A Year of Making Waves

It often feels like time to reflect is a rarity at MCEA. It seems there’s always a hearing to prepare for, a court decision on the horizon, or a person whose life is impacted by pollution to learn from and collaborate with. Although it sometimes seems like we’re moving inch by inch, this year has seen campaigns we’ve worked on for years leap forward, even as we’ve discovered new threats to our air, water, and climate. 

That’s why it’s important we take time to look back and celebrate everything we accomplished together. Because we really can’t do it without your support. As we enter our 50th year, we hope the foundations we’ve laid will support a healthy future for all of Minnesota. 

The ways you make our work possible

Whether we’re sending a lawyer to argue at the Minnesota Supreme Court or an advocate to give testimony at the legislature, we at MCEA know our supporters are standing beside us. At our annual fall event, Legally Green, a person who has been fighting nitrate contamination in southeastern Minnesota asked one of the staff if they thought things could change. 

The staff member couldn’t make any promises about what state agencies would do, but they could promise MCEA would keep fighting alongside community members. And you’re fighting alongside us too. 

This year, our supporters sent 8,603 messages through our actions. You contacted your representatives, the governor, state agencies, and the federal government to tell them Minnesota’s environment matters to you. Sometimes it might feel like sending an email won’t make a difference, but when we collectively stand together, we see the difference our voices make in chorus.

This year, more than 1,550 people donated to MCEA, providing over half of our budget that fuels our work. These are people like you, who understand that protecting our environment is imperative and requires coordinated, collective, and yes, legal action. Thank you.

Next year, we celebrate 50 years of defending the True North of Minnesota’s environment. We look forward to linking arms together with you in this continued work. Before we forge ahead, let’s take a minute to see all we accomplished together. 

Blow after blow for a bad proposal

Let’s start with a big one, the underdog story that our CEO Kathryn Hoffman took on when she started as a staff attorney at MCEA - the dangerous and damaging PolyMet mining proposal. This is a tale of international mining company Glencore, hoping to set up shop in Minnesota with no respect for our laws or natural resources, against  our small, nonprofit law firm that refuses to give up the fight to protect Lake Superior and the Boundary Waters. 

This year may not have seen the final blow on this bad proposal, but it has marked the beginning of the end. As we stepped into the courtroom in case after case, we saw appellate judges, the Minnesota Supreme Court, and an administrative law judge all agree that several permits issued to PolyMet five years ago failed to guarantee the protection of one of our most precious resources – clean water.  

Our PolyMet wins demonstrate the important role MCEA plays in holding corporations and our government regulators accountable. The Minnesota Supreme Court, for example, chastised the Pollution Control Agency for actively trying to conceal critical comments that expert staff at the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wanted to submit on PolyMet’s draft water permit. The case took years of litigation, including a week-long trial. But we were vindicated, and now, for the first time, EPA’s experts can weigh in publicly with their concerns. This case affects not just PolyMet, but hopefully sends a strong signal to the MPCA and all Minnesota agencies and local governments that we expect our regulators to be transparent; hiding criticisms from the public won’t be accepted.

Separately, in our challenge to PolyMet’s permit-to-mine, again after years of litigation that included another weeks-long trial, the administrative law judge concluded that DNR’s approval of PolyMet’s unproven plan to hold mine tailings in a lake for perpetuity violates Minnesota rules. Both the company, and the state agency that is there to protect our valued resources, failed to abide by the law. 

These are just two of the many successful arguments we’ve made to beat back PolyMet’s dangerous proposal. And each time we win, protections for our environment get stronger, because companies – and the agencies that regulate them – are held accountable and know they will face the same scrutiny in the future.

We know the success of this work depends on partnerships with so many people and organizations, like  the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa,  the Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness, and thousands of MCEA supporters. We’re proud to have worked alongside everyone who cares as much as we do about our environment, and we’ll continue to do so until PolyMet’s threat of polluting our waters is over. 

The case for clean water

MCEA is not afraid to take on the big issues, even when it means we need to take on powerful interests. When people in Minnesota’s karst region facing nitrate-contaminated wells couldn’t find help to protect their drinking water, we stepped up. It’s the kind of work that’s important to us, building coalitions with grassroots organizations and people directly affected by pollution. It’s also the kind of work we know can be successful with a powerful network that refuses to let the health of Minnesota’s people and environment be threatened. 

