US Government Sued Over Lake Michigan Erosion

A nonprofit group called the New Buffalo Shoreline Alliance has claimed the U.S. government violated their fifth amendment rights by building the New Buffalo Harbor.

The fifth amendment states private property cannot be taken for public use without “just compensation.”

“The government authorized the harbor, the Army Corps of Engineers designed it, but if the government takes property from U.S. citizens unjustly, the U.S. citizen is able to make a claim against that and that’s what we believe happened here,” New Buffalo Shoreline Alliance Secretary Ron Watson says, according to CBS Detroit.

Members of the alliance believe the designers of the New Buffalo Harbor, which was built on Lake Michigan in 1975, knew about the sand starvation it would cause to the lake's shoreline, where many alliance members' homes reside.

“There was an agreement made that the corp would nourish the beaches because they knew there would be a blockage of sand resulting from the construction of the Harbor,” Ted Grzywacz, New Buffalo Shoreline Alliance president, says.

Grzywacz claims the funding for such procedures stopped in 1995 and the people of New Buffalo have seen little to no support since that time.

“We’re not asking for personal compensation. Homeowners are gonna get no money. The money is going to go into a trust and that trust will be used to nurse to beaches [and] construct wave attenuation devices to keep the nourishment on the beaches,” Grzywacz says.

The lawsuit is currently pending litigation, and the U.S. government has asked the Detroit office of the Army Corp of Engineers to answer the complaint.