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Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

MPCA on sulfates

As debate moves forward, public shouldn’t stand for misinformation

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It’s too early to judge whether the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s proposal to regulate sulfate discharges on a case-by-case basis represents an improvement, or a significant weakening of the current standard, which the agency established in the 1970s to protect wild rice and other aquatic organisms.

For one thing, it’s just a draft plan, and it will almost certainly be altered significantly before it might ever take effect. And second, there’s still too much that we don’t know about the ramifications of the agency’s proposal, because the effect will vary significantly from lake to lake, or river to river.

At least the agency, unlike our local politicians and Gov. Mark Dayton, isn’t running from its scientific findings. PCA officials made it clear that the research ordered and paid for by the state Legislature in 2011 largely upheld the validity of the state’s strict 10 mg/l standard, albeit with caveats. Indeed, in many cases, depending on the makeup of the wild rice waters in question, PCA officials acknowledged that an even stricter sulfate limit may be appropriate.

That’s a far cry from the nonsense that’s been spit out by the politicians in recent months. Ask most Iron Range elected officials and you won’t hear about the PCA’s own research, conducted with state dollars by scientists from the University of Minnesota, including extensive research at UM-D. That’s because the state study didn’t provide the answers they were looking for regarding the sulfate standard.

Legislators only approved the study after an earlier attempt to weaken the standard met opposition from the federal Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA said if the state wanted to weaken its sulfate standard, it had to have a scientific basis for doing so, not simply a desire to placate the mining industry. So imagine the politicians’ displeasure when their very study confirmed the validity of the original standard.

“The 10 milligram per liter standard holds up to the science,” said Dr. John Pastor, longtime UM-D professor and one of the lead researchers on the state’s study.

But you would never know that if you listened to the local politicians, who have been telling anyone who would listen for months that wild rice could thrive with sulfate levels as high as 1,600-2,500 mg/l. That’s just flat out wrong.

But don’t take our word for it— listen to Dr. Pastor. “Virtually all of what is being said on this by elected officials, including our governor, is scientifically inaccurate,” he said. That’s putting it nicely.

Dr. Pastor is raising other concerns as well. He worries that the PCA has jumped the gun in some of its assumptions, including its assumption that waters that are higher in iron can sustain a higher sulfate level without impacting wild rice.

Pastor said that’s not confirmed— indeed his ongoing research is suggesting that higher levels of iron may not mitigate the effects of higher sulfate levels at all. We expect the science will get sorted out over the next two years, as the PCA goes through its rulemaking process.

We understand that many residents of the area may question whether we should care about wild rice. This wild grain is an important asset in its own right, but it’s also an indicator of aquatic health in general. In waterways, sulfate is converted to sulfide by bacteria that live in the sediments, and that sulfide is toxic to many things, wild rice being among them. The research has demonstrated that at levels above 10 mg/l, the effects to wild rice frequently become detrimental, and that should be a wakeup call that the overall health of the waterway is being harmed.

The health of wild rice is certainly one issue, but the systematic way in which local politicians have misled the public on this issue is just as alarming. As readers know, we have chastised the St. Louis County School District for years over its misleading campaign to pass a 2009 referendum. We’re not about to look the other way when other local politicians engage in exactly the same kind of behavior.

Regardless of which direction the PCA’s regulation of wild rice is headed, we should insist that the upcoming debate be based on science, not misinformation and scare tactics. The evidence on that score is clear. When it comes to wild rice and the overall health of aquatic systems, sulfate levels matter. Those who say otherwise simply aren’t telling the truth.