WASHINGTON – The U.S. Supreme Court took a pass on a request by the frac-sand company Minnesota Sands to overturn Winona County’s frac sand ban. The Court announced it would not hear the company’s appeal of a series of lower-court decisions that upheld the right of local governments to control their local environments. At issue was a county ordinance against frac-sand mining, processing, or transportation. The decision was a setback for Rick Frick of Minnesota Sands. Frick claimed the county was interfering with the company’s right to extract sand from 2,000 acres of silica-rich land. Frick valued the sand at $3.6 billion to $5.8 billion. The unusually slippery sand is in demand by the oil industry for the hydraulic fracturing process to extract deep oil deposits.
Judicial path
The Winona County Board banned frac-sand mining in 2016. Minnesota Sands sued the county, but the ban was upheld by the Winona County District Court in 2017, the Minnesota Court of Appeals in 2018, and the Minnesota Supreme Court in 2020. In October 2020, Minnesota Sands petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the case. The Minnesota Sands appeal was financed by the oil and extraction industries, which argued that Winona County was infringing on a company right to exploit its land for profit under the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.