GRANVILLE NON-VIOLENT ACTION TEAM
For Immediate Release: November 13, 2008
Contacts: Kathryn Spann (919) 477-5653, Email: kathryn6668@yahoo.com
Elaine McNeill (919) 693-6574
Bill McKellar (919) 575-4283
Judy Winters (919) 575-5198, Email: admin@nobio.org
Granville Anti-NBAF Group Reminds Federal and State Agencies of “Promise” to Stop Bio-Hazard Lab
Granville County—In the final days before the Dept. of Homeland Security announces its Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) with evaluation of potential sites for its proposed massive biohazard lab (NBAF), the Granville Non-Violent Action Team is sending a message to federal and state officials that there’s no question the fight will only intensify if a site at Butner is fingered as likely. At the July public hearing on the Draft EIS, Bill McKellar, a GNAT leader and Butner pharmacist made clear his group’s “promise to fight” with a strong legal action to a siting in Butner. Other GNAT members, led by Suzanne Moody-Smith of Creedmoor, spoke of the group’s history of direct action to prevent other sitings and asked Homeland Security whether they would “use force” to build the facility against the will of local residents. Most recently Governor Elect, Bev Perdue said she “thinks that this decision should be left to you, the residents of the area. She would not support putting something in an area that the people who live there do not want”.
Since learning more of the details of diseases to be studied, the limits of protection from biohazardous accidents, and the lack of transparency for operations in 2007, GNAT has firmly opposed the lab, researched its potential impacts extensively, and spoken out. The group’s presentations have motivated Granville, Durham and Raleigh officials to oppose or at least withdraw support. Over the past year, the Government Accountability Office has released several reports critical of the massive growth and lack of security in biohazard labs and saying that Homeland Security’s study
doesn’t justify locating research on extremely contagious Foot and Mouth at a mainland site.
“The spectacular increase in biohazard research has only decreased our security and the transparency the public can expect about this research,” says Hope Taylor, a non profit executive and former biomedical researcher who farms a few miles from the proposed Butner site. “The NC Consortium for the NBAF has recruited support from local universities by promises of big federal grants, and the impact on a local community was simply no concern for them at all.” In recent months, the Consortium’s Barrett Slenning, of the NC State Veterinary School, has acknowledged that Butner might not be the best site for environmental and because of lack of community acceptance. He hinted that the Consortium might consider withdrawing their proposal. Despite letters from NC Senator Doug Berger and other local and state officials asking them to do so, the Consortium has kept NC’s hat in the ring for consideration in competition with five other states.
Most recently, the NC Dept. of Commerce has admitted that its optimistic 2006 projections that economic benefits to NC outweigh the costs of the NBAF to the state is no longer accurate. GNAT researcher Kathryn Spann has been working with Senator Berger to call on Commerce to redo the calculations based on more accurate data obtained recently from Homeland Security. The state commerce agency claims it’s not able to recalculate the economic projections without totally new data, while GNAT contends that any improved data going into the model, such as a much lower number of jobs created, and the projected additional $181 million required from the state for infrastructure, would show there’s no justification for the state supporting this project. “Any economist would know that the calculations would be more accurate with updated information, so this is no excuse. At the very least, they should stop the Consortium and the NC Biotech Center, [the leading advocates for the NBAF], from continuing to use skewed numbers about economic benefits, when they KNOW that they’re wrong!”
“No matter what conclusions that Homeland Security draws in its Environmental Impact Statement” says Elaine McNeill, a farmer in nearby Stem, “we’ll be fighting this thing. We’re not a sacrifice area for misguided biohazard research when the need for the massive increase in such labs hasn’t even been assessed. NO community, especially on the US mainland, should have to face the threat of this lab and its deadly research in their midst. It didn’t take Bruce Ivins to convince me that we simply can’t anticipate all the ways that these diseases could escape and destroy our region’s economy, health and way of life.”
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