Fire Sale! One Day Only! Get Your Share of the Great Lakes While Supplies Last.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:                                                                                      December 20, 2018

Liz Kirkwood, Executive Director                                                                Email: Liz@FLOWforWater.org
FLOW (For Love of Water), Traverse City, MI                                         Web: www.FLOWforWater.org Office: (231) 944-1568, Cell: (570) 872-4956

The following statement can be attributed to Liz Kirkwood, environmental attorney and executive director of FLOW (For Love of Water), a Great Lakes law and policy center based in Traverse City:

“The decision on Wednesday by the Mackinac Straits Corridor Authority board was nothing less than a Snyder administration fire sale of Great Lakes public trust waters and bottomlands that defies Michigan law, tribal treaties, climate science, democracy, and the will of the people. Make no mistake: This proposed oil tunnel fails to solve the greatest threat facing the Great Lakes — the decaying Enbridge Line 5 oil pipelines in the Straits of Mackinac. Claiming that a tunnel that would take up to 10 years to build will prevent an oil spill disaster that grows more likely every day is like claiming that the best way to diffuse a ticking time bomb is to wait a decade to see if it actually explodes. No amount of spin that the oil tunnel is somehow meant to benefit the public can hide the unconstitutional nature of the law that the legislature rammed through to form a public body for a primarily private purpose – commercial transport of oil from western to eastern Canada. It represents a total abdication of the state’s perpetual and paramount public trust duty to the citizens of Michigan in favor of a private Canadian corporation whose uninterrupted oil transport and profit threatens 95 percent of America’s fresh surface water supply. This rushed and unlawful process will not survive a legal challenge.”