The bridge connecting detroit windsor is too small so they want to build a bigger one.
The state of michigan can't afford it really so the province of ontario offered to pay for michigan's share as well as ontario's share. On top of that the US federal government decided that they would contribute matching funds to michigan's "contribution" in exchange the toll revenue from the bridge would go to pay back michigan's share to the province of ontario after which the revenues would be split as normal
However the owner of the existing bridge successfully lobbied the state of michigan to reject to offer.
Totally retarded
How do you turn down a free bridge that will generate massive revenue for you? It wouldn't cost michigan a dime and would have helped the city of detroit amongst other things...

I live in Windsor so I have been on top of this story for a bit.

Ontario is already starting to build the "park way "(high way with environmental elements integrated in its design) that will connect to the "new bridge" even while this is all occuring. Even though the "park way" will have ramps that will lead to the current bridge and other streets, they should not start building this high way unless they know for sure the build will be built (they currently expect the bridge to be done when this high way is complete but that does not look like its going to be the case.)
The construction of the park way is providing windsor with a lot of needed jobs, so I guess its not all bad.

On topic of the current bridge owner... this is not the first action the current bridge owner has done to try to get the new bridge from not being built.
He bought out entire neighbor hoods around where the bridge will be built just so he could say "that building a bridge in this area would harm this community even more," even though it was him (the bridge owner) who created the bad looking neighbor hood.
His main goal is to get his own bridge to be extended instead of a new bridge being built.

One of the main factors for having a new bridge being built instead of just making the old bridge bigger is because of the traffic the current bridge creates. The trucks that goes down communities with the current bridge is very dangerous. They kill a bunch of people every year.


Eh... thats all the input I want to add to the thread for now, I could say more but I wont :P

How are people reacting to this?

I'd like to see this happen to the troll....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAu_Ykvju5A

Or is the troll going to continue menacing the people with his tolls...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ8G2s--1zA

Also, how is the bridge owner influencing the politics of all this? Is it the US side or the Canadian side that is having the problem deciding if this is a go?

Us side was lobbied by the current bridge owner, so easily influenced against what would be good for the people

off of what martian said i would assume the US side

Money can now blatently talk, under the guise of upcoming or current campaign contributions, or legal bribes heh

Well the US side we have no problem running a road through your property under eminent domain, especially if a corporation promises they will generate a dollar higher in property taxes.

I will not disparage the country I love.
I will not disparage the country I love.
I will not disparage the country I love.
I will not disparage the country I love.
I will not disparage the country I love.
I will not disparage the country I love.
. . .

-sigh-

it mostly affected the US side. There was some effort at interference on the Canadian side. However due to our donation and election laws (and a provincial government that is heavily supported by the construction industry) he got shot down.

At Oceana: only if your property is in a low income neighborhood. Otherwise not so much:P

why would Michigan have to pay back Ontario for the, um, free bridge?

the wouldn't. Just that the toll revenue collected would go to ontario first until Michigan's "share" was paid off. And then it would be split.

Rejected free bridge that would pay off by itself and helping the people around it and then generate more income for the state and shot down so 1 man could buy another yacht.

martian i know this wont help but this is happening everywhere. Other states and much much worse in developing countries.

Two things I am missing:
1) Couldn't Ontario toll their side of the bridge too? (Observation from someone who has cursed out the NJ and NY tolls situated what seems like feet from each other sometimes. Same goes for NJ and DE).
2) Can there be two bridges and one relegated to commercial and regular vehicles and the other only regular vehicles?

I watched the only Ambassador bridge related video on youtube.

Some whacko commercial they must have played around Michigan. Something about it will cost ONE HUNDRED MILLION (!!!!!) DOLLARS a year to Michigan taxpayers and that traffic is down 50% in the last 10 years (compared to DOT studies showing traffic almost doubling in the near future).


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CT_OrPKzN8

I've never ever seen anything like this on Canadian television. Never. It seems full of claims pulled from a hat with the intention of shocking uninformed people. Seems that everything there is totally unfounded.

