Fighting Westway: Environmental Law, Citizen Activism, and the Regulatory War That Transformed New York City

by William W. Buzbee

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.

312 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Michael Lewyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the beginning, Westway must have seemed like a highway project from heaven. While other highways sliced up neighborhoods, Westway was designed to run under a new waterfront park that was to be created by filling in a bit of the Hudson River; the aboveground land was to be used partially for the park and partially for housing and offices. The project's backers (including banks, real estate interests and construction unions) were so powerful that both the mayor of New York City and the governor of New York State campaigned against Westway and then were talked into flip-flopping after the election. How could such a project fail?

Buzbee explains how both the law and the balance of political forces eventually turned against Westway. A few local activists feared the impact of the highway on the West Side of Manhattan, and believed that the money spend on Westway would be better spent on repairing New York's crumbling subways. After a few false starts, they discovered that the Clean Water Act might help their case. The Clean Water Act provides that waters may not be filled with land if doing so would harm fish and wildlife habitat. Government scientists discovered that the part of the Hudson River to be filled by Westway was habitat for the striped bass, and the bureaucrats favoring the project were never able to credibly establish that the striped bass could easily go elsewhere. Although the Army Corps of Engineers granted a permit to fill Westway, the scientific basis for its opinion was so wobbly, and their experts so confused and self-contradictory, that the courts repeatedly rejected its decisions.

If Congress had favored the highway, it could have overriden the courts by amending the Clean Water Act. But the House actually voted 2-1 to kill Westway. Fiscal conservatives opposed Westway because it was unusually expensive ($2 billion in 1980s dollars). Most New York Congresspeople opposed Westway because under then-existing federal law, the federal subsidies for Westway could be "traded in" for public transit, and New York's subway system needed a lot of help in the 1980s.

The ultimate lesson of this book is that even a seemingly unstoppable project can be stopped by a few determined citizens- but only if they have the law on their site and local politicians are divided.