Legalectric

Itasca State Park is looking for comments on two amendments to its Management Plan:

View the current Itasca State Park management plan (PDF)

It’s THE Minnesota State Park, though it’s been a decade since I’ve been there.

Over the years, I’ve stayed in Douglas Lodge, Nicollet Court, the 4-Plex, and both campgrounds, Maple Loop 199, and here’s Bear Paw #38, moving up in the world from tent to pop-up:

What do they want to do? Two areas of change, one, overnight use and winter trails and the other, water access:

• Review the Itasca State Park overnight use and winter trail activities draft plan amendment (PDF).

• Review the Itasca State Park public water access redevelopment draft plan amendment (PDF).

Comment period ends April 10th, send comments to Jade.Templin@state.mn.us or mail to:

Itasca State Park Plan Amendments comments, c/o Jade Templin
Parks and Trails Division, Minnesota DNR
500 Lafayette Road, Box 4039
St. Paul, MN 55155-4039

Is this classic or what? There were several, and they were popping up as if they were diving under the boat and appeared on the other side.

Step by step, MISO is slogging through the Variance Analysis for the Northland Reliability Project as set out in MISO Tariff FF (P. 182-193). This just came through the wire, it’s BIG, but interesting tidbits:

Much of this process is confidential, don’t know if it matters at this point. The parts I care about are the cost questions, and the responses may well be confidential. We’ll see.

Generally, there’s this:

And the specifics are what needs to be produced, p. 6-16 of the first document, above:

I don’t/can’t do math, have grey mush in that part of my brain, but if I think on this a bit, and scan through the 347 pages, the trajectory will become clear!

For your reading enjoyment, here’s the part of MISO’s Tariff FF that covers the Variance Analysis process:

It’s all connected — and here’s the eastern part of the 765kV line across Minnesota, from South Dakota headed east across the Mississippi into Wisconsin — the western web comments were due Monday:

Reply Comments filed – SW MN 765kV lines March 3rd, 2026

Today’s inbasket had good news for us on the eastern end, where they want to follow a 161kV line across SE Minnesota’s Driftless region — the good news is that “Gopher to Badger” backed off of its asinine “informal process” and:

Applicants request that the Commission stay the Certificate of Need Application and process it jointly with the Route Permit Application, which Applicants intend to submit this fall.

Informal process?!?!?! How stupid do they think we are?

Good, they’re being reasonable. Did they really think they could get away with “informal process” that does not exist?

Anyway, Reply Comments were due Wednesday and here is ours, NRG and NO765MN:

The Maple River-Cuyuna 345kV transmission line, that’s the orange one on this map above.

First the Initial Comments:

And then Reply Comments:

Applicants’ filed their Reply Comments:

And we filed the Andersen Comments:

And that’s it!

So on to tomorrow’s Reply Comments on the Gopher-Badger 765kV transmission line!