Bridge Co. plays class card in bid to stop rival span

DETROIT — The billionaire owner of the private Ambassador Bridge is raising the stakes in his battle to stop a competing public bridge from being built a few miles away down the Detroit River.

The Detroit International Bridge Co. — owned by Detroit trucking magnate Manuel (Matty) Moroun — has made good on its threats to take developers of the proposed second bridge to court.

The lawsuit — filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. yesterday — names the Federal Highway Administration as a defendant and demands that the binational Detroit River International Crossing (DRIC) is blocked from proceeding with a new bridge.

The DRIC team has spent years studying the construction of a publicly controlled bridge spanning the Detroit River between the industrial Brighton Beach area in Windsor and Delray, an impoverished suburb just west of Detroit.  

The private bridge company has enlisted the support of a handful of Delray community groups, including the Detroit Association of Black Organizations; Latin Americans for Social and Economic Development (LASED) and Detroiters for Progress, which, as the Detroit Free Press reports, is run by a "paid political consultant who has worked for Moroun."

Their argument is, essentially, that the new bridge landing would uproot the residents of Delray, while at the same time a predominately white, middle-class neighborhood across the border in Windsor is being protected.

Desolate for long stretches, Delray could use
some investment,bridge proponents argue.

"A new DRIC bridge and customs plaza will destroy homes, churches and businesses," reads the complaint. "The homes and community spaces that remain will face dramatically worsening air quality as a result of 24-hour a day truck and car traffic in the plaza."

DRIC complains the bridge company is proceeding with a plan "that creates massive adverse impacts in the United States in order to avoid any impacts whatsoever in Canada."

Plus, states the lawsuit, environmental and social safeguards meant "to protect minority and low-income businesses and individuals would be revealed as empty promises if the US DRIC proponents are permitted to destroy Delray with a new border crossing and customs plaza."

However, it can be easily argued that fewer citizens will be impacted in Delray than anywhere else, as many of the suburb’s homes are vacant, burnt down, or barely standing. Proponents of the bridge insist that any development would bring with it much-needed infrastructure, social services, and jobs to the community.

The bridge company, though, says these direct and ancillary benefits are just a smokescreen. "People who have little hope of improving their circumstances in other ways are all too ready to believe these kinds of empty promises."

It isn’t just Delray citizens the bridge company is concerned about. In its compliant, the company points out that the DRIC project is intended to "poach as much as 75 percent of the commercial traffic currently using the Ambassador Bridge.

"Such a steep drop in traffic would severely harm DIBC."

As they’ve been saying for the last four years, bridge company officials insist that their own plans to twin the current Ambassador with a new six-lane span is more viable for the economy and affected communities.

"DRIC Proponents intend to defeat the Congressional directive to improve the Ambassador Bridge by diverting traffic away from (it) immediately after hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have been invested in connecting the Ambassador Bridge to the U.S. highway system," the suit read.

This is the latest move in a series of attempts to stop DRIC. According to the Free Press, U.S. Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick — a Detroit Democrat and mother of that city’s former embattled mayor — had received a request from "Ambassador Bridge operators to have a prohibition against any funding for a rival span placed in next year’s federal budget."