Silver Rapids developers hand in their permits

REGIONAL- Quietly and with little fanfare, the owners of Silver Rapids Resort have surrendered their permits and approvals for the proposed redevelopment of the century-old resort, near Ely, following a legal challenge by local residents and the Department of Natural Resources.
Resort owners handed in their conditional use permit and preliminary plat application on Oct. 21, just three days after Judge Eric Hylden of the Minnesota Sixth District Court in Duluth issued an “order to maintain status quo” at the resort, stopping all work related to the applications until a scheduled hearing on the pair of lawsuits on Nov. 27.
The owners of the property proposed to renovate the resort’s motel, build a new lodge, construct 49 quarter-fraction timeshare cabins, install 15 new docks, and make other improvements.
A grassroots opposition made up of local residents and landowners formed a new nonprofit called Community Advocates for Responsible Development, or CARD, and filed a lawsuit opposing the applications, arguing that Lake County had violated state law in granting the applications. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources filed its own lawsuit on similar grounds.
Summary judgment
With the permits now surrendered, both Lake County and the Silver Rapids Resort filed motions for summary judgment with Judge Hylden seeking dismissal of the cases as moot.
The language from Silver Rapid’s motion summarized their thinking on the applications and the motions to dismiss the lawsuits: “(The) defendant is confident that the county’s approvals were properly issued but lacks the time to wait for the exhaustion of claims attacking those approvals. So, it surrendered those approvals on Oct. 21… and intends to pursue a course different from the applications that led to those approvals by pursuing improvements allowed under existing rights or a scaled down project with fewer units.”
A summary judgment is a decision in a case issued by a judge when none of the facts in a case are contested. A civil case, such as the ones filed here, usually goes to a trial when facts in a case are contested by one or more parties to a suit and the parties are unable to negotiate a settlement.
Summary judgment motions must be filed in Minnesota 28 days before a judge can decide on them. All four motions were filed on the last possible day for Judge Hylden to issue a summary judgment on the two lawsuits on Nov. 27.
Fallout
The decision by developers to reconsider their plans for the Silver Rapids site is a victory for local residents, who had strongly opposed the plan as proposed. While most told county officials during the one public hearing on the matter this past summer that they supported redevelopment of the property, they balked at the scale of the project and the potential impact it might have.
Over 400 area residents had signed a petition last summer seeking the completion of an environmental assessment worksheet, or EAW, a process that likely would have clarified the issues surrounding the number of units that could be built on the property. The conditional use permit approved by Lake County appears to have exceeded the number of units allowed under county ordinance by nearly double, and that fact became a central point in the litigation filed to stop the development.
“This is what happens when local government doesn’t listen to its constituents,” said Hudson Kingston, chief legal counsel for the nonprofit group CURE. Kingston assisted local residents in petitioning for an EAW, but the county ultimately rejected the position.
“The petition we presented would have prevented any need for a lawsuit,” said Kingston. “CURE hopes that the county will be more responsive to its constituents and will follow the law in the future.”