Happily, Canada ditched the attempt to legalize knowingly misleading information from being broadcast over television/radio earlier this year.

"...the CRTC's (Canada's Communications regulator) call for public input on the proposal resulted in a tidal wave of angry responses from Canadians who said they feared such a move would open the door to Fox TV-style news and reduce their ability to determine what is true and what is false."

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/...fake-news/article1921489/


This article popped up this morning showing that the bridge owner built a bunch of stuff not according to plan. I don't know how this impacts traffic on the Detroit side, but it is still uber sketchy.

http://www.freep.com/...or-Bridge-gateway-project

hehe. complaining that it's a billionaires fault that Detroit doesn't want to buy foreign.

Trumper: There is only 1 toll and the revenue from it is distributed between both Michigan and Ontario.

It is both jurisdiction's toll

america only builds bridges to nowhere, not bridges to places that want to buy your goods while selling you raw materials.

isn't there some kind of railway tunnel that Canadian rail doesn't want to use?

No idea dibs.

As soon as that boarder agreement is signed we will probably see this bridge happen though.

How is this up to Michigan anyway? Isn't it under the US State Department's perview since it crosses international boundaries?

i dunno. i read the article regarding the Ambassabor bridge on Wikipedia. the Federal government doesn't exactly have full autonomy. they run into problems if the states don't want to cooperate with them.

figure that Canada needs it's own Duty Free Gas Station to compete with the billionaire's monopoly in order to resolve the issue.

A Canadian duty free wouldn't be able to compete, there is still a 13% sales tax that drives the price above the US comparable heh.

Greedy Canadian Government! :-P

"1) Couldn't Ontario toll their side of the bridge too? (Observation from someone who has cursed out the NJ and NY tolls situated what seems like feet from each other sometimes. Same goes for NJ and DE)."
One toll operation, shared revenue. Cheaper.

"2) Can there be two bridges and one relegated to commercial and regular vehicles and the other only regular vehicles?""
Yes. For the record they aren't advocating blocking access to the existing crossings. If they wanted to be real fluffs on the Canadian side the city of Windsor could block the roads connecting to the bridge via "construction projects" and/or "environmental assessments" you wouldn't have legal recourse, but it's not really worth it for them in this case. The point is to expand trade, not impede it. I note that the province of Ontario has blocked a federal railway project to nowhere using this method though. The existing provincial government has proven to be pretty ruthless when it comes to getting infrastructure built their way. Also there is a tunnel. There is no abandoned railway tunnel unfortunately.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I think it's really bad that

Money in politics

a

I've never seen someone lobby to build a bridge, only to not build a bridge.

What fluffing retards. How stupid do you have to be?

I've seen both. however not in a case like this.
The against was due to environmental concerns and overloading an already overcrowded road.
The for was because the old one was deemed structurally unsound:P

would one be allowed to pay ones toll in Drachma? I hear the Drachma is fixing to make a comeback and I want to get on that rife eaaarrrly.

This is hardly unexpected. The rest of the world looks at the US political system as corrupt. Hence why the arguements for invading other countries to bring about democratic change are so hollow.. ;-)

trumper: all of the ny/nj crossings have tolls in one direction, not both.

Posting about politics in the alliance forum is retarded.

I'm flattered that you actually took the effort to post on a thread you didn't think was appropriate just to troll. However on alliance you need to try much harder before you reach 1337 tr011ing levels....

I live in the suburbs of Detroit.

The owner of the Ambassador Bridge, Manuel "Matty" Moroun, is a billionaire fluffbag. He is throwing everything he can into the fight, because HE wants to build the bridge, which HE would then own. The problem is, he already owns one bridge, which is absolutely falling apart. The thing is 80 years old and is in TERRIBLE shape.

The only thing going for it is that Moroun has the US-bound traffic (ie coming FROM Canada) is routed right past HIS Gas Station and HIS Convenience store, where he makes money hand over fist due to their tax-free status. It is worth pointing out that he is in contempt of a judicial order to reconstruct the whole bridge enterance/exit area to a design that was agreed upon all the way back in 2004. Earlier this week, a judge ordered Moroun to personally appear before him, with a large fine likely and some jail time possible.

