Press Release: Another legal defeat for PolyMet - Minnesota Supreme Court reinstates air permit appeal

DATE: 06/21/23   CONTACT: Aaron Klemz, MCEA, aklemz@mncenter.org, 763-788-0282 

St. Paul, Minnesota - Today, the Minnesota Supreme Court issued a decision that reinstates Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy’s appeal of the PolyMet air pollution permit. PolyMet had sought to dismiss MCEA’s appeal on procedural grounds. This decision sends the air permit appeal back to the Minnesota Court of Appeals, which will now decide the merits. 

This is yet another legal defeat for the PolyMet proposal. On June 6, 2023, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers denied PolyMet a key federal wetlands permit. In January 2022, the Court of Appeals reversed PolyMet’s water permit, sending it back to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA). In April 2021, the Minnesota Supreme Court reversed PolyMet’s Permit to Mine, sending it back to the Department of Natural Resources for a contested case hearing on PolyMet’s tailings basin closure scheme, and to add a permit “term.” PolyMet has also been unable to stop litigation seeking to overturn the U.S. Forest Service’s action allowing PolyMet to build an open pit mine on Superior National Forest land.  

“PolyMet has, yet again, failed to limit Minnesota’s review of its flawed proposal -- this time on narrow procedural grounds," said JT Haines, Northeast Minnesota program director at MCEA. "We applaud this decision from the Supreme Court and look forward to a full review at the Court of Appeals."

The air permit appeal will now return to the Court of Appeals, which will examine if the MPCA properly investigated evidence that PolyMet is planning an expansion. 

MCEA, Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness, and Sierra Club challenged MPCA’s failure to investigate PolyMet’s expansion plan in a January 2022 appeal. This appeal arose after the Court of Appeals remanded PolyMet’s air permit to MPCA for such an investigation in March 2021, but MPCA declined to do so and simply reissued PolyMet’s permit based on a presumption that PolyMet’s application was accurate. 

MCEA was joined in this appeal by three “friends of the court,” Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid, Clean Up The River Environment (“CURE”), and Law Professors Peter Knapp, Henry Allen Blair, and Elizabeth Bentley. These amici argued that PolyMet’s procedural argument for dismissing MCEA’s appeal could limit access to justice for other plaintiffs in a variety of cases.      

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