Area motorists suffered a setback last week when a federal judge blocked work on a new, improved Wilson Bridge on environmental grounds. But the news wasn't all bad. If it's any consolation to those stuck in daily traffic jams there, the subaquatic vegetation and benthic invertebrates - sometimes known as water bugs - at the proposed site are getting along just fine.
Government officials, you see, were concerned that in the effort to reduce gridlock by building a 12-lane bridge to replace the existing six-lane structure, construction work might cause "prolonged disturbance of Potomac River bottom sediments, an increase in turbidity and reduce localized water quality." It might, in short, muddy the water. And that might cause both temporary and permanent displacement of water bug habitat, which in turn might violate the Clean Water Act.
To protect the water bugs, highway officials agreed to restrict bridge work in the water to four months from Oct. 15 to Feb. 15. It may not be be best time of the year to do construction work, and it may prevent the overall project from being completed until 2006. But it's important enough that feds appear willing to turn I-95 - a vital commuter and East Coast commercial route - into a six-lane parking lot if that's what it takes to keep bridge workers from committing bugicide.
Welcome to the world of Vice President Al Gore, a fervent supporter of the Clean Water Act. It's a place where merely human needs are no obstacle to stern environmental enforcement. Motorists can wait. Bridges can wait. The environment can't. Earth is hanging in the balance, to paraphrase the title of his book.
The laws and regulations spawned by this outlook are quite familiar to developers, farmers and, more generally, residents of western U.S. states. They have watched as environmental regulations shut down logging operations (and the lumber mills that rely on them), block mall construction and more. For them it's part of the cost of doing business. Eastern lawmakers like former Sen. Gore certainly didn't have any trouble voting for "tough" environmental measures in part because their constituents weren't the ones having to bear the burden.
But daily traffic jams at the Wilson Bridge are very, very burdensome. That may help explain why, within just days of Judge Stanley Sporkin's ruling holding up work on the bridge, four senators, seven congressmen and a host of state and local officials gathered faster than one can say "approval ratings" to deal with the fallout from his decision.
What Judge Sporkin said, among other things, is that planners at the Federal Highway Administration had failed to consider "reasonable" alternatives to the proposed 12-lane bridge, as required by the National Environmental Policy Act. Indeed they hadn't considered a narrower 10-lane bridge backed by Alexandria activists, because, they said, it "cannot satisfactorily address the transportation needs of the region." But those needs are a secondary consideration. Wrote Judge Sporkin, "an agency may not eliminate an otherwise reasonable alternative solely because it presents only a partial solution to the stated purpose and need for the project." That means planners are going to have to go back to draft more reports, invite more public comment, hold more public hearings and spend as much as two more years studying a plan they don't believe will work.
The highway administration, continued the judge, also neglected to quantify "air emissions" during bridge construction work, or how they would affect the "human and non-human environment." Their discussions of "noise, visual and other impacts," he said, are too vague and uninformative. Planners failed to provide worst-case estimates of the construction's effect on wetlands and aquatic resources or identify its effects on bald eagle and osprey. Nor did they consider what it would do to historic properties. It seems, alas, they were focused on building a bridge.
Interestingly, Judge Sporkin is not happy about citing transportation officials for these violations. "The court is reluctant to order this action," he wrote. "These statutes have as their purpose the protection of various aspects of the public interest. Despite their intended purpose, they often cause regulatory gridlock which results in necessary projects being interminably delayed. It is clear an expanded bridge crossing linking the North and South at the Nation's Capital is sorely needed. While a return to the simpler days of the past might better satisfy the concerns of the public interest statutes involved here, progress must nevertheless occur. Simply put, an expanded bridge over the Potomac River is necessary if this Nation's Capital and its surrounding neighborhoods are not going to suffer paralysis." That proposal, he continued, "might require direct intervention by Congress, which after balancing all the public interest aspects could 'by pass' the regulatory gridlock that has developed."
But bypassing the gridlock that comes of enforcing all these laws to the letter is to walk away from Mr. Gore's legislative agenda. Spokesmen for Mr. Gore did not return phone calls regarding a possible exemption for the bridge now being pushed by Maryland Rep. Albert Wynn and others. The question is whether he could afford to support the exemption in view of the ugly, anti-environmental precedent it might set with respect to enforcement of other laws. Western lawmakers are certainly going to be watching what happens at the Wilson Bridge. Commuters will be watching. Businesses will be watching. And let's not forget the subaquatic vegetation and water bugs. They have a stake in this too.
Kenneth Smith is deputy editor of The Washington Times editorial page.
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