INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Opponents of a $3 billion highway between Indianapolis and Evansville are suing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, alleging it violated federal law by giving the state permission to fill wetlands and reroute streams along part of the road's 142-mile route.
The federal lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Indianapolis, contends such construction will cause "irreparable harm" to the environment along a 26-mile section of an expanded Interstate 69 that would cross southern Indiana's Daviess and Greene counties.
The Hoosier Environmental Council and Citizens for Appropriate Rural Roads asked the court to halt work on the entire highway until the defendants "fully comply" with the federal Clean Water Act.
Tim Maloney, the Indianapolis-based council's senior policy director, said building the road as planned would "destroy valuable natural resources." The section of the highway at issue will run from the southwestern Indiana city of Washington to just outside the Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center.
"It will completely alter the character of the land that the highway passes through, creating a four-lane concrete barrier to any kind of wildlife movement," Maloney said Thursday. "It fragments wildlife habitats and just completely alters the surrounding ecosystems — and that's just one part of the overall impact of I-69."
The lawsuit alleges that the Army Corps violated the Clean Water Act by issuing a permit that will allow the Indiana Department of Transportation to dump about 215,000 cubic yards of fill material into wetlands and streams to build the highway between Washington and Crane.
They contend the agency approved the permit even though other construction approaches would inflict less serious damage to the area's environment, and allege the Army Corps did not consider the project's full environmental impact.
Gene Pawlik, a spokesman at the U.S. Army Corps' Washington, D.C., headquarters, said the agency does not comment on pending litigation.
INDOT spokesman Will Wingfield said the department was reviewing the suit, but added "we are confident that federal environmental rules and regulations were followed properly."
This week's lawsuit is the second filed to date by opponents of the project, which they say will destroy forests, wetlands and farmland and create runoff from automobiles and road salt that could harm sensitive caves and springs.
A federal lawsuit in October 2006 alleged the state rigged the process it used to select the highway's route, which then-Gov. Frank O'Bannon announced in January 2003. A federal judge ruled against the groups in that case.
Opponents of the current plan have unsuccessfully pushed an alternate route that would have used existing Interstate 70 and U.S. 41 for Indiana's portion of a "NAFTA Superhighway" linking Canada and Mexico. They still want INDOT to consider using the I-70/U.S. 41 route, even though construction of the expanded I-69 began in July 2008.
The highway's opponents have also questioned how the state will pay for the project, the cost of which has risen from the original $1.3 billion estimate to about $3 billion.
"Construction may have started, but it is unlikely I-69 will ever be finished unless INDOT diverts a major share of the state's dwindling highway dollars away from badly needed road and bridge repairs around the state," said Thomas Tokarski of Citizens for Appropriate Rural Roads.
Last summer, crews began building overpasses at county roads and other preliminary work on the project's Washington-to-Crane portion. It's part of the highway's 69-mile Evansville-to-Crane leg that's expected to be completed by the end of 2012 at a cost of about $700 million.
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