A couple things real quick to ponder and discuss for the next few days.

One, the NBAF EIS is out. It’s 1,000 pages long. Guess I know how I’ll be spending my weekend.

Two, I spoke to Carl Jordan earlier today and he is not running for re-election.

Blake.aued@onlineathens.com

The last time Homeland Security came to town, they told us all of our silly little questions would be answered in a magical document called an Environmental Impact Statement that would come out in early or mid-May.

It’s a month late, so I called Amy Kudwa at DHS to ask what gives. The department will release the EIS “in the next week or two,” Kudwa said, but she couldn’t be more specific. A third round of public hearings, including one in Athens, will be scheduled for July, she said.

No cause for alarm – the next time a government report comes out when it’s supposed to will be the first – but I just thought y’all might want to know.

Blake.aued@onlineathens.com

"We're not obligated to release information that may put us at a competitive disadvantage."

That's a quote from David Lee, University of Georgia vice president for research and the public face of the broad-based effort -- involving a host of the state's higher education and economic development officials -- to bring the National Bio- and Agro-Defense Facility to Athens-Clarke County. Lee's statement appeared in a Sunday Banner-Herald story by government reporter Blake Aued on the fact that officials in Kansas have added more than $100 million in incentives to their bid for the federal facility which will do research into animal and zoonotic (transmissible from animals to humans) diseases. The story also notes that the federal Department of Homeland Security has, with a final decision on NBAF siting just months away, asked all five finalist sites for revised proposals.

Bio-defense labs make strange bedfellows.

One of the odd things about the NBAF debate is the way some opponents are lumping Athens elected officials in with President Bush and the bogeymen at Homeland Security.

Much has been made recently of a letter Mayor Heidi Davison wrote to DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff in support of bring the lab to Athens, as if she was conspiring with those Republican fascists to kill us all in the name of the almighty dollar.

The Sunshine Project has folded, according to the British magazine Science. There is also a better Chronicle of Higher Education article, but it’s subscription-only.

The group, with offices in Texas and Germany, was probably the only organization in the world solely committed to investigating and criticizing bio-research. The local anti-NBAF group FAQ invited U.S. director Edward Hammond to town last month to give a talk on the dangers of such research, to mixed reviews, and I had interviewed him for an article back in September.

More on this in my Sunday column, but I wanted to get the word out as soon as possible:

The format of the Department of Homeland Security meeting on the planned National Bio- and Agro-Defense Facility scheduled for 7 p.m. Feb. 19 at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education will rely on questions submitted in advance.

Briefly, the format will be: A 45-minute (or so) presentation from DHS and Plum Island, N.Y. Animal Disease Center officials, followed by those officials answering questions submitted in advance. Local organizers say those officials will be prepared to answer questions about the issues of concern that have arisen in the community since the DHS scoping meeting held last year, i.e., whether the facility will, in fact, be a bioweapons lab, what its environmental impact will be, etc.

Tuesday, as election days always are, was insane. For 12 hours I dashed back and forth between polling places, the commission chamber, the voter registration office and the newsroom, talking to voters and election officials, checking Web sites and stuffing my face with pizza.

Towards the end of the night, I walked in on the tail end of the commission meeting, where Mayor Heidi Davison and commissioners Alice Kinman, Elton Dodson and Kelly Girtz were lamenting John Edwards’ decision last week to drop out of the race.

“I didn’t want to be down to just those two,” Davison said, referring to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. “I wanted that third option.”

Grady Thrasher, one of the founders of the local anti-NBAF group FAQ, passed along a link today
to an article in a Kansas paper that quotes NBAF project manager as saying the lab would be protected by 50 armed guards, and another to a North Carolina television report that also mentions guards.

Thrasher and his wife Kathy Prescott are not pleased with Mayor Heidi Davison accusing them of using fear-mongering tactics to scare residents into opposing NBAF.

When you get right down to the heart of the matter, the equation is fairly simple. Are the economic rewards (high paying jobs, spinoff businesses, prospects of luring more biotech facilities) of a major federal research facility greater than the risks – however large or small- the facility might pose.

Most of the 200-plus people who attended a Jan. 22 presentation by Edward Hammond about the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s National Bio- and Agro-defense Facility being considered for Athens, fall on the side of not willing to take any risk. That's understandable when you consider events like those at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease from a Merial vaccine facility in the United Kingdom -- all high security places that posed "little to no risk".

If you don’t want NBAF in Athens, the public hearing put on by the group FAQ Tuesday night gave you some serious ammo to use against it.

If you’re in favor of it, it probably didn’t change your mind. It didn’t change the mayor’s mind: she had some harsh comments for the lab’s critics that you can read in Wednesday’s paper.

The event, billed as revealing the truth about the massive federal research lab, did anything but. While speaker Edward Hammond made some very good points about the unneeded proliferation of such labs since 2001, when he got on the topic of NBAF in particular, he fell into the type of logical fallacies they beat out of us the first week of my freshman philosophy class.