MPR: The History of the IRRRB

The History of the IRRRB
By Bob Kelleher
December 6, 1999
Part of "After the Mines"

The Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board has a history stretching back more than half a century. It's predecessor was created to revive a region flattened physically and economically by overlogging, mining, and the Great Depression.

Formed as a state department in 1941, the agency has worked ever since to revitalize the region's mining and forestry, and to create an economic base less dependent on iron mining. In the years since the agency has enjoyed massive successes and huge failures. Its always been the center of controversy.

Historian Dana Miller says the once great white-pine forests had, by the 1930s, fallen before the axes of overzealous loggers. The blight was worse in Northeastern Minnesota's mining regions. Nearly every town was built near the edge of an open-pit iron mine, nestled amongst mounds of waste rock, tinted rust red by the all-permeating iron dust. This area was in Babbitt.
Courtesy: Minnesota Historical Society - Locator: HD3.21 r1, Negative: 3094

TO UNDERSTAND WHERE where the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board comes from, you have to understand life in the 1930s, in the iron-mining region of Itasca and St. Louis Counties, known as the Iron Range.

Once a wild paradise of clear lakes and pine forest, mining and logging transformed the range into a dingy desert of huge open pit holes and scraggly second growth woods and stumps.

Miller: This area was known as the cut over area in the '30s, because the logging was pretty much done, and everything had been cut; clear-cut pretty much to the Canadian border.

Miller: In the '30s, it was a real desolate looking place. There are very few places on earth that have been pitted and scarred like the Iron Range.

After just 50 years of intensive mining, Minnesota's reserves of high-grade iron ore, once thought inexhaustible, were nearly spent. Meanwhile, the Great Depression had idled America's industries and forced Minnesota's iron miners into work camps and soup lines. Demand for steel was absolutely flat. A workforce of 12,000 miners in the 1920s shrank to less than 2,000 in the 1930s.

In April of 1941, Governor Harold Stassen signed legislation creating the Department of Iron Range Resources. Funded by a small portion of the state's tax on iron shipments, the department was charged with addressing economic distress and unemployment, by helping create resource-based jobs. It's focus was the Iron Range but it's scope could be anywhere in Minnesota.

It tried a lot of things - with mixed results. The Department's forays into fish packing and cash-crop farming were only marginally successful. A Grand Rapids rutabaga processing company was short lived. Dairy farms fared a little better. But the department's attempts at reforestation and breathing life back into mining transformed the Iron Range.

Iron Range Resources set out to map Minnesota's woodlands and replant the region's cut-over forests. It took a couple of decades, but the thriving trees began drawing wood products businesses like sawmills, fiber board, paper and pulp plants back to Northeastern Minnesota.

More than $2.5 million was ploughed into long-term research which developed viable methods of making iron using the hard, low-grade rock taconite.

University of Minnesota Researcher Edwin Davis developed the process and machinery to crush taconite rock, remove waste minerals, and cook the residue into high iron content pellets suitable for the nation's blast steel furnaces.

Mining companies slowly adopted the new processes through the 1960's, and by the '70s, things were cranking.

It was the heyday of Minnesota taconite, with mines pouring out pellets; mining jobs attracting new residents and businesses; and a new tax on taconite production churning dollars into the coffers of the IRRRB.

Things began happening fast

By the late '70s, Iron Rangers were worried that taconite, like iron ore before, would run out. And they wanted more money to better diversify the range away from mining.

State Senator Doug Johnson says a new agency was proposed in a 1976 meeting among regional political and business leaders.

Johnson: It was a meeting between the Iron Range Legislators, and Jeno Paulucci, and Rudy Perpich who was then lieutenant governor. And that's where the idea really originated to have an increase in the tax, have it indexed, and establish an economic developed fund for the Iron Range.

The timing for change was right In January of 1977 when Hibbing native Rudy Perpich assumed the governor's office, Northeastern Minnesota DFL'ers held key legislative committee chairs.

They crafted a new agency with more money, and a mission to fund both economic and community projects in a specific area of Northeastern Minnesota. The revamped body is better known for its board of advisors, The Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board, or the I-Triple-R-B.

But the range's aging infrastructure was showing it's wear. Between 1978 and 1982 more than $60 million were granted to communities for sewer and water systems. An extensive trail system was carved through the woods to link northeastern communities and resorts. Public facilities were rebuilt across the range.

Critics say the community improvements were straying from the agency's mission to create jobs. But State Senator Doug Johnson of Tower, says infrastructure investments were necessary to build a tourism industry, and to make the region attractive to employers.

Johnson: I've often said that if it wasn't for the infrastructure and community development moneys that we had, the Iron Range would have looked like Appalachia, which is not very good.

Johnson says the IRRRB's broadened scope and increased funding came none too soon. Almost overnight, the bottom fell out of the U.S. steel industry, taking Minnesota's taconite mines down with it.

Johnson: We had terrible times in the taconite industry much sooner than we would have thought in 1977.

Two mining companies, Reserve Mining in Babbitt and Silver Bay, and Butler Mining of Nashwauk, closed altogether.

Thousands of mining jobs were lost for good across the Iron Range. Unemployment in small mining towns like Babbitt reached 85 percent of the workforce.

The pressure was on help out-of-work miners. But that pressure may have led to some less than ideal investments that tarnished the IRRRB's reputation for years to come.

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