PolyMet's Water Pollution Permit For Sulfide Ore Mine Thrown Out!

Paula Maccabee, Counsel & Advocacy Director - WaterLegacy 

Minnesota’s Highest Court Rules that Permit Approval Was “Arbitrary and Capricious” Due to Agency Procedural Irregularities  

When WaterLegacy was founded in 2009, environmental groups warned us that the PolyMet copper-nickel sulfide ore mine proposed for northeastern Minnesota was “inevitable” and that we were wasting our time trying to stop the PolyMet mine. They spoke too soon.

This year, the PolyMet mine was dealt a major blow. The Minnesota Supreme Court tossed out PolyMet’s water pollution permit, ruling that the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA)’s decision to approve the permit was “arbitrary and capricious.” 

Canoeing to PolyMet Proposed Site (photo credit: Robin Heil)

The PolyMet sulfide ore deposit is located in the headwaters of the St. Louis River, the largest United States tributary to Lake Superior. If constructed and allowed to operate, the PolyMet mine would destroy 1,000 acres of Minnesota wetlands and peatlands, contaminate drinking water and surface water with sulfate and toxic metals, decimate wild rice, and increase already dangerous levels of mercury contamination of fish, which would particularly threaten tribal communities that rely on fish for subsistence. 

WaterLegacy, the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, and our other allies argued that the PolyMet mine would violate the Clean Water Act, Minnesota water quality standards, and the water quality standards that protect aquatic life and human health on the Fond du Lac reservation.  

The wheels came off the PolyMet Express when Minnesota’s Supreme Court reversed the permit.

Starting in 2018, WaterLegacy filed state Data Practices Act requests and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and lawsuits, worked with whistleblowers, and secured a special trial to expose MPCA’s improper actions that hid warnings from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). We and our allies revealed that the EPA concluded that PolyMet’s water permit failed to set enforceable limits to comply with the Clean Water Act and state and tribal water quality standards. But the MPCA had taken the unprecedented action of convincing EPA political appointees under the Trump Administration to withhold the EPA’s highly critical comments. MPCA then deleted its “smoking gun” emails with EPA appointees and kept the EPA’s conclusions hidden from the public, the press, and the courts.  

In response to the MPCA’s actions, in August 2023—for the first time ever in Minnesota history—the Minnesota Supreme Court concluded that a state agency had engaged in procedural irregularities. In fact, the Court issued a stinging rebuke of the MPCA, ruling that the MPCA’s irregular procedures to hide federal criticisms of the PolyMet permit and to destroy official documents were “danger signals” that the MPCA “did not genuinely engage in reasoned decision-making.”  

The Minnesota Supreme Court’s decision to throw out PolyMet’s water pollution permit was a complete vindication of WaterLegacy’s work after many years of investigation and litigation, much of which was supported by the Impact Fund. The Minnesota Supreme Court not only reversed a major PolyMet permit, but also held that “secrecy is unacceptable.” The Court’s decision has already been cited several times, and we believe it will have important precedential value in Minnesota to protect clean water and regulatory integrity. 

Most importantly, since the courts stayed PolyMet’s permits while MPCA’s irregular procedures were investigated and litigated, PolyMet was not allowed to begin mine construction. Although PolyMet’s permits were issued in the fall of 2018, five years later no wetlands have been destroyed, no resources needed for the exercise of treaty-reserved rights have been impaired, and none of the streams, rivers, or lakes in the Lake Superior Basin have been polluted by the proposed PolyMet copper-nickel mine. 

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