Border officers seize large pile of cash

Major construction on the new Gordie Howe International Bridge will begin in the fall of next year and won’t be derailed by a new Ambassador Bridge span, says the chairman of the Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority.

“If you don’t do this crossing, the economic cost to this community, the province, state and both countries will be enormous,” Dwight Duncan said at the authority’s annual public meeting Friday at the Capitol Theatre.

Worries about toll revenues and traffic projections falling short are premature, he said. “When the Ambassador Bridge opened in 1929, you could shoot a cannon down that bridge and not hit anything. The estimated life span of this bridge will be over 100 years.”

During that time, the two bridges over the Detroit River with a total of 12 lanes will be needed for redundancy and to accommodate growth, Duncan said.

He bristled at the suggestion that some traffic projections show two six-lane border bridges between Windsor and Detroit may be too much.

“Be careful because numbers are being taken out of context and seem to parrot the Ambassador Bridge’s position,” he said.

The Howe bridge will draw more economic investment to the region, create more border traffic and draw traffic to Windsor from other crossings because the current bottleneck will be eliminated, Duncan said. “Traffic numbers (currently) are an incomplete analysis.”

The bridge authority’s slogan for the coming year is “momentum” as it pushes forward after the project seemed to stall with the election of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government.

A private-sector consortium will be selected by May from those bidding to build the bridge, Duncan said. Site preparation on the Detroit side will start in July and financial closure of the deal with the builder is to be done by September. Construction of the Howe bridge will begin “immediately” after that.

Duncan shied away from committing that nothing else will go wrong in the coming months that could further delay the project. He also would not give an expected completion date. He would only say it will get done “soon” or in an “expeditious” manner.

The previous Conservative federal government had committed to completing the bridge in 2020.

Just over 80 per cent of the required properties on the Detroit side have been acquired, while site preparation and utility relocation is nearly fully complete on the Windsor side, those at Friday’s meeting were told.

There will be “significant construction in the latter half of 2018,” vowed Andre Juneau, the bridge authority’s new chief operating officer.

The private-sector partner will be paying almost full costs for the bridge project and is expected to recoup its money through tolls under a planned 30-year agreement with the bridge authority.

Some estimates have placed the project’s cost at $4 billion, but the true number won’t be known until all contracts are signed next fall.

“There are many risk factors (on costs),” Duncan said. “The biggest factor is the U.S. dollar. We have seen that change by 20 cents in a year. Interest rates are also a factor. We will be in a position in September at financial close to know the full costs.”

Questions about the project’s future were raised recently when the Trudeau government granted a permit to the owners of the Ambassador Bridge to build a new six-lane span, which the company said will open by 2020. One of the conditions is that the old span be torn down, though it is the subject of a heritage protection on the U.S. side.

Be careful because numbers are being taken out of context and seem to parrot the Ambassador Bridge’s position.