For someone like me, who loves irony, Minnesota’s school trust land controversy is a gem. The state and federal governments are knee-deep into a complicated process to compensate the state for school trust lands currently locked in the Superior National Forest.

Most Minnesotans have probably never heard of school trust lands, and what does “locked in” mean, anyway?

Some history:

In the new nation of the United States, the General Land Ordinance of 1785 required that in the lands taken from native tribes, one section of each surveyed township be set aside “for the maintenance of public schools.”

When the territories became states, these reserved lands became state trust lands. Since 1802, all states admitted to the Union have received some amount of school trust land. The federal Organic Act of 1849 created the Territory of Minnesota and reserved sections 16 and 36 of each township “for the purpose of being applied to the schools in said territory.”

Theoretically, the state could have held on to those eight million acres and leased them to farmers, mine operators, resort or cabin owners, with the lease income deposited yearly in the school trust. But that is not what happened. Minnesota lost no time in selling off most of the school trust parcels. The original grant was eight million acres, and today trust lands only comprise 2.5 million acres, 92% of which are in northern Minnesota.

In the rush to develop farmable and other valuable land, five and a half million acres were sold outright. Essentially, the best land is in private hands and practically the only school trust land that remains is in the forested and swampy northern part of the state. The school trust fund now holds more than $1.9 billion, which is managed by the State Board of Investment, yielding $51 million for schools in 2024.

$51 million might sound like a lot, but—ironically—it’s a paltry .2 percent of Minnesota’s overall budget for K-12 education, which is $23.2 billion for fiscal years 2024 and 2025—nearly a third of the state budget.

Enter the BWCAW

When Congress passed the Wilderness Act in 1964 and established the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in 1978, commercial activities such as logging and mining were prohibited on the school trust lands as well as on the federally owned lands. Sections 16 and 36 can still be seen on maps as school trust land, but they are only accessible by canoe or skis, and not many people are interested in hauling logs out of the woods by canoe or skis.

And here’s a fine irony: The trust lands comprise nearly half of the public land managed by the DNR. For nearly 50 years, the state has lost out on the commercial potential of nearly half of its most valuable possession. 

The people in charge recognized the problem of “locked land” from the beginning, and the U.S. Forest Service negotiated with the Minnesota DNR and the Office of School Trust Lands, or OSTL, for years, trying to arrange a trade of trust lands inside the BWCAW for land of comparable value outside the Boundary Waters. The state would then manage the traded lands for logging or whatever else might serve the school trust fund. But you can imagine the difficulty of finding “comparables” for the sections “locked” inside the wilderness.

Iron Range legislators were eager to see a trade. “We don’t want money; we want the land,” said then-Rep. David Dill, who represented the sprawling district at the Capitol. But environmental groups were reluctant to remove land from federal control, fearing state management would result in more mining and logging. A hybrid model was discussed, but the issue remained at a stalemate until last year, when the feds and the state gave up on the trade idea and began talking about an outright sale, the money to be deposited in the school trust account.

It’s a complicated process which will likely take several years. An early step is underway right now: The Forest Service is applying for a “categorical exclusion” for the planned sale. This means that because little change will occur on the land, an environmental review is not necessary. The agency has been collecting public comments on that issue, and recently the comment period was extended to September 17.

The three key players—the Superior National Forest, the Minnesota DNR, and the Office of School Trust Lands—say they are satisfied that the plan meets legal requirements and will resolve the difficult issue.

But the legislator now serving in David Dill’s former district isn’t. Roger Skraba wants to go back to the trade idea. It might be tempting to believe that Skraba is one of the people in the area who is still sore about the creation of the Wilderness, still feeling victimized by the governments that turned the land into a motorless playground. Skraba has been found guilty of breaking federal law six times in the Boundary Waters by using motorboats and snowmobiles in the wilderness area—most recently when he was mayor of Ely.

But Skraba argues that a trade is better than a sale because the land can continue to provide economic support to the region. A parcel of land controlled by the state (or several, or many) “can keep a logger in our community and the sales tax in the state,” Skraba said in an interview for this story. “It adds more wood so we can rotate the logging more.” (That’s logger talk for “cut more often.”) He points to the scarcity of privately owned land in the region: more than 90-percent of the land in Cook County is publicly held. “I’m thinking of the communities that survive on logging,” Skraba said. “We could ask Grand Marais and other towns if they want to have some of the traded land so they can grow.”

Ironically, rents and royalties from iron ore and taconite mines are the largest contributor of revenue (88 percent) to the Permanent School Fund. In 2019, the DNR’s mineral program contributed $21 million to the trust fund; forestry activities close to four million, only 15 percent of the total fund.

This imbalance doesn’t worry Skraba; he has his eye on long stretches of federal land just north of today’s Iron Range, where mines could expand or store their waste.

Here, ironies abound. In arguing against the land sale, Skraba and his allies point to language in the Constitution that says the land must be traded for land of equal value. But the Constitution also calls for the trust lands to be managed solely to benefit public schools, not to support community development or create jobs. If the DNR doesn’t manage for maximum benefit of the school trust, it must compensate the trust fund.

Further, a little analysis, kindly performed for us by Marshall Helmberger, publisher of The Timberjay, shows that a present injection of money into the trust fund account would yield far more over time than the traditional uses of logging and mining. His calculations show the long-term value of cash from the sale, accrued over 40 years, would be more than ten times the value produced by logging. 

Skraba is busy ginning up support for his insistence on a trade. In the past, politicians from northeastern Minnesota have held an incredible amount of sway in St. Paul, with long-serving members wielding power from key committee chairmanships. Not so much anymore. This issue could be a useful indicator of relative power at the Capitol.

Meanwhile, government workers are proceeding with the multi-stage plan for the sale. It’s expected to be completed in 2026.