Inside the lawsuit against the Brent Spence project

There’s a big bridge called the Brent Spence that connects Covington and Cincinnati; maybe you’ve heard of it?

The Brent Spence corridor project, which will include building a new bridge next to the existing double-decker bridge and other construction along a 7.8-mile stretch of I-75 and I-71 in Ohio and Kentucky, is one of the largest infrastructure projects in the country. It is estimated to cost $3.6 billion and has a construction timeline that could extend into the 2030s.

Several weeks ago, environmental advocacy groups sued the project in federal court over concerns about how the project will affect both residents and the local environment. Although the lawsuit is not first time people have expressed concern about the project, it’s the first formal challenge to the corridor since the project was revived in 2022.

So what’s the lawsuit about, and what has people so worried?

The suit has two primary points of contention: how the project may affect the environment and how it may affect the overall safety and public health of predominately minority communities around the bridge.

The suit’s plaintiffs include the Devou Good Foundation, Civic Cincinnati, Ride the Cov and Queen City Bike. The complaint alleges that the project has inadequately explored the potential environmental impact of the construction and demands that work on the project cease until their concerns are redressed.

Specifically, the suit calls for the project to engage in and produce something called an Environmental Impact Statement, or EIS. Large federal projects are required to assess their potential impacts on the local environment. The project first completed an environmental assessment in 2012, which found no significant impact.

The project floundered for years due to lack of funding, but following an injection of federal money in late 2022, the project went about updating its initial assessment. The federal government approved a second finding of no significant impact in May, following months of public input. Projects whose assessments find no significant impact are not required to produce an environmental impact statement.

The text of complaint lays out the groups’ position.

“By refusing to acknowledge that the Project will have significant impacts on the human environment, Defendants have arbitrarily and capriciously refused to prepare an EIS, which would require them to meaningfully consider reasonable alternatives, including ones that would include substantial investment in public transportation as part of the Project, or to consider charging tolls on the Ohio River bridges, which would reduce the demand for the Project’s dramatic increase in the number of travel lanes,” the suit alleges.

“Defendants also have failed to adequately consider or mitigate adverse effects on the predominantly non-white residents located near the highway in the project area, including effects on air quality, noise, health and mobility caused by the anticipated 6 years-long construction of the project,” the suit continues. “They have also failed to adequately consider or mitigate long term effects of expanding these highways, including greatly increased vehicle traffic; water quality and quantity impacts from increased emissions and from the additional acres of highway right of way and impermeable pavement; increased urban sprawl and associated segregation; and the unequal distribution of the benefits and burdens of these transportation system investments.”

Devou Good and the other transit organizations in the suit have been critical of the project from the start. The suit mirrors other advocacy Devou Good has engaged in throughout the region, which usually involves calls for expanded public transit (including electric rail), more investment in bicycle infrastructure and an overall reduced reliance on automobiles.

The coalition had already filed a complaint with the Federal Highway Administration’s Office of Civil Rights early in 2023, where it argued that the project’s initial environmental assessment’s finding of no significant impact could potentially violate federal civil rights and environmental laws. The Federal Highway Administration agreed to begin an investigation in late May, shortly after the bridge project completed the supplemental review of the original environmental assessment. That determination essentially allowed the construction to move forward in earnest. The Federal Highway Administration investigation has yet to begin.

The environmental concerns revolve around increased pollution–both from construction and the operation of the new bridge once it’s up.

“By setting up extra capacity, we will be setting up the capacity for increased traffic volumes, and therefore increased sound, particulate matter, other air pollutants,” said Nolan Nicaise, former Covington City Commissioner who works advising cities on zoning and environmental policy. “And we’re setting ourselves up, for from an urban planning standpoint, we’re setting ourselves up for increased sprawl development.”

Nicaise is active in community advocacy around the environment, although he’s not a signatory on the lawsuit itself.

“Covington and the West End [in Cincinnati], according to the federal government, are already categorized as negatively impacted by highways,” said UC Professor of Environmental Science Amy Townsend-Small, who lives in Covington.

She cited data from the Biden Administration’s Justice 40 Initiative, which has “a goal that 40 percent of the overall benefits of certain Federal climate, clean energy, affordable and sustainable housing, and other investments flow to disadvantaged communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution.”

Townsend-Small is not directly involved with the lawsuit, but she expressed frustration that the same government that has flagged many local Ohio and Kentucky communities as disproportionately affected by pollution were also pushing for a massive highway expansion project. If you consult the federal government’s online Climate and Economic Justice Screening tool you’ll see many areas in and around Covington, for instance, as being particularly vulnerable to diesel particulate exposure.

