INDIANAPOLIS —A federal lawsuit filed by environmental groups opposed to the Interstate 69 extension in Southern Indiana charges the Army Corps of Engineers violated federal law when it approved a permit to fill in wetlands in Pike and Daviess counties.
Included in the work are the Patoka River National Wildlife Refuge and Wildlife Management Area.
The lawsuit seeks to overturn Corps permits for the I-69 segment between Oakland City and Washington, part of a 142-mile stretch of highway that will link Indianapolis and Evansville as part of highway corridor envisioned to stretch from Canada to Mexico.
It also seeks a court order stopping work on the entire Evansville to Indianapolis project.
It is the second federal lawsuit by the Hoosier Environmental Council and Citizens for Appropriate Rural Roads against the project and similar to one filed in February involving the Corps’ permitting for a segment between Washington and Crane.
The most recent lawsuit, filed last week in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana’s Indianapolis division, claims the Corps violated the Clean Water Act in issuing a permit for construction of 29 miles of I-69 between Indiana 64 near Oakland City and U.S. 50 near Washington.
That permit allows nearly 645,000 cubic yards of earth, stone and concrete to be used to fill in wetlands in Pike and Daviess counties. One of the groups filed a similar suit in February over a Corps permit for another segment of the project.
Cher Elliott, spokeswoman for the Indiana Department of Transportation’s Vincennes District where the work is taking place, said Thursday that state officials are confident the law was followed. However, she said because the lawsuits are against the Corps, the state has little direct involvement with them.
Officials at the Corps’ regional office in Louisville, Ky., which handled the permitting process, could not be reached for comment on Thursday. The Corps has not yet filed a response to the lawsuit.
Tim Malony, senior policy director for the Hoosier Environmental Council, said the lawsuit has several key allegations.
“There was no independent analysis of alternatives to the project and their impact,” he said. “They were obligated by law to do their own analysis.”
Instead, he alleged that the Corps used analysis done by the Indiana State Department of Transportation to create its permits.
The Corps also authorized numerous stream and wetlands projects — including a causeway 25 feet tall and 2 1/2 miles long across the flood plain of the East Fork of the White River — under a permitting process intended for smaller scale projects but not within the process of the overall permit for the section.
“The analysis that they did do left out some important information about the White River project and described it inaccurately,” Malony said.
For instance, he said the Corps stated that proposed crossings would be sized appropriately so that water flow would not be blocked.
Malony said that although that was true for some of the crossings such as the one through the Patoka wetlands, that it wasn’t accurate for the White River causeway.
He said that apart from actual bridges over the river and two small tributaries, that the causeway would instead act as dam, raising the flood level to be more than a foot above the current level, potentially affecting about 5,900 acres of floodplain.
The lawsuit also charges that the Corps did not consider the project’s impacts apart from areas within two miles of proposed stream crossings and alternatives to construction of the entire Indianapolis-Evansville highway stretch.
INDOT officials have said the $700 million stretch from Evansville to Crane is on schedule to be finished by the end of 2012.