St. Louis County suggests feds help pay for Boundary Waters rescues (2024)

DULUTH — St. Louis County commissioners say they could use assistance covering the cost of lending a hand to those who need help in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

In the past five years, the St. Louis Rescue Squad has responded to an annual average of just over 30 calls for help in the Boundary Waters. Its members have logged an average of 910 hours per year assisting people lost, injured or sometimes dealing with a sudden death in their party.

Commissioner Paul McDonald, of Ely, representing the 4th District on the County Board, said it’s unfair to saddle local taxpayers with the full expense of covering Boundary Waters rescues, and the same holds true in other wilderness areas.

“The BWCAW is federal land, so this is a federal issue. St. Louis County is certainly not alone in this,” he said. “Counties throughout the country that include federal lands face similar challenges. Whenever there is an emergency situation on federal land, we’re responsible for responding, but get little reimbursem*nt for our efforts.”

The St. Louis Rescue Squad is a nonprofit, volunteer-run organization that receives funding from many sources, including public donations. Nevertheless, local tax dollars are vital in keeping the organization on top of its game.

In 2023, the county spent $337,610 to support the Rescue Squad for vehicles, equipment, fuel, training and other expenses.

Squad Capt. Rick Slatten said the organization’s total annual budget is about $450,000 — a pretty good bargain considering the roughly 30,000 hours volunteer members dedicate to the cause each year. Slatten equates that to about $3.5 million in free labor annually.

“While our Rescue Squad members are volunteers, there are numerous other costs involved in a mobilization including vehicles and equipment,” McDonald said, noting the extra costs of support from local law enforcement agencies, including the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Office, dispatch and other first responders.

Those additional support expenses are not captured in the direct financial aid the county provides to the rescue squad, according to Dana Kazel, the county’s communications manager, who explained they are not tracked.

But that accounting system could change if there were a federal funding mechanism, McDonald said. “We are working with NACO (the National Association of Counties) and federal partners in hopes of developing a reimbursem*nt option.”

While St. Louis County regularly collaborates with the Forest Service, McDonald pointed out that counties in other parts of the U.S. work with other arms of the federal government, such as the Bureau of Land Management.

Gary Meader / Duluth Media Group

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“Ideally, we’d like to see a yearly appropriation for EMS services,” he said.

The federal reimbursem*nt discussion recently has been ignited by a call for the state to help Iron Range cities cover the cost of providing emergency medical services to rural areas beyond their tax jurisdictions, putting yet another strain on local government budgets.

Slatten said calls to the Boundary Waters generally account for about 4%-6% of the rescue squad’s responses in any particular year. But calls spiked in 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the squad responded to the Boundary Waters 39 times, accounting for 9.5% of its annual volume.

“There were a lot of tenderfoot, first-time camper-type folks who figured they would weather the disease by going to commune with nature, but they got into trouble out there,” Slatten said.

But he said things seem to have settled down recently, with the squad being called to the Boundary Waters just 18 times last year, accounting for 3.7% of its overall responses.

Slatten said the Boundary Waters calls tend to consume a lot of time, energy and money, due to the distance, the number of team members involved and the difficulty of reaching and locating people in the wilderness.

“They tend to be an all-hands-on-deck response,” he said, noting several incidents that required over 300 hours of work.

“These are incredibly expensive operations,” said County Board Chair Keith Nelson, of Virginia. “We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars that St. Louis County taxpayers are spending within a federal area.”

McDonald noted those expenditures are often made not to rescue county residents but for folks visiting the Boundary Waters from distant locations.

“As more and more people are using these federal lands for outdoor recreation, the numbers have increased dramatically,” he said, pointing to the especially high volume of visitors during the pandemic.

Peter Passi covers city and county government for the Duluth News Tribune. He joined the paper in April 2000, initially as a business reporter but has worked a number of beats through the years.