Sahan Journal26%
Northern Iron to close East Side foundry after battle with regulators, neighbors 37%
By Andrew Hazzard22%
7/31/2026, 8:51:28 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 21 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Framing Effect, and Hindsight Bias, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 17.4% saturation with 149 hits. Analysis detected 1,190 faulty-reasoning hits from 857 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 38.3% and a BS Rank of 37% (16,362 of 25,932 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 63.10% of the article peer group.
Northern Iron sits on a sunny day in Saint Paul on May 26, 2026.
A St.
Paul metal foundry fighting legal battles over excessive pollution with state regulators and East Side residents will close, bringing an abrupt end to a conflict that played out at large neighborhood protests and inside small courtrooms.
Northern Iron and Machine will close its factory off Phalen Boulevard by the end of 2026, the company announced Thursday.
The plant, which has melted and cast metal into parts for 120 years, employs 77 people, according to recent court filings.
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) moved to revoke Northern Iron’s operations permit in June, three years after the agency first cited the company for failing to properly notify regulators about changes to its pollution control equipment and fined it $41,500.
On July 21, Northern Iron’s attorneys asked a Minnesota Administrative Law Judge to dismiss the state’s revocation case and said the company has installed more than $2 million in pollution control equipment since 2024.
The hearing was packed with neighborhood residents who called for the foundry to close, citing concern for local children with asthma and complaining of clearing soot off their homes.
“It’s a huge relief, we’re just ecstatic.
I was calling people last night and they were crying.
This is really great news for the community,” Mel Lorentz, an environmental attorney who lives near the foundry and works with the nonprofit group East Side Neighbors for Health, told Sahan Journal Friday.
The company will stop melting operations and lay off 52 workers by Oct. 1 and will fully close by the end of the year, according to a notice filed with the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development.
Fifty of the workers are members of United Steel Workers.
Foundry employees earn an average wage of $24.71 an hour, according to court filings.
The closure is a sudden shift for Northern Iron, which has been fighting with state regulators in court since April 2024, when the MPCA ordered it to reduce operational hours to comply with national air quality standards for smog and lead pollution.
Northern Iron sued the MPCA and won an injunction that largely allowed it to operate normally while installing new pollution control equipment.
The company and state argued in court for years, and the foundry filed a second lawsuit against the MPCA in 2025.
Brittney Bruce, a mother who lives directly across the street from the foundry, filed a class action lawsuit against Northern Iron last March, alleging the factory’s pollution was impacting her family’s health and well-being.
“I’m shaking with joy.
No one deserves to be polluted in this way,” Bruce said in a statement celebrating the closure.
In a news release, Northern Iron Chief Administrative Officer Tierney Grutza said the company feels it lacks “regulatory certainty” to operate in Minnesota.
“We are deeply disappointed that, despite years of investment, collaboration, and good-faith efforts to address environmental and permitting concerns, we were unable to reach a path forward that would allow Northern Iron to continue operating,” Grutza said.
It’s the second closure of a large foundry in a diverse, historically polluted neighborhood accused of pollution violations since 2024.
Smith Foundry in the East Phillips neighborhood of south Minneapolis closed in 2024 after the Environmental Protection Agency found the factory had failed to control its emissions for years.
The company, through its legal team at Minneapolis firm Dorsey and Whitney, has aggressively clashed with neighbors and the MPCA in court.
Dorsey and Whitney withdrew as the company’s representation this week in the class action case, court records across cases show.
State Rep.
Liz Lee, DFL-St.Paul, told Sahan Journal that she still hopes to see a legal judgment issued in the case that gives transparency to East Side residents.
She said the announcement shows that Northern Iron lacked faith in its ability to win its case against state regulators.
“They think they’re probably going to lose and they don’t want a bad finding of fact — that they were polluting the East Side,” Lee said.
Lorentz agrees, and thinks the company saw the writing on the wall after the July 21 hearing that the judge was not going to dismiss the permit revocation case, which would likely mean a full trial in October.
The judge has not issued a ruling on the motion.
“I think they’re cutting their losses at this point,” Lorentz said.
Lee said the community is taking the closure as a sign that neighbors can organize and win.
Northern Iron could have cooperated with the MPCA but instead chose to drag out a long and costly legal fight.
There is still more to learn, Lee said, like what the final months of production look like at Northern Iron, what the plans to demolish the foundry safely will be, and what will happen at the site in the future.
“It’s just the end of the chapter, not the end of the book,” Lee said.
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