“They [should] go back to the drawing board and find a project that improves mass transit without messing with streams that are protected,” Fitzgerald, who is also an environmental lawyer, said in an interview.

Sarah Lazo, a spokeswoman for the corps’s Baltimore district, said she couldn’t comment on a pending lawsuit. However, she said, the agency evaluated the construction’s potential permanent impacts to a half-acre of non-tidal wetlands and 5,100 linear feet of streams, including from 40 stream crossings. The state is required to mitigate those impacts by restoring Paint Branch Stream in College Park and creating wetlands in the area of Ken-Gar Palisades Park in Kensington, she said.

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Construction on the 16-mile Purple Line started in August 2017, a year behind schedule, after a three-year battle over the first lawsuit filed by Fitzgerald and Friends of the Capital Crescent Trail. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ultimately overruled a lower court judge’s decision that Metro’s declining ridership required Maryland to update the Purple Line’s environmental study.

A second lawsuit, filed in 2017, argues that government officials didn’t properly consider Metro’s financial problems or the Purple Line’s effects on a historical post office and bridge. That lawsuit is pending before a judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

The latest lawsuit is filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.