most would remark “It’s blue.” And, for the most part, it is blue. With some gobbledegook in the middle. Now, perhaps you’ve spent some time looking closer at that gobbledegook, enough time to realize that it looks like one of those old newspaper…
-
Duluth’s modernist library faces existential crisis
In November, we spoke about the unsettling news that the city of Duluth, Minnesota, faced with two unpleasant options — spend many millions to repair the Duluth Public Library, or many similar millions to demolish and replace the 35-year-old building. A few weeks ago, the steering committee formed to make a recommendation announced it favored rebuilding…
-
Tomassoni declines RAMS job amid controversy
This morning State Sen. David Tomassoni (DFL-Chisholm) announced that he would decline the position of Executive Director of the Range Association of Municipalities and Schools amid the continuing controversy over potential conflicts of interest. Sen. Tomassoni issued this statement: “Today the Campaign Finance Board issued the advisory opinion I requested relating to my role at RAMS.…