Charges were dropped against the three Duluth bicyclists tagged over the summer for impeding traffic while delivering food to a soup kitchen.

In a story first reported on Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy's web site, Sadie Sigford,(left in photo) Alex Strachota and Greg Schultz (right) were ticketed by police in July and August on Fourth Street in Duluth, which is a designated bike route by the city. The three, with a trailer behind one of the bicycles, were making their weekly run from Whole Foods co-op to the Damiano Center.

Tuesday, according to the Duluth News Tribune, the city attorney dropped the charges as the three made another court appearance. Cary Schmies of the city attorney’s office, said the officers were wrong to tell the bicyclists that they should weave in and out of parked cars to let traffic go by, but they should find a place to pull over when traffic backs up behind them, according to the News Tribune story.

It was the third appearance for the trio, who refused to plead guilty to lesser charges and sentences offered to them earlier. Erin Cartwright,(center in photo) who was visiting from Indianapolis and was tagged in the July incident, already had been cleared by officials. The case was exhibit A on why Minnesota needs a “Complete Streets” law which requires cities and counties to consider the safety of pedestrians and bicyclists, as well as vehicles, when renovating major roads or building new ones.

Not so victorious was the air over the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and Voyageurs National Park when the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency Citizens Board voted Tuesday to approve a plan that is meant to eliminate haze over national parks and wilderness areas by 2064.

Mary Marrow, MCEA’s lawyer in the case, argued in October that the plan needed to put stronger controls on Xcel’s two oldest Sherco coal-fired power plants in Becker in order to eliminate the haze. She was joined by officials from the National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service who also said the plan needed to set standards for reducing air pollution from taconite plants. Neither of those changes was included in the haze plan, making it unlikely the air will be clean by 2064.

Instead, the plan only asks taconite plants to better monitor their air pollution and do further research into how to reduce that pollution. The plan requires 11 Minnesota power and taconite plants to update their pollution control equipment within five years of the plan’s approval by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“We’re not going to get where we need to get,” Marrow told the St. Paul Pioneer Press after the vote. “It’s only going to get harder as we move forward into the decades in front of us.”

Barbara Battiste, the only board member to vote against the plan, said she wanted to see a plan which would cut emissions quicker and monitor the pollution better.