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A tale of two junkyards
I was raised in the 1980s and early ’90s on a family-owned junkyard along the storied Iron Range Highway 7 on the edge of the Sax-Zim Bog. Two trailer homes rested upon these swampy grounds: one filled to the ceiling with hubcaps and the other which housed my family. The steam cloud from Eveleth Taconite filled…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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Embattled RAMS settles on four candidates for top job
The Range Association of Municipalities and Schools (RAMS) has announced four candidates for its long vacant position of executive director. The position drew significant controversy earlier this year when the RAMS board named State Sen. David Tomassoni to the position, presenting a widely-perceived conflict of interest for Tomassoni and the group that lobbies St. Paul…
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Essar ramps up Nashwauk construction
Construction is accelerating at the long awaited $1.9 billion Essar iron mine near Nashwauk, while Essar now says it’s optimistic about producing direct reduced iron products here. In a tour of the site on May 21 with Mitch Brunfelt, Essar’s assistant general counsel and director of government and public relations, I took pictures and observed…
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IRRRB mulls $33 million 2016 budget
Even though the legislative session may go to the wire tonight at midnight, Iron Range lawmakers — who comprise the statutory Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board — will meet Tuesday morning in St. Paul to hash out the agency’s $33 million FY 2016 budget. “I am pleased that over half of the proposed budget…
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The human connection lives on
I was moved to read this post by Minnesota blogger Aaron Rupar, previously of City Pages and Fox 9, but writing this for his personal site. His grandfather, George Raskovich of Nashwauk, died when he was a young boy, but he recently formed a connection with the man’s memory thanks to the writing of another Northern Minnesota writer…
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Better living through sawhorses
In the hurly-burly churn of Iron Range news and controversies, it can be hard to find the steady constant of a noble cause. How about sawhorses? Everyone needs a sawhorse, eventually. Those sawhorses should be better. Lighter. More easy to store. And if an entrepreneurial couple from St. Paul with a tie to the Iron Range so happens…
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The Iron Range is dead; long live the Range
“The king is dead; long live the king.” This saying from the height of European monarchies meant when the person at a nation’s helm physically died, the title lived on with the next person in the royal line. Massive change could be seen as mere progression. This simple continuity kept order even at a time…
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A close look at Essar construction
Yesterday, Dan Kraker of Minnesota Public Radio filed a report about Essar Minnesota, the new taconite plant under construction near Nashwauk, Minnesota, on the Mesabi Iron Range. In essence, the long awaited project — funded in part by massive state and regional investments — has reached the critical mass needed to see completion (as soon…
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Essar seeks legislation to avoid paying back public funds
Last week, Northern Minnesota media sources, with help from new lobbying activity by Essar Steel Minnesota, finally connected the dots that this proposed new Iron Range taconite mine would really, truly not build a steel mill with its project as originally planned. As such, Essar is due to run afoul of the agreement that brought $67 million in…
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Rock and a hard place, change coming to the Iron Range
Some of life’s biggest myths are that 30 years is a long time, that today doesn’t matter, and that anything is permanent. Here on Northern Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range, the lessons of change that come from digging out the ground beneath our very feet have been hard learned. But what’s learned is so easily forgotten after those paltry 30 years.…
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Star Tribune pens glowing Essar Steel update
Today’s front page feature in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Minnesota’s newspaper of record, was a Dee DePass story entitled “After seven years, Essar’s giant Iron Range project finds a groove.” The story is about progress at Essar Steel Minnesota, the spinoff of Essar Global, an Indian company which seeks to build a new taconite plant on…
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A schoolhouse divided will not stand
Last week, the Nashwauk-Keewatin School Board voted to dissolve its shared services agreement with the Greenway School District on the western Mesabi Iron Range. Days later Greenway also backed away from most elements of the partnership. This marks the end of an experiment exposing many hard truths about the future of school and community collaboration on the Iron Range.…