A Burnsville property owner wants to turn a former garbage dump into a high-tech driving range and pickleball stadium, an ambitious concept that has drawn scrutiny from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency over plans they say fail to address decades-old underlying contamination at the site.

Michael McGowan recently unveiled development plans for Big Hits at the Gateway, an entertainment complex centered around a three-story golf driving range, restaurant and pickleball complex with indoor and outdoor courts. Currently, the Chalet Driving Range sits on the site, which rests along Interstate 35W and the Minnesota River in Burnsville. McGowan is the second-generation owner of the site, where the long-closed Freeway Dump once operated.

While McGowan’s Freeway Properties development team has celebrated what could be a regional draw for the area, MPCA officials are concerned with the pollutants in the ground. Those pollutants, left in place, eventually could contaminate area drinking water. The MPCA is also concerned with the old dump’s proximity to the Minnesota River.

The Freeway Dump operated from 1960 to 1969, when few regulations concerning the operation and location of landfills or dump sites existed. The waste is currently covered with grass and other vegetation. There is also a nearby landfill site that was operated by the McGowan family, northwest of the Chalet Golf site, known as the Freeway Landfill. The unlined landfill accepted refuse from 1969 to 1990.

The Big Hits development would not involve the Freeway Landfill site.

McGowan said his father, Richard, has been trying to redevelop the land for 55 years, since the dump closed. Decades ago, there was talk of a furniture store. Then, murmurs about a car dealership, he said, recalling preliminary chats with the Walser and Luther automotive groups. In 2000, a large-scale amphitheater to be placed on top of the old Freeway Landfill reached planning stages, in partnership with then-ownership of the Minnesota Wild.

But over time, nothing came to fruition.

“The common stumbling block has always been the MPCA,” McGowan said. “All the McGowans want is to be treated fairly like similar brownfield sites. We have absolutely not been treated like other landfills.”

MPCA officials said they talked to the developers about plans last year, but have not had discussions about the most recent concept. Representatives from Freeway Properties said they have reached out to the MPCA to discuss plans.

In terms of how the MPCA views the site compared to other former dumps, MPCA Assistant Commissioner for Land Policy and Strategic Initiatives Kirk Koudelka said this site brings several unique characteristics, particularly due to the proximity to drinking water and the Minnesota River.

“The specifics matter,” Koudelka said. “We have to be protective of those drinking water sources in the area.”

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Through the last few decades, the McGowans and MPCA officials have gone back and forth about how to best mitigate the site. Two main options from the MPCA emerged.

The first option involved creating a new, modern landfill on the old Freeway Landfill site and moving the refuse from the old Freeway Dump to the new landfill at an estimated cost of $117 million.

The second option was excavating both the old landfill and the old dump and moving the contents to a different, modern landfill site, with projected costs of anywhere between $165 million and $538 million.

At the end of the day, the concerns are the same, Koudelka said.

“At this time we have a number of concerns, and they don’t address the underlying issue,” Koudelka said. “The previous plans we have seen do not address the actual source of waste.”

Garbage to golf

Plans for Big Hits at the Gateway — so named for how the parcel of land has been referred to as the “gateway of Burnsville” — call for a three-story structure with 100 golf driving bays, a full-service restaurant and bar, and corporate and event center space.

The concept also includes 17 pickleball courts spread across indoor and outdoor facilities, with one of the courts outfitted to attract professional tournament play, LSE Architects CEO and co-founder Mohammed Lawal said. His firm has been brought into the fold as part of the project development team.

The plans also include trail connections to the Minnesota River Trailhead, Lawal said.

On the west side of the proposed driving range, a lined and capped berm would be created to store the old waste excavated in creating the site’s new building. (Courtesy of Freeway Properties)

On the west side of the driving range, a lined and capped berm would be created. That would store the old waste excavated in creating the site’s new buildings, he said. A lined stormwater collection pond would rest along I-35W, along with pollinator gardens throughout the property.

The McGowan development team has created websites detailing the history of the area, and their development efforts, at FreewayLandfillFacts.com and BetterforBurnsville.com.

The plans have been submitted to the city of Burnsville. The Burnsville planning commission will formally review the project and make a recommendation by late summer or early fall. The Burnsville City Council would then review the project proposal.

Worries about future water

While the groundwater table is currently safe, and drinking water is healthy, MPCA officials maintain they are concerned about the future.

The cities of Savage and Burnsville pump drinking water from the nearby Kraemer Mining and Materials quarry. The quarry currently pumps water for its operations, too, thereby depressing the groundwater table and keeping groundwater away from the underground dump sites.

The fear, Koudelka said, is that once the Kraemer quarry stops pumping water, the groundwater table will rise, flooding the old polluted sites, and contaminating the drinking water of Savage and Burnsville.

The timeline of when Kraemer Mining will stop pumping has not been announced.

