Officials Say Tribes Must Weigh In . . .

. . . and I’m sure they would agree that traffic sucks on the BQE, especially when it gets congested leading up to the LIE onramp:

Crossing the traffic-choked Kosciuszko Bridge is hard, but tearing it down is proving even more difficult.

After a year of bureaucratic delays, the $630 million project to replace the aging span has hit another snag: getting an okay from Native American tribes who have long disappeared from the region.

The feds have refused to sign off on the project until the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohicans in Wisconsin and the Delaware Nation in Oklahoma are given a chance to weigh in, state and federal officials confirmed.

The two tribes once called this area home. The holdup — the third major delay in a year — has further angered Queens and Brooklyn landowners whose future remains unclear as officials try to figure out how to replace the bridge, which opened in 1939.

. . .

For six weeks, the feds have been mulling final approval to replace the Kosciuszko, which carries the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway over Newtown Creek.

But late last month, the state Historic Preservation Office notified the feds that “some ancestral land” of the two tribes may be affected by the project, said Federal Highway Administration spokesman Doug Hecox.

Federal law requires a Native American tribe to be notified when a federally funded project affects its ancestral homeland.

“They have to consult with us to find out if we have a defined interest in that area,” said Tamara Francis, the Delaware Nation’s Cultural Preservation Director. “Ordinarily this was something the state would do,” Hecox said. “Simply put, the action did not occur, so we are now doing it.”

The feds are mailing letters to the tribes this week. They will be given 30 days to respond.