In November, the EPA, in response to our petition seeking federal intervention to help with the crisis in the karst region,  put Minnesota state agencies on notice, requiring them to take action to ensure safe drinking water. More than a thousand supporters have joined us in demanding government action to reduce nitrate contamination in Minnesota's karst region. In the year ahead, we’ll be working for solutions. These solutions include requiring polluters to provide safe drinking water for impacted residents, a “polluter pays” model that uses fertilizer fees to fund treatment systems and deeper wells, and help for small farms to better manage their manure storage.

Perhaps the biggest challenge we took on this year for water and for people’s health was tackling the scourge of  PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” in our environment. We lobbied tirelessly for legal protections against PFAS contamination alongside Clean Water Action Minnesota and Amara Strande, the courageous young Maplewood woman who testified while fighting a rare cancer she developed after exposure to the chemicals (and who loved music, her cat, and the game World of Warcraft). 

The passing of Amara’s Law, provides the most robust protections against these dangerous “forever chemicals” in the country, making our state, which is where these chemicals were first created,  now a leader in preventing their spread. 

The passing of this law will also be a defining moment in the lives of all who worked on this legislation. 

But while we know that banning the continued use of these chemicals is essential, they are already pervasive in our environment. That’s why we created an advocacy report to talk about the next challenge in PFAS mitigation. Other states have already begun to address legacies of pollution from spreading contaminated sewage sludge on agricultural fields as fertilizer. We know that Minnesota must too. We spent the summer testing around wastewater treatment plants and areas downstream of land-applied sewage biosolids  to better understand where these chemicals are concentrated in the state – and help state agencies begin to address this dangerous contamination.

Creating policies to protect us from pollution

As a member the Frontline Communities Protection Coalition, MCEA helped pass one of the strongest laws in the nation aimed at better protecting communities overburdened by air pollution. Communities of color, immigrants, and low-income earners are disproportionately impacted by polluting factories, are often bisected by highways or other major thoroughfares, and lack adequate green space. 

MCEA helped write the groundbreaking new “cumulative impacts” law, which requires that permit decisions for new or expanded sources of pollution in these neighborhoods must take existing sources of pollution into account. Other initiatives MCEA pushed for in recent years were also included in the bill, such as dedicating 40% of large pollution settlements to affected communities, creating a network of air pollution monitors, and requiring public meetings for “non-expiring” air pollution permits. MCEA also provided legal assistance to the coalition and kept key legislators, community members, and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency at the negotiating table until the job got done. 

Even as we work on ensuring that rules to implement this law are strong, we’ll keep stepping up to calls from our community partners. The Smith Foundry in the East Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis,  a significant  source of pollution in an overburdened community, is an example of a facility this law would impact. The recent news that a surprise EPA inspection of the factory  found disabled pollution control equipment and permit violations has generated anger and concern. We’re continuing our work with people who live in East Phillips to hold Smith Foundry and other polluting businesses, and the MPCA which is regulating these polluters, accountable and to advocate for laws that will make it harder to contaminate residential air.

A law to safeguard the future

Our climate work this year started off with a bang in the legislative session with the passage of the 100 percent clean energy law, which mandates that all Minnesota utilities supply electricity generated by carbon-free resources by 2040. MCEA staff helped write the bill, negotiated with electric co-ops and investor-owned utilities, and played defense against attempts by industry to weaken the law’s climate protections.

In 2007, we helped pass the Next Generation Energy Act, which set bipartisan greenhouse gas reduction targets based on the best available science at that time. Sixteen years later, scientists tell us we need to move a lot faster than previously thought to reach net-zero emissions. Thanks to MCEA’s efforts over the last two years, the legislature passed the Next Generation Climate Act this session, a law that finally updates Minnesota’s climate goals to reflect the demands of science and sets a 2050 date for net-zero emissions. Your effort to contact legislators just before the session closed helped ensure this critical change didn’t get pushed off to another year. 

Now, we’re working on making the promises and goals in these laws a reality. 

This past September, our staff convinced the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission to close one of the loopholes utility companies could try to use to avoid complying with the true spirit of the 100 percent law. We also compelled commissioners to mandate that utilities start planning for the seismic shift in energy production now, so they can’t make excuses later about not having enough time to flip the switch. These wins might seem in the weeds, but we all know the devil is often in the details, which is why MCEA never overlooks them. 

This is just some of the work you helped us accomplish this year. As we look ahead to our 50th anniversary, we’re ready to roll up our sleeves and continue protecting the health of Minnesota’s environment and people. We know you’re right there with us.