The minutes from the Perch Lake Township annual meeting in March were stark. “The sewer project is dead.”

After months of negotiations in 2019, the failure to reach a new joint powers agreement between the Big Lake Area Sanitary District and the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa made clear in December that the death notice for improving lake water quality was nigh.

Sanitary district chairman John Frederickson wrote the obituary on Dec. 12, saying all efforts to resolve differences between the district and the band “have been exhausted without success, and any further action will resul...