'This time is different': Iron Range braces for impacts of idling mines

CHISHOLM — For Barb Kalmi, history is repeating itself 40 years later.

The Nashwauk-Keewatin School Board vice chair clearly remembers when Nashwauk’s Butler Taconite mine closed in 1985. Hers was one of the families impacted.

“Young family. No income. No available jobs,” she recalled. “People left the community in droves. Our school lost half of its enrollment.”

Over 600 miners were laid off by Cleveland-Cliffs in March 2025. With no indication of when Minorca or Hibbing Taconite might reopen, Iron Range leaders are beginning to sound the alarm.

The familiar “ups and downs of mining” were brought up repeatedly April 22 in Chisholm at an event hosted by the Range Association of Municipalities and Schools, or RAMS. The Minnesota Department of Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation offered an outlook for production and how that might impact local budgets, and elected officials gave their perspective on what’s to come.

“This time is different,” said IRRR Commissioner Ida Rukavina. “And that is kind of why we’re having these discussions. And not because mining is going away, but because the industry is changing. At the end of the day, we’re working with a finite resource.”

Shaping the future of the Range

RAMS put on the same event Monday, May 11, in Virginia and will host a third 5-6:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Aurora Community Center.

While the forums are aimed toward local officials, anyone can learn more about how changes in mining will affect their community.

The main takeaway from the IRRR’s predictions is that less production means less money on the horizon for local governments.

“It’s not necessarily that we’re out of ore,” said the department’s Jason Janisch. “It’s that some locations are out of economic ore.”

New steel facilities largely use electric arc furnaces, which need a type of iron pellets that most Range mines don’t produce. Those new facilities are being built in the South, not the Rust Belt, in part because of the convenience of nearby ports for importing cheaper foreign iron.

Why foreign iron is cheaper is a complicated question to answer, but one big reason is that foreign mines have higher-grade iron. Most of the Range’s high-grade iron was depleted by World War II, which necessitated the transition to producing lower-grade taconite.

Megan Buffington

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KAXE

Though the anticipated opening of Mesabi Metallics sometime this year is a bright spot for the Range's mining industry, officials cautioned that it will take time for communities to see the tax benefit.

The taxes that are distributed to Range communities are based on a facility’s three-year production average. While that means taxes are more protected from downturns, it also means that there’s a lag when production ticks up — or an entirely new facility comes online.

“How we respond, at this moment, I believe, really matters,” Rukavina said. “The choices that we’re making at the local level over the next few years will shape what this region will look like for decades to come.”

'Nobody can do this on their own’

The region never fully recovered from the 1980s downturn, Nashwauk-Keewatin's Kalmi said. They’ve learned to expect less and less with each upswing in production.

Part of the issue, she said, is no one was “looking at things through a different lens.”

“It was waiting for things to get better again. Because it always has,” Kalmi said.

Megan Buffington

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KAXE

Hibbing Mayor Pete Hyduke told the room he’s concerned, but he’s not in a panic.

“Nobody can do this on their own anymore,” he said. “Those days are gone.”

Collaboration was a common theme at the meeting. But the specifics of what that looks like remain elusive.

“If it was just as simple as somebody else solving our problem, in the last 125 years, it would have been done already,” said Tony Sertich, former state representative and former IRRR commissioner. “So why the hell are we still sitting in a room saying, ‘Somebody else is going to come and save us?’ They’re not.”