Wild rice has all but vanished from Little Sandy Lake near Mountain Iron, Minnesota, and leaders from the Bois Forte Band and Grand Portage Band of Chippewa say a new state permit for U.S. Steel's Minntac mine won't fix that fast enough. The draft permit gives the company as long as 45 years to bring sulfate pollution down to legal limits, a timeline tribal leaders call unacceptable for water that Ojibwe families have depended on for generations.
The tension is stark: U.S. Steel has told regulators it expects to keep mining at Minntac only through 2044, according to The Timberjay, which means the state's proposed cleanup window would stretch roughly 27 years past the mine's own projected lifespan. Bois Forte and Grand Portage leaders, speaking from Grand Portage, said the 45-year permit timeline is simply too long, according to MPR News. Carlos Hernandez said band members should not have to wait another generation for clean water, and made clear the tribes are not against mining itself — Bois Forte members work in the mines, and April McCormick said the tribes support responsible mining.
How the 45-Year Number Was Reached
The figure comes from competing estimates. A U.S. Steel consultant estimated that polluted groundwater would take about 45 years to work its way out of the system, while the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency's own estimate ranged from roughly 22 to 67 years. MPCA ultimately selected 45 years as the outer deadline, using it as a stand-in for how long recovery might take in the Dark River as well. The agency has said 45 years is not the correct final date and will be lowered as new information becomes available.
Federal law requires U.S. Steel to meet sulfate limits as soon as possible, not on a company's preferred schedule. The draft permit requires U.S. Steel to build an active water-cleaning system on the east side of the Minntac tailings basin within eight years and a water treatment plant on the west side within six years, with the company required to test groundwater pumping along the way. MPCA's Dan Ruiter described the draft permit as the most protective yet for Minnesota's wild rice waters, per the same report.
A Basin Leaking for Decades
The Minntac tailings basin covers more than 13 square miles and has no liner at the bottom, allowing it to leak toward Sandy and Little Sandy lakes and toward the Dark River and Dark Lake. U.S. Steel plans to build an underground wall down to bedrock on the basin's east side to help contain the seepage. MPCA has identified Minntac as the only possible source of the high sulfate levels found in Sandy Lake and Little Sandy Lake.
The numbers illustrate the scale of the damage. Little Sandy Lake now averages more than 250 milligrams per liter of sulfate, compared with less than 3 milligrams per liter in nearby lakes untouched by mining — far above the 10 milligrams-per-liter standard Minnesota set in 1973 to protect wild rice waters. State wildlife surveys found wild rice growing thick on Little Sandy Lake in 1966, with Sandy and Little Sandy together capable of producing about 200 acres of wild rice in a good year. U.S. Steel opened the Minntac taconite operation near those lakes in 1967, and by 1987 state surveyors reported wild rice was, for all practical purposes, gone. Researchers found just two stalks of wild rice in Little Sandy Lake in 2024. The 1854 Treaty Authority, which manages natural resources for the Bois Forte and Grand Portage bands, has surveyed Little Sandy Lake regularly since 2006, and Darren Vogt said wild rice is essentially gone from the lakes.
Downstream Waters and a Rare Regulatory Request
Water from Sandy and Little Sandy lakes flows into the Sand and Pike rivers and eventually Lake Vermilion. MPCA counts 14 wild rice waters downstream of Minntac, and half of them are impaired by sulfate. The agency's draft permit requires compliance with the wild rice standard in Little Sandy Lake and sets a separate sulfate limit on the Dark River to protect wild rice in Dark Lake.
Sandy and Little Sandy lakes sit within the roughly 5.5-million-acre 1854 Ceded Territory of northeastern Minnesota. Bois Forte and Grand Portage now plan to ask the Minnesota Environmental Quality Board for a Generic Environmental Impact Statement, a tool that would examine the cumulative effects of past, present, and proposed mining across that entire territory. The state has ordered such a statewide review only twice before, for timber harvesting in 1994 and animal agriculture in 2002, according to background reported by The Timberjay. April McCormick said the state too often reviews mines one at a time, and the bands want approval of new mining projects delayed if the GEIS moves forward.
Legal Precedent and Corporate Costs Collide
Minnesota's fight over wild rice sulfate limits has a long legal history. A Minnesota Administrative Law Judge rejected an MPCA proposal in 2018 to replace the flat 10 mg/L limit with a complex site-specific formula, ruling it violated federal law and placed an unfair burden on Native American communities, according to AP News. More recently, in March 2025, the Minnesota Court of Appeals upheld MPCA's rejection of a separate U.S. Steel request for higher sulfate discharges downstream of its Keetac facility, according to the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy. The EPA had told state regulators in 2010 that they were required under the Clean Water Act to enforce the standard during mining reviews, a mandate rooted in research by state biologist John Moyle in the 1930s and 1940s showing wild rice cannot grow in high-sulfate water.
U.S. Steel has said water treatment at Keetac alone would cost more than $800 million, though MPCA has said the company had enough cash flow to afford it. Since Nippon Steel's acquisition of U.S. Steel, the new parent company has pledged to invest $800 million into Minntac and Keetac operations between 2025 and 2028, subject to regulatory permits, according to Iron Range Today. Minntac and Keetac together generated $1.8 billion in economic impact for Minnesota and supported 5,284 direct and indirect jobs in fiscal year 2022, per U.S. Steel's own figures.
Tribal leaders have not ruled out legal action over the draft permit. April McCormick said the tribes are prepared to pursue every opportunity to change it, and Grand Portage has said it could ask the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to strip Minnesota of its authority to issue federal water permits altogether. McCormick warned that the permit will serve as the model for current and future permittees on the Iron Range. The draft Minntac permit remains open for public comment through October 12.
