Who says Gordie Howe Bridge won't be built? Leaders show off $350M worth of busy site work

When a project takes as long to build as the planned Gordie Howe International Bridge, perhaps it's natural that skeptics still harbor doubts about it being built.

So the leaders of the bridge project took reporters on a hard-hat tour of the site Wednesday to show first-hand how much work has already been undertaken.

That work includes about $200 million worth of road construction, utility relocation and other preliminary construction on the Windsor side. On the Detroit side, about $150 million has been spent so far on utility relocation and other site work, not counting money spent to acquire properties that must be removed to make way for the bridge.

Andy Doctoroff, Gov. Rick Snyder's point person for the bridge project, said skeptics who don't believe the bridge will be built are "100% wrong."

"I think that there's a lot of speculation in certain quarters that is uninformed," he said in Windsor during the tour, "but I'm part of the project every single day and I have no reason for anything other than optimism."

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Heather Grondin, a spokeswoman for the Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority, the Canadian entity overseeing the project, echoed that.

"The government of Canada is committed to building the bridge," she said. "All funding is in place, all approvals are in place. There's already over $350 million in preparatory work we're doing now. We're well through the process of identifying the private-public partner who will be on board by September of next year" to actually build the span.

As the media tour made clear Wednesday, the work on the Windsor side is further along at this point, but that's by necessity. The soil on the Windsor site is spongier than the Detroit dirt, and thus needed more reinforcement with roughly 1 million tons of infill material. And the process of property acquisition on the Windsor side was somewhat easier than on the Detroit side, allowing work there to start earlier.

On the Detroit side, the Michigan Department of Transportation has either acquired or gotten court orders to take about 93% of the more than 600 properties in southwest Detroit's Delray district needed for the project.

Of the remaining few dozen parcels not yet controlled, about 20 of them are owned by entities controlled by Ambassador Bridge owner Manuel (Matty) Moroun. Moroun is fighting MDOT's seizure of his parcels to delay construction of the rival Gordie Howe Bridge. But court actions to take the Moroun land are proceeding, Doctoroff said.

Add it up and it's clear that work is proceeding on virtually all fronts for the Gordie Howe Bridge. Yet it's understandable that a project in the works for so many years may not seem real until steel begins to rise against the sky. That should begin in another year or two.

The schedule now goes like this: Bids from three teams of finalist potential builders are due in to the bridge authority by May. The authority expects to pick a winning team and sign a contract next September.

That public-private partner should begin "significant construction" next year, Grondin said. There's no exact schedule yet, but in the past authorities have used a general estimate of four years for actual construction. That would translate into a bridge opening around 2022.

Yes, major infrastructure projects take a long time. A huge bridge spanning an international border ranks as perhaps more complicated than anything else.

So remember this: Progress on the Gordie Howe Bridge may seem to proceed at a snail's pace. But even a snail gets where it's going eventually.

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep.