Plans for Bridge Staggering Over New Concerns: Bigger Truck Plaza Targeted As Danger

By Jerry Zremski, The Buffalo News, N.Y.

May 14–WASHINGTON — The common tern may be the least of the problems facing plans for a “signature” bridge across the Niagara River between Buffalo and Fort Erie, Ont.

In letters to the federal agency that can approve or disapprove the project, a vast array of interest groups, government agencies and citizens have raised questions that go far beyond whether the soaring, cable- stayed bridge design would mean death to the birds that fly near it.

Many are more concerned that the Peace Bridge Authority’s plan for a vastly expanded truck plaza on Buffalo’s West Side would mean death to a neighborhood and its historic treasures.

“The project is pretty staggering in terms of its negative impact on Buffalo,” said Roberta Lane, an attorney for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a Washington-based advocacy group.

The U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, the New Millennium Group and the Buffalo Olmstead Parks Conservancy are among others that sharply criticized the project’s draft environmental review. They say it downplays the project’s negative impact while failing to consider other options.

“We believe that other reasonable alternatives having fewer environmental impacts than the preferred alternative should be analyzed,” wrote John Filippelli, chief of strategic planning in the EPA’s Multi- Media Programs Branch.

The Federal Highway Administration, which has the final say on the project, will take all these comments seriously as it reviews whether the bridge expansion complies with federal historic preservation and environmental laws, said Doug Hecox, an agency spokesman.

“Ultimately these concerns need to be addressed,” said Hecox, who added that hopes for a 2009 construction date for the bridge should be viewed as “a ballpark estimate, at best.”

“Whenever possible we are going to cut red tape without cutting corners,” he said. “We’re going to do this right.”

In response to all the criticism, the Peace Bridge Authority has modified the plaza plan.

It has shrunk the number of residential and other properties it would need to acquire from 120 to 102, saving five historic homes. The agency also changed ramp designs and proposed a buffer of berms and trees between the plaza and the nearby Columbus Parkway neighborhood.

“We have made significant changes to address each of the concerns that have come in,” said Ron Rienas, the Peace Bridge’s general manager. “This is pretty normal,” Rienas said of the critical comments and the agency’s response.

Yet the plaza changes have not placated critics such as Lane.

“These changes are not responsive to the concerns of preservation organizations, agencies, or other stakeholders, but this and similar announcements serve PBA by forcing the project’s critics to deal with a moving target,” she said.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation’s concerns echo those of neighborhood groups in Buffalo, which worry that the plan for a 38-acre truck plaza calls for the taking of 83 homes.

“The Peace Bridge Authority wants this to be just one big truck stop because that’s how they’re going to make their money,” said Kathy Mecca, who heads the Niagara Gateway Columbus Park Association, who also is concerned about the project’s potential health impacts.

Meanwhile, the New Millennium Group — which spearheaded the calls for a signature bridge — now fears that the accompanying plaza will do too much damage to the city.

“The good neighbors of this wonderful community want to ensure that this project is done properly, with consideration to Buffalo’s image, sensitivity to human health and the environment and respect for historic properties,” wrote Patrick McNichol, a spokesman for the group.

Hispanics United of Buffalo was one of several groups to focus on the potential health impacts on neighbors who would be breathing in fumes from the trucks at the plaza.

“With the asthma rates as high as they are, what makes us think they will not continue to increase?” wrote Lourdes T. Iglesias, the group’s executive director.

And the Olmstead Parks Conservancy worries that the plaza plan would further isolate and pollute Front Park — and that the Peace Bridge Authority is rushing to complete a long-delayed project.

“They think the getting-it-done sword is going to beat off all challengers,” said David Colligan, the group’s chairman-elect.

The project’s timetable calls for the environmental impact statement to be finalized this year and construction to begin by the end of 2009. Local political and business leaders, frustrated

that the effort to expand the existing bridge has stretched for more than a decade, stressed that they want to stick to that schedule.

“We are focused on pushing federal bureaucracies and the state to iron out their concerns and rapidly develop a mitigation strategy that will get a world-class signature bridge for Buffalo back on track and constructed as quickly as possible,” said Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N. Y.

But Rep. Brian Higgins, D-Buffalo, warned that the planning of the plaza won’t make everyone happy.

“You’re never going to have 100 percent consensus,” he said.

And Mayor Byron W. Brown noted that he wants the project to go forward, even though his former planning director, Timothy E. Wanamaker, raised numerous concerns about it in a letter to federal officials last fall.

Brown said he wanted many of those concerns to be addressed as the plan evolves, but he also noted a cold, hard fact for residents of the Peace Bridge neighborhood.

“I don’t think there is any way to build the plaza without some takings” of nearby properties, Brown said. “We certainly want to reduce the takings.”

Peace Bridge officials were left with the expanded plaza plan last year after U. S. and Canadian officials failed to come to an agreement on “shared border management,” a proposal to move many of the plaza operations to the Canadian side of the bridge.

The trouble is, the EPA and numerous other organizations noted that draft environmental impact statements for such projects are supposed to include alternatives.

The environmental review is part of a process in which the Federal Highway Administration will decide whether the project complies with the National Historic Preservation Act, the National Environmental Policy Act and laws.

If the highway agency allows the project to move forward, that would not necessarily quell the controversy.

“There’s certainly the basis for legal redress,” said James B. Kane, regional director for Ambassador Niagara Signature Bridge Group, which wants to build an alternative bridge mainly for trucks linking Buffalo’s Black Rock neighborhood with the Bridgeburg section of Fort Erie, Ont.

Many of the written comments made no mention of the common tern. The Audubon Society, however, warned that the bridge design chosen by a design jury was the one that posed the greatest threat to birds.

And Kate Cody, a neighborhood resident who is critical of the plaza plan, wondered why the common tern controversy erupted so late in the process.

Mention of the potential problem “was in an attachment to an appendix of an addendum to Appendix F of the draft environmental impact statement,” she said.

jzremski@buffnews.com

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