The thinking goes that both the construction itself and the potential increased traffic could exacerbate pollution and other environmental concerns in the form of increased noise, dust and vehicle emissions, all of which can have negative health effects.

The second concern is the effect the project may have on minority communities around the bridge.

For one thing, the nation’s highways have a fraught history with Black America as they have served as a means of breaking up and displacing Black communities in the past.

For instance, the construction of I-75 and the subsequent urban renewal campaign eventually led to the displacement of about 27,000 people, almost all of whom were Black, according to the late Cincinnati historian John W. Harshaw, Sr., who wrote a book on the neighborhood’s history. To this day, the neighborhood’s population levels have not returned to the levels they were before the construction, and the highway has left the area carved up into smaller land parcels. Something similar, albeit on a smaller scale, occurred in Covington’s Lewisburg neighborhood around the same time.

“It was traumatic from the standpoint of the barbershop I used to go to was gone, the school yard where I used to play was gone, the two movie theaters, that was gone, the grocery stores I used to shop at was gone,” said Ron Sanders, who was among the people displaced from West End during the I-75 construction. “Some of these people, the last time I saw them was 1958. I never saw them again.”

Sanders and others worry the new construction could lead to something similar.

The project’s revised environmental assessment, released in January, laid out the changes the project has undergone since 2012. While the project is still massive, the revised assessment shows an overall reduced footprint from the corridor’s original plans.

Additionally, the project released its own numbers predicting the number of homes and businesses that will be affected by the construction: four residential relocations and 24 commercial relocations. This is a reduction from the 40 residential locations the project predicted in 2012, but an increase from the 14 commercial relocations first predicted.

Other environmental experts LINK nky interviewed gave mixed appraisals of the project. Some shared Nicaise’s and Townsend-Small’s concern about the pollution as well as a concern about potential increased run-off due to the addition of new impermeable surfaces, like new payment, but others were less critical.

Thomas More University Professor of Biology and Director of the University’s Biology Field Station Chris Lorentz, who studies mussel species that will be affected by the new construction, saw the project as a trade off.

Some of the mussel populations will need to be moved, and although some of the animals will inevitably die in the move, Lorentz said, the project will provide the resources necessary to conduct more surveys of the river, which will in the long-term provide more insight into the ecosystem. Survey data for the Ohio River, where the field station is located, is slim compared to other rivers of comparable size.

“I do believe that the benefits will certainly outweigh those impacts in terms of having the resources to survey,” Lorentz said in March.

The tension, as suggested by Lorentz’s statement, humming around the project comes from the trade-offs therein: the environment will likely be affected, but the ($3.6 billion, it’s worth restating) project is also an opportunity.

This tension was actually on display at an event the transit coalition put on this summer around the coalition’s civil rights complaint. Although the group hoped to spread the word and garner support about their environmental concerns, many of the Black business owners in attendance were less concerned about that and more concerned about how local businesses could benefit–in the form of federal contracts–from the construction.

“Pollution impact is one thing from a civil rights perspective, but then there’s the impact of jobs and communities and all the money that’s going into the project that then leaves the community and goes out to California or all these other places,” said Gregory Parker, the director of membership services for the Greater Cincinnati & Northern Kentucky African American Chamber of Commerce, at the event earlier this year. “So, that’s something I could really get behind. How do we maintain, and how do we investigate that the money that’s being spent is staying in this community?”

Parker’s tune had not changed when he spoke with LINK nky for this story. He was aware of the lawsuit as well as how highway projects in the past had broken up communities. Still, he said his goal was to ensure that local businesses were the ones benefiting from the project. It was important for him that such businesses were “really getting a good and fair shot” at contracts and other awards that would allow local communities to build wealth.

A project as large as this has a lot of moving parts, both literally and figuratively. Thus, even if they project has taken measures to reduce its footprint, its scope will inevitably bring some disruption in people’s lives.

“You talk about eight lanes, that’s a lot of space to add it to what you already have,” Sanders said. “So people on the east side and the west side of this expressway are going to be impacted, period.”

When asked to comment on the lawsuit, the project sent an email.

“A priority of the Brent Spence Bridge Corridor Project is to provide an inclusive process that enhances surrounding communities while delivering a project that will bring safer, less congested travel and job opportunities to the region,” the email reads. “We are aware of the filing against federal and state agencies. No further details can be shared at this time due to pending litigation.”

The Ohio Department of Transportation reached our to LINK nky as well to state they could not comment on pending litigation.

LINK nky will report more on this lawsuit as it proceeds.