From 1971 to 1985, battles raged over Westway, a
multibillion-dollar highway, development, and park project slated
for placement in New York City. It would have projected far into
the Hudson River, including massive new landfill extending several
miles along Manhattan s Lower West Side. The most expensive highway
project ever proposed, Westway also provoked one of the highest
stakes legal battles of its day. In Fighting Westway, William W.
Buzbee reveals how environmentalists, citizens, their lawyers, and
a growing opposition coalition, despite enormous resource
disparities, were able to defeat this project supported by
presidents, senators, governors, and mayors, much of the business
community, and most unions. Although Westway s defeat has been
derided as lacking justification, Westway s critics raised
substantial and ultimately decisive objections. They questioned
claimed project benefits and advocated trading federal Westway
dollars for mass transit improvements. They also exposed illegally
disregarded environmental risks, especially to increasingly scarce
East Coast young striped bass often found in extraordinarily high
numbers right where Westway was to be built.
Drawing on archival records and interviews, Buzbee goes beyond
the veneer of government actions and court rulings to illuminate
the stakes, political pressures, and strategic moves and
countermoves that shaped the Westway war, a fight involving all
levels and branches of government, scientific conflict, strategic
citizen action, and hearings, trials, and appeals in federal court.
This Westway history illuminates how high-stakes regulatory battles
are fought, the strategies and power of America s environmental
laws, ways urban priorities are contested, the clout of savvy
citizen activists and effective lawyers, and how separation of
powers and federalism frameworks structure legal and political
conflict. Whether readers seek an exciting tale of environmental,
political, and legal conflict, to learn what really happened during
these battles that transformed New York City, or to understand how
modern legal frameworks shape high stakes regulatory wars, Fighting
Westway will provide a good read."
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