Push is on to mold played-out ore pits into lakeshore property

What will the Central Iron Range landscape look like 25 to 50 years out, when mining companies have exhausted the taconite ore at their operating pits near Virginia, Hibbing and Chisholm, and left them behind? State and local officials, residents and mining executives are working together to ensure that there won’t be more bleak post-industrial moonscapes in the region.

Instead of unusable, water-filled abandoned mine pits, they want recreational lakes, with homes and thriving business parks built along their terraced shorelines.

This vision began as a desire at U.S. Steel Corp.’s Minntac mine and mill to leave behind a positive legacy on the Central Range. And it’s blossoming into a cooperative effort some say is helping to bring together for greater good an area long divided by historical and personal differences.

Architect Doug Hildenbrand, co-chairman of the Central Iron Range Initiative (CIRI), is taking the lead on the mine pit project. The Initiative was formed to promote the interests of Balkan and Great Scott townships and the cities of Buhl, Chisholm, Hibbing and Kinney. Hildenbrand said the Initiative is providing a long-needed vehicle for the area to break down longstanding mistrust. Atop its priority list is a comprehensive plan for the future of the mine pits — a future that will add value to the Central Range.

“We are starting to evolve,” Hilden-brand said. “With the mining companies actually at the table, they’re going back home and coming to us with ideas. It’s very much a cooperative idea. I think with the DNR (Department of Natural Resources) and mining companies at the table, we’re actually starting to talk more openly.

“Until the last couple years we kept it pretty close to the chest, we didn’t really have a vehicle for communication. CIRI has given that to us,” Hildenbrand said.

The Initiative is working on a long list of projects to improve the quality of life and develop new businesses on the Central Range. While the mine pit project is only one of them, it’s the one that ties together many of the group’s goals — post-taconite economic development, strategic infrastructure planning, and positioning the Iron Range as a leisure and tourism destination.

Backed in the Minnesota Legislature chiefly by Sen. David Tomassoni (DFL-Chisholm) and Rep. Tony Sertich (DFL-Chisholm), CIRI has requested $1.2 million in bonding money to fund its plans, including the mine pit project. Its money request was turned down in 2002, and its fate in 2004 was still undecided in late March. Gov. Tim Pawlenty excluded the request from his own list of bonding priorities.

The idea to develop mine pits with an eye toward their end-use as recreational lakes originated with former Minntac General Manager James Swearingen and began in 1998 through a joint effort led by the University of Minnesota, the DNR and the mining companies called the Laurentian Vision Project. In many ways, it helped CIRI with its master plan for the region, said Chris Carlson, the U of M Architecture School researcher who helped direct it.

“We broadened their constituency to include the membership that they have now,” Carlson said, “and then we held a big design workshop. We started with a map on which CIRI had identified areas for development, and we made recommendations for how (the Initiative) could change.”

The biggest were pushing a wider-ranging vision that included the smaller towns of Buhl and Kinney, and gathering substantial input from the community through public meetings. Another change was to move the development emphasis away from privately-owned isolated lands around the pits to more visible, publicly- owned areas.

“We also showed them how the pits could be redesigned and re-landscaped to help people want to live there,” Carlson said. “We showed them how community development can be done around the pits. At each step of the way we reviewed the plans and ideas to show how they were practical.”

The three mining companies in the Central Range area — Minntac in Mountain Iron, Hibbing Taconite and Keewatin Taconite, are backing the concept. Their current mining patterns reveal that after 25 years, the central region will end up with two big mine-pit lakes. One will begin south of Chisholm, cross U.S. Highway 169 and terminate at Keewatin. It will be about 18 miles long. On the north side of Chisholm, a separate 12-mile-long lake will stretch east to Virginia.

The bonding request would help the Initiative design and understand the water levels as they will exist and help establish where the lake shores will be. Also to be analyzed is the kinds of game fish to be stocked in the lakes. The shores would

be constructed by terracing the sides of the pits to gradually slope into the water.

This would eliminate the steep drop-offs that have always made the crystal-clear deep waters of the abandoned pits virtually unusable.

Key in the effort is making the plans final as soon as possible so mining companies can start planning lakeshore instead of traditional pits, and secure proper DNR permits. Converting already-abandoned pits is considered too expensive — the concept only will work with current operations, according to the Initiative.

Minntac already is working on a demonstration of the concept, said Jerry Dombeck, the company’s mine planning coordinator.

“Our former general manager asked to pick an area to try this, and the area I selected was an active area with mining still going on,” he said. “It looks like it will have a lot of potential future value. It’s about half-finished now. The terrace ‘steps’ will be 300 feet wide by a half-mile long. It’s south-facing and overviews what will be the lake.”

Dombeck said Minntac is enthusiastic about the mine lake idea and will fully embrace it.

“Our goal is to do this while mines are still active,” he said. “This way the land will have value after the mining is done.”

The biggest benefit would be a new era of long-battling Iron Range constituencies instead working together for a common goal, Hildenbrand said.

“We’re kind of going through this together, the ideas are getting stronger and the cooperation is showing through,” he said. “We’ve been saying that we’re stronger in numbers than we are as individuals and I think that finally the government and industry and the citizens are all working together and we’re all at the table with a vision here.”