EAGLE RIVER — Dan Eichinger, director of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) said that his department is happy to be joining Helen Taylor, director of The Nature Conservancy in Michigan (TNC) in talking about the TNC’s acquisition of 31,000 acres recently sold by The Rohatyn Group (TRG), listed as the Keweenaw Heartlands.

Eichinger spoke during a press conference held by TNC last Thursday at which the group confirmed purchase of the property the day before. The transaction is important, he said, and one he thinks everyone at the conference had been following since the announcement that TRG had listed the property for public sale. The total price tag for the commercial lands was stated at $43,193,000.

TRG had approached the DNR several times since the late 1990s to determine interest in acquiring significant land holdings in the county.

Eichinger said that for his department, the approach to the Keweenaw Heartlands acquisition provided a valuable learning experience. In prior years, he said, the state would have come in with guns blazing, figuring out any means possible to buy that property as quickly as possible.

“There was a lot of pressure for us do that,” he said.

For example, in a March 2021 telephone interview, Scott Whitcomb, director of Public Lands with the DNR Executive Division, said that the DNR had received approximately 300 nominations for the purchase of the land at the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula using Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund grants (MNRTF). The nominations came just before the grants were due within the month of March, while grants are due on April 1.

The DNR also has other important public lands it currently manages in Keweenaw County, Whitcomb said, including state forest lands at the tip of the Keweenaw and Fort Wilkins State Park.

“At this time there is not adequate DNR staffing capacity for managing the entirety of additional lands for sale by TRG in this area of the state,” Whitcomb explained. However, to begin to assemble funds necessary for the purchase plan, the DNR applied for a trust fund grant in 2022 for $5,000,000 for fee ownership, and to pay for a portion of a conservation easement on remaining lands.

As Eichinger said at last Thursday’s press conference, in response to TRG’s offers to the state in 2021, the DNR said it would like to propose including “a more robust and diverse group” whose purpose would be gathering additional information, creating a prioritization of the acreage, and packaging a recommendation for the best path forward that will ensure the highest likelihood of success utilizing multiple partners.

Referring to his statement of the DNR’s prior acquisitions in haste as was commonly done in the past, Eichinger said this time a different, more cautious approach was adopted.

“We pulled back a little bit,” he said.

The DNR was intent on bringing in local government and local community, also including state legislators, conservation organizations and recreation users, Eichinger noted. The goal, he said, was to thoroughly discuss the uses for the property, and how all stakeholders could work together to accomplish all of their respective missions.

“And we’re very pleased to be in a position today,” he said, “where we can say that all of those uses that we enjoy, all of those benefits that we enjoy are going to preserved here on the Keweenaw.”

While Eichinger did not elaborate, he said the DNR is now in a position to aggressively pursue, through partnership and creative financing, and some of the tremendous grant programs that exist in Michigan to be able to add value to the residents and visitors.

“And I think that really created a model for us going forward, that as we look at other scenarios across the Upper Peninsula, across the northern Lower, or wherever it might be, there is something here that we can replicate, because this feels very durable to us, the kind of community engagement, the community conversation that was built around this acquisition is unique and unlike how we’ve done other acquisitions in the past. We buy and sell a lot of acreage on an annual basis and this 31,000 acres that we’re talking about here has probably had more community engagement and more team engagement from partners – local government, local community folks, local recreation leaders — than any other acquisition that I’m familiar with or I’ve been involved in my career.

“So, we’ve learned something here and I think that’s one of the great benefits of this project here is that we’re going to take what we learned and we’re going to be able to apply it in other contexts in other places.”