Mine expansion set to swallow stretch of Iron Range highway

VIRGINIA, Minn. – The shortest distance between two points is about to vanish into a pit mine.

Half a century ago, Minnesota built a highway through the Iron Range, across land it didn't own, directly over an iron deposit. Now, the mining company needs access to that ore and the state needs to reroute a four-lane highway, fast.

Hwy. 53 links Duluth to International Falls. It binds the Quad Cities of the Iron Range — Virginia, Eveleth, Gilbert, and Mountain Iron — together. It carries weary travelers up to Bill Aho's door.

"You sever that, you cut me off," said Aho, who owns a Super 8 Motel in Eveleth and an AmericInn Lodge in Virginia, just off the highway on opposite sides of the future mine site. Like others in the region, he's been waiting and worrying over the highway relocation for years. Without Hwy. 53, he said, "We would be shut off. It would be devastating."

The state has until 2017 to build an alternate route for the estimated 24,000 travelers who cross this short stretch of road every day. But four years into the process, it's still trying to figure out how.

Options range from building the tallest bridge in Minnesota over some of the hardest rock on the planet to letting the highway dead-end at the mine. None of the proposed alternatives is easy and none would be cheap.

The state took the cheap, easy route in 1960, when it cut a deal with the local mining companies to lease the stretch of land leading into Virginia instead of buying it outright. For five decades, the state got free use of the land while the property owners focused on iron deposits that were bigger and richer than the low-grade taconite under all that asphalt.

But now, with older mines played out, the taconite under the roadway is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and mining it could extend the life of an operation that employs 514 people.

"The relocation of Highway 53 will open up decades of mining," said Patricia Persico, director of global communications for Cliffs Natural Resources, the company that owns the mining rights to the land under the highway.

Like the rest of the community, Cliffs' plans are on hold until the state chooses its path. But MnDOT planners are hemmed in on all sides by pit mines and worried residents.

"If it was easy, or clear, we would have already made a decision. But it's not," said Patrick Huston, MnDOT's Hwy. 53 project director. "It's a tremendous challenge."

This isn't the first public road built on private property on the Iron Range, and it isn't the first time a mine expansion has disrupted a community.

Iron Rangers don't mind a little disruption. Mining shaped the towns here as surely as it carved out quarries and squared off hilltops. Roads, homes and entire towns have shifted out of the way of the mines — neighboring Hibbing once relocated 200 homes and businesses to accommodate an expanding pit mine. It's the trade-off communities are willing to make in exchange for good jobs and a solid stream of tax revenue.

"If you lived in certain areas of town, the standard joke was that if you left for school in the morning, you didn't know if your house was still going to be there when you got home, because houses were literally moving all the time," Eveleth native Mary Baratta said with a laugh.

Her own house — behind her downtown Eveleth restaurant, Mary's Morsels & Catering — was moved in the 1930s to make way for a mine.

Her restaurant, which offers Iron Range comfort foods like pasties and sarma, has two signs in the window that go to the heart of the community: "We support mining," "Mining supports us."

But the grinding uncertainty about the highway relocation is another story. Along the highway corridor, storefronts are vacant, business expansion plans are on hold and new businesses are reluctant to move to town until the state settles the highway relocation question.

"People are really nervous," Baratta said. "It's a fiasco, and the fiasco has been going on for years."

They support the mines, the mines support them. Now residents of the Quad Cities are hoping the Minnesota Department of Transportation supports them as well.

For a while, MnDOT had debated closing the highway at the mine site and routing traffic to the west, bypassing Eveleth and Gilbert entirely. The proposal, now abandoned, terrified the communities.

Losing Hwy. 53 would cut off communities like Eveleth and Gilbert, 4 miles to the east, from Virginia, a bustling city of 8,700 that boasts shopping centers, government offices, courts and the region's only emergency room.

Virginia City Council Member Charlie Baribeau spent weeks driving back roads, trying to figure out just how long it would take to cross those few miles without the highway.

His calculations, backed up by a full economic impact study earlier this year, found that without an alternate route into Virginia, commutes that used to take a matter of minutes could stretch into half an hour — a lifetime for someone in a speeding ambulance.

"If that highway doesn't go by me, it's going to destroy me," said Eveleth native Ejay Dawson, who expanded his business, Five Seasons Sports, after assurances from the state that the rerouted road would still pass by his door. He employs between 14 and 20 workers with a living wage, he said.

But after years without a plan, he's worried. "This is my livelihood. My son and daughter are taking the business over. This is going to be their livelihood."

Eveleth businesses live and die by the highway, said Dawson, whose parents operated a downtown store. When the highway went through, the downtown died, he said, so when he was opening his own shop in 1970, he chose a shop right next to the highway.

"We get 11,000 travelers a day here, and they're looking this way when they drive by. Best advertising I have."

An economic impact study issued in January estimated that losing Hwy. 53 would cost 500 jobs and knock as much as $50 million out of local economies over the first six years.

"It would be economically devastating to split up the Quad Cities," said Bernie Collins, president of the Laurentian Chamber of Commerce, which represents the business interests of all four cities. "There are numerous real estate deals hinging on where this highway's going to go. It is a major issue for the community right now."

The uncertainty may be coming to an end.

MnDOT, which has run through three managers on this project over the past four years, has narrowed its options to half a dozen and is ready to make an announcement in November. The new road will be built on state land this time, Huston said.

The question now is, which route?

One path would run the highway across an active pit mine, raising logistical and air quality issues. Two others would divert 53 across a water-filled quarry east of Virginia — an option that would require soaring bridges to be built.

The state could opt to do nothing and risk a lawsuit from the landowners. Or it could preserve the existing road by buying the mineral rights back from Cliffs — which could cost Minnesota taxpayers an estimated $400 million to $600 million and possibly hasten the mine's closure. None of the routes have price tags yet, but the state has budgeted $30 million just for the planning process. Work crews are driving test pilings into the old Rouchleau Pit mine to see if it could support the proposed bridges. The water-filled quarry, which also serves as Virginia's main source of drinking water, is so deep and its walls so steep, spanning it would require the tallest bridge in Minnesota.

The deadline to vacate the highway — and have another one running — is three years away. The 2017 deadline "is going to be very difficult to meet," Huston said. "We are likely going to need to ask for an extension."

But, he added, "our goal is to get this done as quickly as possible."

Jennifer Brooks • 612-673-4008