This is a Detroit Free Press article from today with some basic info:

http://www.freep.com/...article?AID=2011111040325



Its not just Moroun though. Our Republican Governor, Rick Snyder, has been pushing heavily for new bridge. However, our Republican-controlled Senate just defeated the legislation for the bridge in committee. Got that? In COMMITTEE. Didn't even get to be voted on by the whole assembly. The thought is that Moroun "contributed" heavily to their re-election campaigns, but due to State oversight rules, the next batch of financial disclosures is not coming for several months, so we really don't know.

Moroun also owns Michigan Central Station, which is one of the most beautiful buildings in the city. At least it used to be, 40 years ago. It fell into total disrepair, admittedly before Moroun purchased it, but is well within his financial means to spruce back up. He has hinted at it over the years, even announced plans once or twice. But his main reason to purchase it is to use it basically as a hostage in his bridge fight.

Oh yeah, this also:

http://news.yahoo.com/...-residents-204609457.html

A conservative group not specifically linked to Moroun had the genius idea of plastering fake home foreclosure notices all over several Detroit neighborhoods. The notices, which were indistinguishable from real ones from a distance, threatened that the people may lose their houses to eminent domain if the new bridge was built. This, in the middle of massive jobs AND housing crises. Nice People.

Again, there is no way to know how much, if any, Moroun donated to the group, Americans For Prosperity. AFP is well known nationally as a billionaire-backed, fake grassroots organization responsible for producing many of the Tea Party rallies in 09, all while claiming that they were made up of the common man, for the common man.

The main idea is that Martian is right. The haves in this country are spending millions to promote their OWN well-being, everyone else be fluffed. Lax financial disclosure and oversight legislated and endorsed by the GOP (including the Citizens United decision handed down last year by our Conservative-leaning Supreme Court) has lead us down this road, and anybody with half a brain is scared fluffless about all the dirty money, anonymous donors and independant interest groups that are gonna be involved in our 2012 Federal Elections.

Science help us!

"a tidal wave of angry responses from Canadians who said they feared such a move would open the door to Fox TV-style news and reduce their ability to determine what is true and what is false."

as equally biased as any other news organization in the world, except they're conservative and don't tow liberal party lines?

if you call that reducing their ability to determine truth from lie then i guess they have far, far bigger problems in this world :(

me no understand how to pray to the Science deity. where's the nearest congregation?

oh, I Do See Greg, Sam I Am! he's right there in the middle of the last word.

http://www.opensecrets.org/

To top an old thread with new info...

http://www.freep.com/...ab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

The judge threw his ass in jail for non-compliance. Probably won't stay very long, but still, awesomeness.

that is awesome, i hope your bridge will get built.

HAHAHAHAHAHA! Take that!

I would like to click like to this thread. Pretty astounding that a free bridge at 0 interest could be rejected when it is absolutely needed.

having said that, the construction industry is quite influential in Ontario although they never are overtly involved in politics.

My company was involved in the cost estimates and design for right of way, and I worked on the utility relocations. The Ambassador Bridge is the busiest international border crossing in terms of trade volume: over 25 percent of all trade between the United States and Canada crosses the bridge.

The new bridge was to cost $2.2 billion with Ontario and the US Federal Government each paying half. In 2013, it was supposed to generate $71m, split 50-50 between the building partners. By 2025, that revenue was expected to grow to $160m. The bridge would pay off construction by 2030 at which time tolls would be split 25-25-50 between the three parties. It's the type of strategic investment that needs to be done like the Keystone Pipeline.

Way to sneak in the keystone pipeline, without addressing the direction that keeps our energy sector pigeon holed to. We're not going to work our way away from oil with continued investment in the industry, especially if its tied to the tar sands. How long are we going to pretend that our economy can depend upon a rapidly diminishing commodity? How long are we going to ignore the disasterous environmental impact of fossil fuel exploitation?