Vote to Fund Plum Island Replacement Lab Passes House

A vote to put $400 million toward a new Department of Homeland Security facility in Kansas, eventually replacing Plum Island Animal Disease Center, passed the House of Representatives recently, and awaits a vote in the U.S. Senate.

U.S. Rep. Tim Bishop, D-Southmapton, attempted to remove the funding for the National Bio-Agro Defense Facility from the $45 billion Homeland Security spending bill, though the measure was voted down, 345 to 80, according to the Kansas City Star.

The spending bill as a whole passed, 245 to 182.

Southold Supervisor Scott Russell noted on Tuesday that any movement toward replacing Plum Island's facilities still has a long way to go.

"Budgets require adoption of both houses of Congress prior to the Presidents’ signature. While the House passed funding for the NBAF, the fate of this facility is far less certain with the Senate," Russell said via email.

According to the Kansas City Star, Bishop called NBAF a "boondoggle" on the House floor while attempting to secure support to remove the funding. 

"We don’t even have a shovel in the ground yet and already the cost has gone up by 250 percent,” he said. The price tag of the lab is currently over $1 billion. “It is not needed.”

Supporters of the new Kansas facility – for which the President has reportedly requested $714 million – have said that the Plum Island center is outdated, and unfit to meet a security clearance of the highest measure, keeping the country in the lead of the animal research field.

Said Kansas Congresswoman Lynn Jenkins, R-Holton: “The NBAF is needed to replace the obsolete and increasingly expensive Plum Island Animal Disease Center. This lab was built in the 1950s and has reached the end of its life. The facility does not contain the necessary biosafety level to meet the NBAF research requirements, and it never will. Any attempts to upgrade Plum Island would cost more than building the NBAF.”

Bishop spokesman Oliver Longwell said on Tuesday that attempts to fund the facility seem at odds with House Republicans' claims of fiscal conservatism.

"If what we hear is that we have a spending problem, what Tim would say is that if we are looking to cut, here is something we should all be able to agree on. It's unnecessary and the cost continues to grow more and mor expensive."

Bob DeLuca, president of Group for the East End and member of the Preserve Plum Island Coalition, has stated that attempts to tie the sale of Plum Island with funding the cost of the NBAF facility should be severed, calling the idea as a whole a "very dangerous course of action. 

"The island is a precious public resource and should not be bartered away to hide the true cost of a lab we may not need to construct in the first place," he said via email.

As it stands now, Russell said, the island off the tip of Southold – which the town is in the process of zoning, should it be sold – should remain as a science lab of one kind or the other. The town has pitched zoning which would keep the labs zoned for research, and over 600 remaining acres on the island as conservation land – a move that has warmed local environmentalists.

"The construction of the NBAF, if it is ever built, does not mean that Plum Island cannot continue to perform the work that it does. As I have stated in the past, the Plum Island Research facility is perfectly situated for the mission it serves."