Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
By PAMELA JANSSON
Hurley — In celebration of Iron County’s first-ever carbon credits payment, the county’s forestry supervisor took the opportunity on Tuesday evening to remind members of the county’s Board of Supervisors that he was a believer.
“I told you we were going to sell it,” said Eric Peterson during a related presentation to the board.
He was referring to the county’s Jan. 6 receipt of $567,895.44 for carbon credits sold in November.
As defined by Oxford Dictionary, a carbon credit is “a permit (that) allows a country or organization to produce a certain amount of carbon emissions and which can be traded if the full allowance is not used.”
In straight talk, it means a company that is causing more pollution than it should can buy carbon credits from a responsibly managed forest region and, so to speak, get off the hook for bad behavior.
In related action, the board approved placing the entirety of the funds toward a loan principal payment on the county’s Saxon Harbor loan.
Board chairman Larry Youngs said that, in doing so, the county was behaving responsibly, like a family that doesn’t waste its tax return. “We’re not running off to Cape Coral,” said Youngs. “We’re going to pay our debt.”
Despite his obvious happiness in the county having received the funds, Erickson also took a conservative view, explaining that’s it’s impossible to predict how future sales might go, given numerous intervening factors such as market demand, company stability, federal regulations, etc.
“It’s birthday money,” he said of any possibility of continuing carbon credits.
On the bright side, he said, “These carbon credits are not stuck in the United States. This is a global market.”
Peterson explained that on Sept. 28, 2021, the county signed a 10-year agreement with what was then called Bluesource LLC and is now known as Anew Climate LLC, based in Houston.
He said that company, for a cut of profits, acts roughly “like a real estate broker” in relation to managing the county’s carbon credits or — specifically — 156,517 acres or almost 90% of the county’s total 175,400 acres of forest land.
Although Anew officials have told Peterson that training is available for counties to take on the responsibility of selling carbon credits in house, he said, “I don’t know honestly whether we ever would be able to handle it internally.”
He concluded, “I’m learning stuff all the time about this. It’s complex; it really is.”
In other news, Roxanne Lutgen gave her first report to the board after serving as the county’s volunteer administrative coordinator for the past three weeks.
Because financial action for 2024 has not yet settled, Lutgen said she will have more information to share at the boards’ February and March meetings.
“I’m also starting to look at the job description — what this job should look like,” she said, adding that she has tapped the Wisconsin Counties Association for guidance.
Board members also:
— Approved a resolution to support an application by Brightspeed, an internet service provider with several Wisconsin locations, for BEAD funding in Iron County. BEAD stands for the Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment grant, a federal system that has allotted more than $40 billion for broadband expansion throughout the nation.
— Approved an Emergency Fire Warden Organization List for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. Included on the list are Bob Walesewicz of Hurley, Stacy Ofstad of Saxon and Ashley Welch of Sherman.
— Approved a resolution supporting the modernization of the record system in the Register of Deeds Office. The resolution formalizes the local application of a state ruling that $8 of every $30 collected for recorded documents must be reserved for “Land Records Modernization funding,” which is the organized scanning and storing of ongoing documents. Another $7 goes to the state’s Department of Administration. The board also approved a contract with Trimin U.S. Imaging of St. Paul to scan said records and also approved overtime for the Deeds office as paid from the recording fee collection.
— Approved the hiring of a temporary deputy clerk of courts for up to 240 hours to cover medical leave in that office.
— Approved rezoning from F-1 (Forestry) to RR-1 (Recreation Residential) the property of Theresa Dennis and Rose Grulkowski at 2003 W. Martha Lake Road in Mercer, in accordance with the Asset-Based Community Development Plan of that town.
— Learned from Paul Mullard during member reports that county fairground storage fees in the past year resulted in $62,000 of county income “and it’s all done by volunteers.” Mullard also commended recent student input to the board.
All votes were unanimous with Roy Haeger and Scott Erickson absent.
The next regular board meeting will be on Feb. 25 at 6 p.m. in the board room of the Iron County Courthouse.
