Virginia and the District of Columbia have filed lawsuits challenging the legality of President Donald Trump’s planned memorial arch.
Virginia and the District of Columbia have filed lawsuits challenging the legality of President Donald Trump’s planned memorial arch.
According to The Guardian, there are now at least three lawsuits pending against the project, which would see the construction of a 250-foot-tall arch on a patch of grass between the Potomac River and Arlington National Cemetery in Northern Virginia.
If completed, the arch would be more than 100 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty.
The lawsuit, filed late last month in a Virginia-based federal court, claims that plans for the arch have been expedited and approved without undergoing routine review. It also raises concerns about the project’s impact on traffic, the environment, and emergency services.
“As soon as defendants break ground on this project, they will inflict irreparable harm on both the District and Virginia. The arch site sits at the center of a major traffic artery between the District and Virginia, in the monumental core of the capital, on an island that straddles the Potomac River,” the lawsuit alleges. “During the three-year period of construction, the arch project will inevitably snarl traffic between the jurisdictions, produce pollution and storm water runoff in the Potomac, interfere with emergency services, and pose numerous other challenges.”
The attorneys general for Virginia and the District of Columbia also claim that local taxpayers will likely have to pay a steep price for the arch, which many critics have described as a vanity project.
“Both jurisdictions will need to take immediate and costly steps to assess, respond to, and mitigate these harmful effects,” the lawsuit states. “These costs are severe and unrecoverable—particularly because Defendants have refused to take them into account or adequately consult with either jurisdiction during their hurried and preordained process to approve the Arch and start construction.”
The state- and District-led lawsuit was lodged less than after the Arlington County Board filed its own complaint in federal court.
“The National Park Service, the agency responsible for projects on national park land such as Memorial Circle, is proceeding full-speed toward ground-disturbing construction,” the lawsuit alleges. “Although the agency has claimed that a final decision to construct the Arch has not yet been made and purports to be engaged in a routine decisional process, that rushed process appears to be a pretext designed to shore up justifications for building the Arch in accordance with the President’s repeated marching orders.”
The lawsuit asks that the Park Service’s work on the arch be immediately halted to ensure that the project meets requirements set by the National Environmental Policy Act.
“The Arlington County Board has filed this lawsuit because our community has the most to lose from this egregious and unlawful proposed project,” Arlington County Board Chair Matt de Ferranti said in a media statement.
President Donald Trump has defended the necessity of the project; he claims that a large-scale memorial would not only serve an aesthetic purpose but could be used as a “military complex” to hold weapons and snipers. However, the most recently-submitted plans for the site do not mention the military.
Sources
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