ELY- It was standing room only at Vermilion Fine Arts Theater here on Tuesday as Sen. Grant Hauschild hosted his fifth town hall event, this time accompanied by Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy. With political alarms going off for many Americans as a result of the unprecedented actions of the Trump administration, people came from as far away as Hibbing to voice their concerns on topics ranging from protecting the Boundary Waters to Medicaid cuts.
Becky Rom, a spokesperson for Northeast Minnesotans for Wilderness, kicked off the discussion on the Boundary Waters. “I’m asking the two of you in the Minnesota Senate to do everything you can to protect the Boundary Waters from the Trump administration and the draconian measures that are coming,” she said. She explained that her advocacy organization was tracking “executive orders, secretarial orders, and internal decisions in the Trump administration, all of which are bad when it comes to protecting our natural world.”
Protecting the Boundary Waters from the potentially damaging effects of copper-nickel mining in its headwaters has been a major political fault line in the region for more than a decade, one on which politicians in Washington seem keen to leave their mark. In 2016, the Obama administration halted federal mineral leases in Minnesota. Trump restored them during his first administration. Biden later reversed Trump’s order, closing 350 square miles of the Rainy River watershed to federal leasing for up to 20 years. Now the Trump administration is currently maneuvering to restore mining activities on federal land in northeast Minnesota through executive orders and at least one bill in Congress introduced in early February by U.S. Rep. Pete Stauber.
Nine individuals who spoke advocated for Boundary Waters protection from the actions of the Trump administration. Three of them asked Hauschild to state his position, especially given his known opposition to Biden’s mineral lease moratorium.
A few commenters disagreed on the need for a mining ban or lease moratorium. One speaker argued that the reaction to sulfate pollution in the headwaters of the Boundary Waters was overblown, noting that Birch Lake is not a Superfund site and that the sulfate levels measured in its waters were barely over the 10 parts per million standard the state had established for the protection of wild rice.
“Birch Lake is listed as impaired for wild rice because of sulfate concentrations of 10.6 parts per million. (That’s) not a lot, right? Birch Lake is harvested for wild rice annually, and has been for decades, and will be for decades.”
Hauschild’s mining position
Hauschild was upfront that his position was to remove Minnesota mining as a political football at the federal level and to leave the evaluation of whether a mine project should go forward in the hands of engineering and environmental experts working for the state. “I don’t agree with the Trump administration on expediting permits, opening up all federal land to mining, and not looking at our environmental policies that protect our national natural environment. These are the things that I think go far too far from the objective process that I would favor,” he said. “I think that what he is doing has crossed a line. I think what he has done with regard to the federal government, with not following the ways our laws are in place — those things are not things that I believe in.”
Hauschild offered a general assessment of the current chaos in Washington: “When it comes to the other things that are happening with the Trump administration, I’ve been very forceful in calling out those things, whether it’s the across-the-board firings of U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service members or whether it’s the cuts that could be coming down the pike on Medicaid. If you don’t think that our rural communities in northern Minnesota won’t be impacted by those Medicaid cuts, then you’re foolish, because it will cause a shutdown of some of our rural hospitals. It will cause nursing homes to close. These are the things that I think will impact our lives directly, and so I’m not afraid to call out when I see bad ideas, regardless of which party they are from.”
Rural health care
The ongoing concern about the future of ambulance services in rural areas came up as well. One commenter offered the advice he received while training as part of the ski patrol at Giants Ridge, “That if I come upon somebody who’s hurt on a hill and they need a doctor, to figure out a way to get that person to self-transport or have friends transport him to Duluth. Do not call an area ambulance — or that skier will end up in a Range hospital, which could be a trap where they’ll have to wait hours and sometimes days to get transferred.”
He contended that Range hospitals had cut services so much that they had become just waystations in transferring care to Duluth. Then he asked Senator Murphy to comment since she started out as a nurse.
Murphy agreed that the health care system is in some peril. “We see it most acutely where service lines are closing, hospitals are closing, clinics are closing, and larger parts of the state are going without access to care, as you were describing, and we’re going to have to figure out how to pump the brake and make the turn to a system that is financed differently than this.”
Hauschild said the Legislature is continuing to work on EMS solutions. “We’re looking at EMS taxing districts to try to encourage consolidation. Because I do think that is part of the answer … We’re putting together different packages. So, really, we are taking a multi-faceted approach to the EMS issue.”
Joe Baltich, chair of the Ely Area Ambulance Service Board of Directors, argued that consolidation of services wasn’t an affordable solution. He argued that smaller, localized services would service their communities better.
“Not if it was done right,” said Dena Suihkonen, the EMS director for Tower, who argued that a district approach would allow for better wages for EMS staff. “Right now, we are not paying living wages. You keep wanting to say our hospitals are bad, but you know what? Our providers up here rock.”
Other topics
Other attendees voiced their concern for what was happening in both St. Paul and Washington. Barb Jones of the Ely Climate Group spoke in favor of the state continuing to fund the solar power program for schools. This a program that ISD 696 has applied to, which will enable the Ely Public Schools to break even on a solar installation in five years and to make money selling power to the grid after that.
Hudson Kingston of the rural community advocacy group CURE asked the legislators to be vigilant in maintaining Minnesota’s commitment to achieve carbon neutrality and mitigate climate change. He specifically asked Hauschild to stop promoting biomass because it was not carbon neutral.
Hauschild responded that he agreed the state should adhere to its 2040 climate goals, but that fuels like biomass gave the state a smooth “glide” to transition to cleaner power.