Report: Governor Plans To Bypass Legislature On Bridge

Other episodes in this series: 
IPR News Features
Date: 
June 4, 2012

By Rick Pluta

A published report says Governor Rick Snyder is ready to bypass a reluctant Legislature and move ahead with a new international border crossing in Detroit.

Crain’s Detroit Business says the governor will turn to the Michigan Strategic Fund to make the necessary agreements with Detroit and the U.S. and Canadian governments. The Strategic Fund is a public-private economic development agency.

The move would allow the governor to sidestep legislative approval. The governor has been looking for a way to work around the approval because he’s been unable to get his fellow Republicans to go along with his proposed bridge across the Detroit River.

He says getting rid of a bottleneck at a busy international crossing would make metro Detroit and the rest of the state a magnet for many types of economic activity.

The governor’s plan has gotten a lot of pushback from the owners of the Ambassador Bridge, which would compete with the new span. They say a new bridge is not needed and the government should not compete with a private enterprise.

Community Discussion Rules

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
Type the characters you see in this picture. (verify using audio)
Type the characters you see in the picture above; if you can't read them, submit the form and a new image will be generated. Not case sensitive.