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State officials, business leaders and other voices said for years that Michigan needed a second bridge crossing the Detroit River between Detroit and Windsor, Ont. But the Moroun family, owners of the Ambassador Bridge, spent millions throwing sand into every gear they could find to preserve their monopoly over the vital freight crossing.
Gordie Howe Bridge under construction (Photo: Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority)
Today, with the Ambassador Bridge shut down for nearly a week by Canadian protesters, those people are having their I-told-you-so moment.
Chad Livengood writes in a paywalled Crain's Detroit Business column:
Redundancy in border crossings — like the four bridges New York has in the Buffalo and Niagara Falls region — were the central argument in Lansing for a second bridge, dating back to the 1990s (the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel is not tall enough for most commercial trucks and largely limited to passenger vehicles).
... But efforts to get Michigan legislators to approve one dime for a second span connected to modern freeways in Michigan and Ontario have been stymied for two decades, in part because of fierce lobbying and generous campaign donations from the family of the late bridge owner Manuel "Matty" Moroun.
Many politicians in the Michigan legislature (and in Detroit) happily sold themselves to the Morouns, until the Canadian government agreed to foot the entire $5 billion cost of the bridge, now under construction downriver of the Ambassador, but still years from completion. It's a wonder they even allowed an American flag and bald eagle on the U.S. tower.
"It was worth $5 billion to us to ensure" the flow of auto parts and food across the border, said Roy Norton, who served as Canada's top diplomat in Detroit from 2010 and 2014.
While the Ambassador sits empty, shut down by what Livengood calls "a ragtag group of protesters," American auto factories are idling workers and manufacturers are starting to fly parts from the Canadian side. Police cleared the bridge of the trucks that were blocking it on Saturday. While pedestrians have arrived to continue the protest, as of Sunday morning Windsor police were beginning to make arrests. There's still no official word on when the span might reopen.
And the pettiness stateside remains:
MDOT employees that work on the Gordie Howe project have to log their hours and effectively send Canada the bill for reimbursement because of a prohibition written into the state budget that the Morouns lobbied for.
