With Sheriff Mark Falk on vacation, Chief Deputy Leif Lunde brought a communication tower lease agreement to the county board on Tuesday, February 22, 2011 for its approval. It was a rather routine request – an amendment renewing the last lease agreement for a Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) tower in Lutsen that expires on March 31. The lease began in 1991 and has been renewed every few years since, but too many questions went unanswered about what the lease was about, and the county board declined to approve it – for now.
The original lease granted MnDOT the authority to build a tower on a two-acre site reachable by Lutsen Mountains chairlift during the winter and by four-wheel drive or ATV during the summer. The tower would be located approximately 125 feet northeast of another tower on Eagle Mountain. The lessor was Lutsen Mountains Corporation, and the lease agreement was scheduled to be up in 2006.
The first amendment to the original lease extended the lease another five years but didn’t come into effect until 2001, and it did not list Lutsen Mountains Corporation as the lessor – the agreement was between MnDOT and Cook County. It changed the annual fee from $800 to $1,000.
In a letter to the county dated September 15, 2005, MnDOT stated its intention to exercise the option of extending the lease another five years starting April 1, 2006.
Who owns the land? Commissioner Sue Hakes asked.
Deputy Lunde said he thought Lutsen Mountains owns the land.
The $1,000 per year MnDOT pays seems low, Commissioner Hakes said. Deputy Lunde agreed, saying it seemed low to him as well, compared to some of the county’s other tower agreements.
If we don’t own the land or the tower, Commissioner Hakes asked, why are we in this agreement?
The people who know the answer to that question, said County Attorney Tim Scannell, are Sheriff Falk and Radio Systems Coordinator Duane Ege. He said he had no problems with the legalities contained within the latest lease amendment, however.
Currently, the county has nine communication towers, but their circumstances – who owns the land, who owns the towers, who leases space on the towers – vary from tower to tower. A county work session recently focused on how to coordinate upcoming changes and additions to these towers as the state ramps up its Allied Radio Matrix for Emergency Response (ARMER) program that will facilitate inter-agency communication and improve emergency assistance for natural disasters and other emergencies.
The county board decided to table approval of the lease agreement until more information can be gathered.
Leave a Reply