The MPCA has already installed a network of groundwater monitoring wells, showing that contamination is widespread within the waste footprint and also has moved outside the perimeter of the old dump sites. Tests have shown elevated levels of heavy metals and chemicals like per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), vinyl chloride, benzene and 1,4-dioxane.

For their part, McGowan’s development team said they have engaged with four different engineering firms, and that they believe the site in its current state is not a hazardous risk to the public. Freeway Properties officials are confident they could control groundwater at the old dump sites in order to mitigate any potential contamination.

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“We feel the site is developable,” McGowan said.

They believe the new plans, with ongoing monitoring of the site, would suffice.

The MPCA, however, believes differently.

Building a new project on the site without properly disposing of the contaminants below would also make future efforts to clean up the area even more difficult and costly, Koudelka said.

“We’re supportive of getting the sites cleaned up, but plans need to address the underlying issue,” Koudelka said. “The contamination is needed to be addressed to protect the drinking water for the communities of Burnsville and Savage.”

When I asked John Savage, the retired co-founder of the Department of Computer Science at Brown University, what the essential ingredient in research is, he responded with one word: “Passion.”

It is passion that keeps scientists going, dead end after dead end, until there is a breakthrough. It is passion that keeps them at the bench or staring into a microscope or redesigning an experiment with slight modifications until that “eureka moment.”

I have been writing about science for half a century. I can tell you that passion is the bridge between daunting difficulty and triumphant discovery. Next comes money: steady, reliable funding, not start-and-stop dribbles.

It is painful to watch the defunding of the nation’s research arm by a third to a half, the wanton destruction of what, since the end of World War II, has kept the United States the premier inventor nation, the unequaled leader in discovery.

It is dangerous to believe the ante will return when another administration is voted in, maybe in 2028.

You don’t pick up the pieces of projects that are, as they were, ripped from the womb and put them back together again, even if the researchers are still available — if they haven’t gone to the willing arms of research hubs overseas or other careers.

The work isn’t made whole again just because the money is back. The passion is gone.

There are crude, massive reductions in funding for research and development across the government — with the most axing in the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. The Philistines, with their metaphorical chainsaws, have slashed wildly and deeply into every corner of science, every place where talented men and women probe, analyze and seek to know.

This brutal, mindless slashing isn’t just upending careers, causing projects to be abandoned in midstream and destroying the precious passion that drives discovery, but it is also a blow against the future. It is a turn from light to dark.

The whiz kids of DOGE aren’t cost-cutting; they are amputating the nation’s future.

The cutting of funds to NIH — until now the world’s premier medical research center, a citadel of hope for the sick and the guarantor that the future will have less suffering than the past — may be the most egregious act of many.

It is a terrible blow to those suffering from cancer to Parkinson’s and the myriad diseases in between who hope that NIH will come up with a cure or a therapy before they die prematurely. It is a heartless betrayal.

The full horror of the dismantling of what they call the nation’s “scientific pillar” has been laid out by two of America’s most eminent scientists in an essay in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

They are John Holdren, who served as President Barack Obama’s science adviser and as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Neal Lane, who was President Bill Clinton’s science adviser and is a former NSF director. In their alarming and telling essay, they appeal to Congress to step in and save America’s global leadership in science.

They write, “What is happening now exceeds our worst fears. Consider, first, the National Science Foundation, one of the brightest jewels in the crown of U.S. science and the public interest. … It’s the nation’s largest single funder of university basic research in fields other than medicine. Basic research, of course, is the seed corn from which future advances in applied science and technology flow.”

The NSF co-stars in the federal research ecosystem with NIH and DOE, the authors write. The NSF has funded research underpinning the internet, the Google search engine, magnetic resonance imaging, laser eye surgery, 3-D printing, CRISPR gene-editing technology and much more.

The NIH is the world’s leading biomedical research facility. The writers say it spends 83% of its $48 billion annual budget on competitive grants, supporting 300,000 researchers at more than 2,500 institutions in all 50 states. An additional 11% of the agency’s budget supports the 6,000 researchers in its laboratories.

Holdren and Lane write, “Of the Energy Department’s $50 billion budget in fiscal 2024, about $15 billion went to non-defense research and development.”

Some $8 billion of this funding went to the DOE Office of Science Research, the largest funder of basic research in the physical sciences, supporting 300 institutions nationwide, including the department’s 17 laboratories.

In all of the seminal moves made by the Trump administration, what The Economist calls the president’s “War on Science” may be the most damaging.

Llewellyn King is the executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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For decades, politicians in both parties have operated on the belief that Social Security is the third rail of American politics, dangerous if not fatal to touch.

Since the 1990s, Medicare has seemed equally inviolate. The budget bill Republicans are hoping to bring to the Senate floor soon will test whether Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act now also belong on that list.

Republicans have long sought to repeal the Affordable Care Act, signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2010, and retrench Medicaid, a joint federal-state partnership created by the Great Society Congress in 1965 to provide health insurance to the poor.

