Robert Monteith

Every year, the Minnesota Lottery generates tens of millions of dollars that flow into the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund. Voters created it that way in 1988, by constitutional amendment, because they wanted conservation money protected from the annual grind of legislative politics. Some things, the thinking went, should be beyond reach.
That idea took a hit this month.
On May 11, the Minnesota Senate voted 34-29 to strip $1.252 million from Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness, killing the next three years of a program that has reached more than 16,000 Minnesota students since 2019, sending hundreds of them on overnight canoe trips into the BWCAW. The justification was a social media video in which the organization’s state lottery logo appeared briefly before the video was taken down, within hours, with a formal apology.
The cut was led by Sen. Keri Heintzeman of Nisswa, who argued the organization had misused the public trust. What she didn’t say, but what the timing makes plain, is that Friends of the Boundary Waters also opposes copper-nickel sulfide mining near the BWCAW. Two weeks before the Senate vote, President Donald Trump signed H.J. Res. 140, stripping federal protections from 225,000 acres of public land surrounding the Boundary Waters and opening it to Twin Metals, which is part of a Chilean-owned mining conglomerate. The education grant was cut in the aftermath of that victory.
So, it’s worth asking the question plainly. Who is actually better off now?
Not the kids. The grant was a detailed work plan, submitted to the Legislature last November, describing how the organization would connect 12,000 students to the Boundary Waters through lessons aligned to state science and social studies standards, skill-building workshops, and multi-day canoe trips. The trips targeted underserved communities. Scholarships averaged $760 per student.
That program is now roughly $400,000 short of what it needs to continue, and the organization is hoping for private donors.
Not Ely, or northeastern Minnesota. The grant included partnerships with area outfitters and a seasonal intern position based in Ely. It was putting Iron Range kids on the water every year. It was engendering a lifelong love of the Boundary Waters in students who could have spent a lifetime visiting here over and over again. All that’s gone now.
Not the mining industry. Twin Metals still needs state permits to proceed. The federal protection was already stripped before the Senate ever voted on this grant. There was no strategic necessity here. The education program posed no legal obstacle to the mine.
What’s left is the logic of demonstration. You oppose us, so we take something from you. The fact that what gets taken belongs to children who had nothing to do with the dispute is, at best, an inconvenience. At worst, it’s the point.
Friends of the Boundary Waters will keep running programs this summer. They’ll be in the Ely Fourth of July parade. They have a film screening planned for August and a bike ride on the Mesabi Trail. They intend to reapply for state funding next cycle.
The Minnesota Lottery will keep generating conservation dollars and funding projects across the state. And the political machine that damaged us this month will move on to something else, largely unconcerned about who will make the next sacrifice. That’s just how it works now. Spite trumps both common sense and our collective needs.