WASHINGTON – The owners of the Ambassador Bridge, along with several Detroit groups, filed a lawsuit today challenging the Federal Highway Administration’s approval of a rival span little more than a mile downriver.
In the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., the Detroit International Bridge Co. – owned by trucking magnate Manuel (Matty) Moroun – and the other plaintiffs argued the FHA’s approval violated federal laws, relied on erroneous traffic data and failed to thoroughly examine alternative crossing locations.
Joining the bridge company in the suit were Latin Americans for Social and Economic Development, Citizens with Challenges, the Detroit Association of Black Organizations, MANA de Metro Detroit, the Mexican Patriotic Committee of Detroit and Detroiters for Progress. The suit named the FHA and James Steele, Michigan administrator of the Highway Administrator, as defendants.
Dan Stamper, president of the bridge company, said the approval process “has been a sham from the beginning. Information that did not support the Highway Administration’s goal was systematically ignored or dismissed. … All evidence shows that the DRIC bridge is unnecessary and a massive waste of taxpayer money.”
The fight has been brewing for years: State and federal officials in Canada and the United States have supported the Detroit River International Crossing, or DRIC, which would be a publicly owned second span over the Detroit River. But it would represent a threat to the operations at the Ambassador Bridge, the busiest trade crossing in North America. Moroun wants to build a second span to the bridge, but officials in Canada have balked at the idea.
DRIC’s supporters say traffic volume and security call for another span. But in the suit, the Bridge Company and the others argue that it will not only cost billions in taxpayer dollars but that it will also “inflict disproportionately high and adverse harm on the predominantly-minority residents of the Delray neighborhood of southwest Detroit, waste $250 million of public funding already spent to directly connect the Ambassador Bridge to three interstate highways in Detroit even before that project is complete, and divert a significant majority of existing traffic away from the Ambassador Bridge, a Detroit landmark, to this new and unnecessary bridge.”
Federal highway officials did not immediately respond to word the lawsuit had been filed.
From The Freep Link is now dead so I do not have the link to site this....
