Poplar hills

DNR let Lutsen violate water rule for years

For years, state officials allowed the popular Lutsen Mountains ski resort to violate permits restricting how much water it could pull from a North Shore stream to make snow for its groomed hills.

Officials for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources acknowledge that the resort’s economic significance in Northeastern Minnesota was a big factor in the decision to not cite Lutsen for permit violations. DNR employees say their oversight was a failure that may have threatened the health of a state-protected waterway and that raises questions about the state’s willingness to crack down on businesses that threaten the state’s water.

They also say they would not allow such a situation to occur again.

Lutsen’s water demand problem has been resolved for now, with this legislative session’s passage of a law allowing it to draw substantially more water from the Poplar River than it could take under a 1964 permit.

That law expires in five years, with the DNR and Lutsen expected to study the river and make long-term decisions in the meantime.

Ninety miles up the shore from Duluth, the Poplar River rushes right through the middle of the Lutsen Mountains ski area on its way to Lake Superior. A pump house pulls water from the river and sends it to the Lutsen’s snow-making system.

Each year for the past 10 years, the resort has been taking more and more water as Lutsen has added runs.

Co-owner Charles Skinner said new ski equipment requires wider runs, and terrain parks for snowboarders need more snow.

Also, even in the snowiest of Minnesota winters, skiers’ expectations are higher than they once were.

“People want to have a nice groomed surface without rocks or bare spots throughout the entire ski season,” Skinner said. “So we’ve had to gradually increase how much water is appropriated for the ski area.”

Like all Minnesota ski areas, Lutsen needed a DNR permit to take water from a Minnesota river and, in 1964, the DNR granted Lutsen a permit to take 12.6 million gallons from the Poplar River each year.

But shortly after Skinner and his partner took over the resort in 2000, the company’s water use jumped — to 60 million gallons a year in 2001 and to just over 100 million in 2010.

Skinner applied for an increased permit level, but he ran into a complication: In 1977, 13 years after Lutsen received its original permit, the Legislature passed a law that said no one could take water from any trout stream, except temporarily.

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