The Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board approved a loan today of up to $4 million to PolyMet Mining Co., but environmental groups are questioning whether the loan was legal.
PolyMet asked the IRRB for the loan to help it buy private land within the Superior National Forest. The company plans to trade that land for federal land where the proposed mine would be located. PolyMet has mineral rights to the copper mine site but the Forest Service owns the land.
The board's vote was 9-0.
Two environmental groups said the loan was ill-time and a violation of state law.
The Center for Biological Diversity sent a letter to IRR Commissioner Sandy Layman saying the loan is premature because an environmental review of the land trade has just begun. Marc Fink, Duluth attorney for the center, says that's a violation of the Minnesota Environmental Policy Act because IRR is a state agency.
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"Under MEPA you can't have state or local agencies giving approval or financial assistance to projects that are still going through the review process," Fink said. "It's really about not prejudicing the process. We don't want so much state money into the project that it becomes a reason it gets approved even when it shouldn't based on its merits."
Fink cited a 2007 Minnesota court opinion that nullified a wetlands credit arrangement between St. Louis County and PolyMet. Judge Heather Sweetland nixed the deal because the PolyMet environmental review had not been completed.
An IRR spokesman said Layman received the letter by e-mail but did not raise the issue at this afternoon's board meeting in Eveleth. The issue did not come up during the board's discussion.
PolyMet's open-pit copper mine also would produce nickel, platinum and other valuable metals. The site of the proposed mine is near Babbitt, while the company would use the former LTV Steel taconite plant near Hoyt Lakes as a processing center.
The $600 million project would create 400 or more jobs for about 20 years, digging and processing billions of dollars of high-value minerals. The project has been praised by Iron Range leaders as a critical step toward diversifying the region's dependence on iron-ore mining. PolyMet is the first of what could be a half-dozen or more copper mines stretching from the Ely area to Aitkin County.
But several environmental groups, tribal natural resource agencies, some Northland residents and even the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have been critical of the proposal, noting the long history of pollution at other copper mines worldwide, mainly from sulfuric acid runoff when copper-bearing rock is exposed to air and water.
