JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A group of environmental and racial justice organizations filed a federal lawsuit on Thursday against the U.S. Department of Transportation and its secretary, Pete Buttigieg, seeking to halt a Gulf Coast road project that the group says will harm the environment near historic Black neighborhoods in north Gulfport.
The other plaintiffs besides Story’s group are the National Council of Negro Women, the Sierra Club and Healthy Gulf. They oppose the DOT’s Interconnecting Gulfport project, which would build a road in a wetland area next to the U.S. 49 and I-10 interchange. City officials have encouraged commercial development in the area, and the road project aims to provide easier access to shopping centers. Proponents of the project also say it would ease congestion near the highways.
Forest Heights was developed in the mid-1960s as a cooperative project of the National Council of Negro Women, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Ford Foundation. Its name is a tribute to Dorothy Height, who was president of the National Council of Negro Women from 1947 to 1997, according to court records.in the neighborhoods. Environmental groups say the road project would increase the risk of damaging floods.
“Our roads already get flooded, our church parking lot was recently flooded with six inches of water,” Lula Dedeaux, Gulfport Section President of the National Council of Negro Women, said in a news release. “The Connector Road will only serve to make these existing and dangerous flooding problems worse”
The National Environmental Policy Act requires federal agencies to evaluate the environmental effects of their proposed actions prior to making decisions.which found that the project would have “no significant impact” on the environment. But the environmental groups claim the analysis failed to look at all of the effects commercial development near the road would bring. They are asking the court to order the DOT to conduct another environmental assessment.
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