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Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

The DNR must be fair

Rift with Lynn Rogers no excuse for harming North American Bear Center

Posted 7/10/14

As we report this week, top officials within the Department of Natural Resources, in May, worked to block the transfer of a captive yearling bear to the North American Bear Center, in Ely.

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The DNR must be fair

Rift with Lynn Rogers no excuse for harming North American Bear Center

Posted

As we report this week, top officials within the Department of Natural Resources, in May, worked to block the transfer of a captive yearling bear to the North American Bear Center, in Ely.

The NABC is affiliated with Ely bear researcher Lynn Rogers, who has been embroiled in a very public spat with top DNR officials for the past few years. That dispute came to a head a year ago when the DNR refused to grant Rogers a research permit, a decision that Rogers appealed, leading to expensive litigation for both sides in the dispute.

We had hoped that the DNR’s antipathy towards Rogers, whether justified or not, would have no effect on the operations and the viability of the NABC, which is a valuable educational facility and a notable attraction for the Ely area.

In the past, the NABC has been able to acquire captive bears, without opposition from the DNR. But that changed in May, just as both sides were awaiting a decision by an administrative law judge.

In response to questions from the Timberjay, DNR officials explicitly denied this week that they opposed the NABC’s acquisition of the bear. They state that they made no efforts to influence the decision of the Wisconsin DNR, which had confiscated the wild bear from a private party and was housing it at a rehabilitation center in Rhinelander until a permanent home could be found for the animal.

Those official statements by the Minnesota DNR directly contradict the record. The Timberjay has obtained copies of more than a dozen emails from DNR and NABC officials, and others, and they paint a very different portrait of the events in May. In those emails, top DNR officials state clearly that they would not permit Wisconsin officials to transfer the bear to Minnesota. “Our collective decision is to not permit the transfer of this wild animal into your facility,” wrote Lou Cornicelli, Wildlife Research Manager for the DNR in a May 7 email to Judy Thon, director of the NABC.

“Minnesota is still not open to taking this bear,” wrote Lori Naumann, another top DNR official, the following day. Naumann’s email was copied to Amanda Kamps, the Wisconsin DNR biologist who was handling the transfer request. Interviews with two other individuals also confirm that Wisconsin officials were well aware of the opposition to the transfer from their colleagues in Minnesota, and that their opposition was a major factor in their decision not to send the bear to the NABC.

For DNR officials to now expressly state that they did not oppose the transfer, or attempt to influence the decision of Wisconsin officials is more than typical agency spin— it’s simply dishonest. There is no dispute that they made their opposition known to Wisconsin officials.

We have been concerned for some time about the DNR’s actions in regard to Rogers and others associated with him. We recognize that Rogers is a complex individual and that his actions are, on occasion, ripe for questioning. We have done so ourselves on occasion.

But Rogers is a private citizen and has a right to be difficult or bullheaded. The DNR is a public agency with broad authority and it has an absolute obligation to treat every citizen or organization in Minnesota with fairness and due process. They don’t have a right to be obstinate, simply because they don’t like someone. When public officials use their influence to thwart legitimate and legal actions by an organization such as the NABC, they are engaged in abuse of power— and that should disturb all Minnesotans, regardless of their views of Lynn Rogers, his research, or his methods.

That abuse becomes all the more troubling when combined with what are, unquestionably, false statements issued to a newspaper by a prominent state agency.

If top DNR officials believe in integrity, they will investigate this matter. There is no question that agency officials acted to thwart the acquisition of this bear by the NABC. But as the DNR’s legal counsel eventually concluded, the agency had no legal authority to do so.

So who authorized Cornicelli and Naumann to tell Wisconsin officials that they opposed the bear transfer to the NABC? Did that direction come from higher-ups, or did Cornicelli and Naumann do so on their own? And who authorized Cornicelli to issue statements to this newspaper that are directly contradictory to the factual record of statements he and others made in this case?

Minnesotans deserve to know what happened here, if only to ensure that such abuses don’t happen in the future. The NABC is a valuable addition to Ely and we don’t need state officials working to undermine it.