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Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

Time to apologize

School District’s political attacks were baseless and ill-informed

Posted

Top St. Louis County School District officials owe St. Louis County Commissioner Tom Rukavina, Morse Township Supervisors, and their own board members an apology.

School officials, without any basis, went on a virtual political rampage this week over a county board resolution introduced by Rukavina that voiced support for Morse Township’s effort to annex six square miles of virtually uninhabited territory in an unorganized township north of Birch Lake.

At the school board’s meeting on Monday, Superintendent Steve Sallee and Business Manager Kim Johnson excoriated Rukavina’s resolution, telling board members its enactment would result in the loss of significant dollars in mineral royalties to the school district and that potential future losses could be “huge.”

School administrators had prepared a letter to the county board, and urged all of the board members in attendance Monday to sign it, putting board members right in the middle of a controversy that left the school district looking unprofessional.

At the same time, the district mounted an aggressive Facebook campaign, which caught fire Monday night, just ahead of Tuesday’s county board meeting. The postings, which appeared on several of the district’s individual school Facebook sites, reprinted the letter to the county board and urged school district supporters to contact their county commissioners to oppose the action. The incendiary language in the letter provoked a number of derogatory comments towards Rukavina and other politicians supposedly associated with the annexation proposal.

The letter even impugned the motivations of the Morse Town Board, strongly suggesting that the Morse Board was misrepresenting the annexation to the county board. “This matter is being presented to you as though it is an offer by the Town of Morse to assume responsibility for emergency services and snowplowing,” read the school district letter. “However, it is really a back-door effort to gain possession of this property because of the value it holds in its mineral rights.”

It was a shocking accusation by the school district, one that had no basis in reality. In fact, the six sections proposed for annexation by Morse Township have long been within the boundaries of the Ely School District. Annexing those lands from an unorganized township within the Ely School District to Morse Township, which is also within the Ely School District, would have absolutely zero impact on the St. Louis County School District. Period.

Not surprisingly, some of the officials involved didn’t exactly appreciate the school district’s wild and baseless accusations. In the end, because of unresolved concerns by members of Babbitt’s emergency services, Rukavina pulled the resolution from consideration, at least for now.

It appears, however, that there may be valid reasons for the proposed annexation, since the properties in question are substantially closer to Ely than to Babbitt, which makes the provision of emergency services from Ely more efficient and effective. By annexing the lands into Morse, 911 dispatchers would route any emergency calls to Ely responders in the future. Emergency officials know that response time can be key to an effective response in any situation, and a response from Ely, in most cases, could be made in half the time as one coming from Babbitt. For the handful of permanent or seasonal residents in the affected sections, it could, someday, make a big difference.

As for school districts in the area, it makes no difference at all. One can only wonder where St. Louis County school officials got their information and why they chose to mount such an aggressive effort without any effort to determine whether they had been misinformed.

Without a doubt, school officials shot themselves in the foot by attacking a county commissioner whose assistance they might very well need someday soon. An apology is certainly in order.