In 2017, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, with enthusiastic support from President Donald Trump, passed legislation that repealed the ACA and severely reduced funding for Medicaid. Although the Senate ultimately rejected a stripped-down version of that plan — with the late Senator John McCain dramatically dooming it with a thumb’s-down gesture on the Senate floor — the attempted repeal stoked a backlash that boosted the Democrats’ big House gains during the 2018 midterms.

In their new budget bill, congressional Republicans have taken one big lesson from that experience. The plan that passed the House last month, and the version advancing in the Senate, both avoid the head-on assault seen in the 2017 legislation. Instead, the GOP is applying a death-by-a-thousand cuts strategy that bleeds the ACA and Medicaid through a succession of less visible changes.

These include imposing a work requirement on able-bodied adults receiving Medicaid, restricting a financing technique that states have used to maximize federal Medicaid payments and adding new obstacles to buying insurance on the ACA exchanges. Among the legislation’s most consequential choices is a decision not to act: both bills let the enhanced subsidies for purchasing insurance on the ACA exchanges (approved by President Joe Biden and a Democratic Congress) expire as of Dec. 31.

Nothing on that list might seem as immediately threatening to voters as the central provisions of the 2017 repeal effort — particularly the earlier bill’s elimination of the ACA’s guarantee of insurance coverage for people with preexisting health conditions. Public polls show that the element of the GOP blueprint that is probably easiest to grasp — imposing work requirements on able-bodied adults receiving Medicaid — consistently draws majority support from voters when they first hear about it.

Yet cumulatively, the new bill comes much closer than is commonly understood toward matching the impact of the GOP’s 2017 repeal effort. The Brookings Institution recently calculated that when the cost of allowing the enhanced ACA subsidies to expire is included, the House bill would reduce federal health care spending by nearly as much as the 2017 package.

The Congressional Budget Office projects that provisions in this year’s House-passed bill would cause about 11 million Americans to lose health insurance. In addition, the CBO forecasts that allowing the enhanced ACA subsidies to expire (plus some other regulatory changes the administration is implementing) would cause another 5 million people to become uninsured, for a total coverage loss of 16 million. That is less than the CBO’s projections from the 2017 House bill (about 23 million), but still an astonishing number. If Trump signs the reconciliation plan into law, it would cause more Americans to lose health coverage than any single statute enacted in U.S. history, says Edwin Park, a research professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families.

Republicans have tried to target these cuts to minimize their political risk. The work requirement in both bills and the Senate’s limits on the “provider tax” financing technique would apply only to the 40 states that expanded Medicaid eligibility to more of the working poor through the ACA. The 10 states that have not expanded eligibility would not face any significant Medicaid reductions, and they almost all lean heavily red: Together, they elect about one-third of GOP members in both the House and Senate.

But that leaves plenty of other Republican-leaning constituencies vulnerable to these cuts. Medicaid is especially important to the health care systems in rural areas — which now vote overwhelmingly Republican — because fewer people in those places have employer-provided insurance. Polling by KFF, a nonpartisan health care thinktank, found that more adults who buy coverage on the ACA exchanges identify as Republicans than Democrats.

And previously unreleased KFF results provided to me found that adults without a four-year college degree, the cornerstone of the modern GOP coalition, comprise 85% of all Medicaid recipients. There are 64 House Republicans, as I’ve calculated with CNN colleagues, who represent districts where the share of Medicaid recipients exceeds the national average. And the states that would be hit hardest by the bills’ Medicaid cuts include solidly red Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana, and Missouri as well as the critical swing states of Michigan, Arizona and North Carolina.

All of those results reflect the new political geometry of health care: Since the passage of the ACA, federal health care programs have extended their reach up the income ladder even as Trump’s political strength among working-class voters has extended the GOP’s grasp down the income ladder. The GOP’s budget bill defiantly disregards that new alignment by stripping health coverage from millions of working- and middle-class Americans, and raising premiums for millions more while providing its biggest tax benefits to the wealthy — at a cost of nearly $4 trillion.

Republicans are barely questioning whether such a massive transfer of income from average to affluent families could endanger their electoral coalition. But the budget bill’s starkly contrasting priorities will likely test how far they can push the working-class voters who have become the party’s undisputed foundation in the Trump era.

Ronald Brownstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He is also a CNN analyst and previously worked for The Atlantic, The National Journal and the Los Angeles Times. He has won multiple professional awards and is the author or editor of seven books.

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ANTHONY BUKOSKI: Presents “The Thief of Words,” interconnected stories split between the Polish-American communities of northern Wisconsin and Louisiana, where refugees from World War II were resettled. In conversation with Carol Dunbar. 7 p.m. Monday, Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Mpls.

JACK STOLTZFUS: Signs copies of “The Parent’s Launch Code: Loving and Letting Go of Our Adult Children.” 9:30-11 a.m. Friday, Lake Country Booksellers, 4766 Washington Ave., White Bear Lake.

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