Catie Clark

At Tuesday’s meeting of the Lake County Board of Commissioners, the county’s Directory of Environmental Services, Christine McCarthy, made a salient point, stating, “purpose of an environmental assessment worksheet is to identify whether an environmental impact statement is necessary.”
McCarthy’s statement is an example of what is both right and wrong with how Lake County has handled the two controversial zoning applications in my not-so-humble opinion. This is actually an area in which I have considerable experience.
Up until the 2010s, when my knees refused to spend any more 12-to-24-hour days at the side of drill rigs, I spent three decades as a professional earth scientist with expertise in groundwater investigation, igneous-hosted aquifers and petroleum reservoirs, and borehole geophysics. I have authored many peer-reviewed science and engineering publications. I managed a Superfund site in my misspent youth and developed data on three other Superfund projects used in court cases and binding records of decision. I even spent a few years raping and pillaging the earth and stealing from widows and orphans on behalf of oil companies, but I’m not proud of that, so let’s move on.

EAW purpose
With that out of the way, let’s get back to what McCarthy said on Tuesday. Yes, she is correct that EAWs are indeed used to determine the need for a much more in-depth EIS.
But EAWs serve other purposes according to the Environmental Quality Board’s own guidance. Besides determining EIS needs, an EAW also “provides permit information, informs the public about the project, and helps identify ways to protect the environment. The EAW is not meant to approve or deny a project, but instead act as a source of information to guide other approvals and permitting decisions.”
Lake County did not acknowledge these other purposes for an EAW during these recent meetings.
It was Julie Blackburn, an environmental expert for the developers, who initially made the claim about the purpose of an EAW, which McCarthy repeated at this Tuesday’s county board meeting.

Seeming disdain
I’ll be honest that I was less than pleased with Blackburn’s presentation because she missed something I considered important. She stated, with what appeared to me to be disdain for the environmental amateurs, that the residents who submitted the petition did not provide any evidence to support their case that an EAW should be mandatory.
Blackburn overlooked that the petitioners believed they had evidence provided by the initial Lake County’s environmental services staff report on Silver Rapids.
This report was handed out at the July 18 public hearing. It stated the staff felt an EAW was probably necessary based on the resort’s original preliminary plat and conditional use permit applications. Added to this is the lack of details on the amended Silver Rapids zoning applications. No one outside of the developers, their experts, the planning commission, and Lake County’s staff have seen the amended applications. Nor do I know anyone who has seen any of the reports that the developers have given Lake County on its wastewater, stormwater runoff mitigation, or groundwater. This is another example of how area residents have been cut out of the county’s zoning and land use approval process.
The application process should be more transparent than this. I spent many years living in Idaho, and I find it appalling that that ultra-regressive and conservative state’s land use processes have far better public outreach and involvement than blue-tinted Minnesota. Pounding on comparative studies of state laws gets boring fast, but I will opine that if this had been the resort communities of Sun Valley, Coeur d’Alene, or Jackson Hole, places where I have reported on land use applications like Silver Rapids, the application process would have started with a public meeting by the developers to present the project to the public with one to two months minimum lead time before a public hearing. I miss that feature of reporting on Idaho real estate and land use.
I can hear someone out there, maybe a civil servant, pointing out that I should have used the public information request to obtain the reports submitted by the developers. I can hear my reply, too, that a big news outlet can afford the potential cost and time to evaluate that material. While the Timberjay has me on the staff as the resident nerd, most small newspapers don’t. For good or ill, based on what I observed of Lake County’s staff, I decided to trust their real expertise to evaluate those reports.

What could be better
Lake County could have taken a few minutes out of the eight hours of Silver Rapids meetings to simply explain things to the public, like providing a summary of how the zoning application process works, explaining when public comments are appropriate and when they are not, or discussing why granting the applications with conditions could cover all the needed environmental assessment the public would like.
Such a move could have built trust and confidence that the county was adequately protecting its residents’ interests. The actions of planning commissioner Matt Unzeitig and assistant environmental services director Tanya Feldkamp were evidence that the people on the commission and the county’s staff were sensitive and concerned over the issues that concern this area’s residents.
The comment by one of the county commissioners at the meeting on Tuesday, that the petition was solely a delaying tactic, was dismissive and disdainful of the hundreds of people who are sincerely concerned about the health of the Boundary Waters and the surface waters like Farm Lake that feed their water into one of the last pristine wildernesses in the lower 48 states. It’s a lousy for a local elected official to diss his own voters.
As far as the developers are concerned, I have found them to be personable and reasonable businesspeople when talking to them directly. The F. I. Salter real estate firm which leads the development effort, is an old established Duluth company and has developed some well-respected projects in the Arrowhead region.
Here’s where the problem lies: the developers’ refusal or inability to engage directly with the resort’s neighbors looks short-sighted and discouraging to me. If the developers had bothered to spend a few extra dollars to design a public relations campaign, they could have made friends with some or maybe even most of the area’s locals. Instead, their stonewalling any contact with residents while at Lake County meetings has made them hundreds of opponents.
Ben Franklin was right when he said an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Or maybe, in this case, it should be a pound of CURE, the rural advocacy nonprofit that managed the petition for an EAW.

What’s next
The Lake County Planning Commission will next consider the Silver Rapids applications next week at its Sept. 5 meeting. It will interesting to see if the commission will put its money where its mouth is to put some conditions on the resort’s application that will have real teeth regarding what I consider the deep issues: water supply, stormwater runoff, traffic impacts on Kawishiwi Trail, pedestrian safety, boat safety at the rapids, the setback from the bluffs for the timeshare cabins, and degradation of the shoreline from the addition of the new docks and boat traffic.