Four-Year Delay Seen for New Detroit Bridge

Canada last week achieved a critical milestone toward building the $3 billion Detroit River International Crossing. But the final opening still faces at least four years of delay by the most hopeful calculation from 2013 to 2017.

Canadian authorities gave their final approval in an exhaustive environmental process which has lasted several years since federal and local governments decided to build a new bridge two miles upriver from the 80-year-old Ambassador Bridge. The same U.S. process ended in approval early this year. The two environmental approvals would normally allow the project to go ahead.

Even four extra years can become more if there are further delays from a huge tangle of lawsuits in U.S. courts or from renewed opposition in the Michigan legislature, where the private owner of the venerable Ambassador Bridge, Manual Moroun, has several supporters. Moroun wants to build his own new span and stop the public DRIC.

“I would anticipate that the bridge would be in service within seven years,” taking that to about 2017, said Mark Butler, spokesman in Windsor for the federal department Transport Canada, on Friday. He estimated four and a half to five years for construction of the bridge, customs plazas, access roads and other details, and a couple of years or more to arrange the financing and select a “concessionaire” who would build and operate the bridge under ownership by the governments of Canada and Michigan.

Butler’s four-year delay from original planning may be too optimistic. There are seven (and counting) lawsuits filed involving Grosse Point billionaire Moroun and his company the Detroit International Bridge Co. Aside from the court battles, final approval of the project by the Michigan legislature faces opponents of the DRIC and supporters of Moroun and the DIBC.

Republican State Senator Alan Cropsey and his majority leader, Michael Bishop, obtained a provision in the 2008-2009 Transportation budget requiring by next May 1 an “investment-grade traffic study” looking ahead 10 years. Michigan’s Transportation Department is to present proposals for private-public building of the project by the same date. The debate may go on for a long time.