Here is kind of how it works. A developer, politically connected, sees a tasty piece of property, but the investment needed in infrastructure to develop it is too great to allow you to do it and take your money and profit back out within an acceptable time frame, so you go to a governmental entity and get it to do the infrastructure, in this case, a very expensive bridge, and then you get rich off of development of the property that benefitted from it.
Bah, was that you who had lived here in Charlotte for a while? Charlotte is the poster boy for the "scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" syndrome.