Former Michigan Strategic Fund board member blasts decision to fund UP’s Copperwood Mine 

Last week, the Michigan Strategic Fund Board voted to allocate $50 million in state funds to support site preparation efforts for a mining project in the western Upper Peninsula.

However, one former board member is questioning the decision after state lawmakers repeatedly failed to appropriate the cash the board approved for the project in 2024.

After the board’s meeting on Aug. 25, Cindy Warner, who served on the Michigan Strategic Fund Board from 2019 to 2025, sent a letter to Quentin Messer, CEO of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation and the president and chair of the Strategic Fund.

In the letter, which was circulated by the Economic Development Responsibility Alliance of Michigan, Warner raised concerns that the board had used funds from a project she’d voted on while serving as a member, stating “At no time was ANY approval that I provided, for any project, transferrable, to ANY other project, ever.”

During a media briefing before the Aug. 25 vote, Michelle Grinnell, chief communications and attraction officer for the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, told reporters that the funding used to support the mining project was appropriated to the Michigan Strategic Fund through a budget supplemental in Fiscal Year 2022 that included $50 million for site readiness. 

Because the funding had already been transferred to the Michigan Strategic Fund, Grinnell said the board did not need to seek legislative approval for the funding like it did with the $50 million it approved for the project in 2024.

Grinnell said the money was initially set aside for other projects which never came to fruition, freeing up the funds to support the new site readiness grant for the Copperwood Mine. 

When asked for more details on the source of the $50 million, Danielle Emerson, the public relations manager for the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, told Michigan Advance that the majority of the funding was never brought before the board.

“While the MEDC accounted for it internally, with the expectation of using it for projects in our pipeline, those projects did not ultimately move forward,” Emerson explained.

However, among that $50 million was $3.86 million which the board had previously approved for a project in Bath Township that was never disbursed, Emerson said. 

Warner told Michigan Advance on Friday that she’d received a nearly identical response to her letter.

Emerson said the board’s authority is not constrained by positions taken by former members, and that “there is no law, policy or precedent that provides individuals who no longer serve on the Board with the authority to determine, or override, the decision of current members of the MSF Board.” 

In her own response to Messer, Warner maintained that she would not allow the board to leverage her approval from any previous projects.

In addition to her concerns about the strategic fund board leveraging funding previously approved for other projects, Warner criticized the board for sidestepping the Legislature when Copperwood Resources Inc. still had not met the requirements put in place when they approved the project in 2024.

As a condition of the previous grant, Copperwood Resources Inc. was required to secure $150 million in financing for the project before the end of 2025 – with the option of a 12-month extension – before it could begin receiving funding.

Environmental advocates blast House budget for providing $50 million in support of Copperwood Mine

Under the newly approved grant, the company must meet the same terms. However, it has until March 31, 2028 to do so.

Highland Copper – Copperwood Resources’ parent company – has received a letter of interest for $250 million in debt financing from the Export–Import Bank of the United States. 

“Highland will seek to convert that into a binding loan in 2027, which will satisfy the State of Michigan’s requirements,” the company said in a statement.

Emerson said the project is subject to the same terms and protections as it was in 2024 through the new grant agreement. She noted that because the Legislature never transferred the requested grant funds to the project, the company never held an executed agreement with the Michigan Strategic Fund.

But Warner questioned why the project was still under consideration when Copperwood Resources Inc. hadn’t secured funding two years after the board initially approved funding.

“The reality is, for a strategic site readiness grant, the basic threshold is that a company has financial viability,” Warner told Michigan Advance. “This company does not have financial viability to do a $425 million project. They didn’t when it was brought to us in 2024. We gave them two years, and they still don’t have proof of financial viability.”