Matt Doll, Minnesota Environmental Partnership
The Minnesota Legislature returned from its weeklong break this Earth Week, and MEP and our allies wasted no time before getting in touch with Legislators on a key issue: the recent failures of our state agencies to adequately protect Minnesotans from big polluters.
For several years now, Minnesota’s environmental organizations have been discussing this challenge. We’ve seen far too many examples in which certain industries have gotten away with long-term, devastating patterns of pollution without intervention from the agencies meant to prevent it.
We’ve seen Southeast Minnesotans’ drinking water increasingly contaminated by nitrate while agencies use the same old ineffective strategies to eat around the edges of the problem. We’ve seen flawed permits for projects like the PolyMet mine. Frontline communities in Minneapolis have seen the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) fail to step in when air emissions from Northern Metals and Smith Foundry poisoned surrounding residents.
The People Not Polluters coalition was formed with MEP and other groups to raise these issues not as separate problems, but as a widespread pattern of undue polluter influence over state agencies. We have a lot of strong environmental laws that are meant to protect our health and natural resources, but they don’t mean much if industries successfully influence state agency decisions to escape accountability.
We appreciate the good work that many agencies do to monitor Minnesota for pollution and provide multiple important programs, but we’re counting on them to do more and better. The US EPA has stepped in on several of these cases to help protect Minnesotans’ health, but we can’t count on that to continue – we need our state to step up and do the job. We’ve communicated this to our state agencies, but we need them to feel the urgency to act. For that reason, we’ve focused on talking to Minnesota Legislators, who have the oversight authority to hold agencies like Pollution Control Agency, Department of Agriculture, and Department of Natural Resources accountable.
Many Minnesotans agree with us, and more than 1500 signed a petition for Legislators to hold hearings on this pattern of polluter capture. This week, we were proud to deliver those petitions to leaders at the State Capitol.
Steve Morse and I represented Minnesota Environmental Partnership at these meetings, along with friends from Sierra Club North Star Chapter and other organizations. We met with legislative leaders including Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy, House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman, Floor Leaders and chairs and co-chairs and minority leads of the Legislature’s Environment committees. Several of our meetings were on Tuesday and coincided with an Earth Day rally featuring MEP and hosted by Friends of the Boundary Waters, providing a powerful backdrop to the conversation.
Our team gave each legislator a copy of the petition as well as personal stories. Each of us has been affected by polluter capture in different ways, whether it’s pollution in our drinking water, carcinogens in the air we breathe, or harm to our climate.
Legislators told us – understandably – that they’re in the midst of a busy, jam-packed Legislative session, and that holding a hearing before it ends less than a month from now may be a tall order. But several expressed support and pledged to do their best to bring these issues to a public hearing.
We’re glad that key lawmakers and many Minnesotans are taking an interest in polluter capture. All Minnesotans should feel safe when they drink from the tap and take a breath of fresh air. We need our state to do everything it can to make that ideal a reality for all.