How disappointing to see my favorite newspaper (which also was my employer for 27 years) give prominent display to two articles within one week throwing all sorts of unsupported innuendo and suspicion at people associated with the Minnesota Department of Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation. Neither article measured up to the standards of journalism to which the Star Tribune should aspire.
The online headline and the lead of the first article, which first appeared June 11, strongly suggested that the agency, commonly called the IRRRB, had been caught in a scandal for paying a veteran employee $166,000 to retire, then hiring him back within a month to do the same work.
It sounded horrible, but the further you read into the article, the clearer it became that state personnel regulations required that if there was to be a buyout, this employee had to be allowed to take it, and that he was hired back basically to train his successor because no one had his skills. Turns out, this happens across state government on occasion, and that neither the IRRRB nor its commissioner, Mark Phillips, did anything wrong. If there was a story here, it should have been about state government personnel policy, not the IRRRB.
The second story, June 15, appeared to be sourced with the same small group of disgruntled people. The headline blared, "Lopsided grants on Iron Range spark questions of favoritism."
The thesis of this one was that Minnesota Senate District 3, represented by Senate Minority Leader Tom Bakk, who is a member of the IRRRB advisory board, has gotten significantly more IRRRB grant dollars than other Senate districts in the IRRRB aid area. The implication, supported by no evidence, is that this showed agency favoritism to Bakk. But there are all sorts of other, more plausible variables that could explain the grant distribution. Unfortunately, those variables went unexamined by the Star Tribune.
For example, while all Senate districts have about the same number of constituents, they vary significantly in size. At 12,966 square miles, Bakk's district is by far the largest and most sparsely populated in the state. The average Senate district is 1,103 square miles, roughly 8.5% of the area in Bakk's.
By way of contrast, Sen. David Tomassoni's District 6, which got the most IRRRB grants in total during the period examined, has about one-third the area of Bakk's.
District 3 is larger than nine American states but has only 79,000 residents. With that few people spread across that large area, it's reasonable that you have greater infrastructure needs, per capita, that IRRRB grants can help address.
