Flora, Mississippi, wants to be home to new national lab

Flora, Mississippi, population 1,546, wants to be home to the $500 million National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility. The city’s mayor Scott Greaves announced he will hold a town hall meeting at the First Baptist Church in Flora to tell the citizenry that if they want to have the lab’s high-paying jobs and high-tech spinoffs, then they must get behind the idea. Flora, in Madison County, is one of only five finalists selected by DHS as its home. The others are San Antonio, Texas; Athens, Goergia; Manhattan, Kansas; and Durham and Granville counties, North Carolina.

Greaves is sold on the idea. “There’s no doubt in my mind. This could be bigger than the car plants,” he said, referring to the Nissan plant located in nearby Canton and Toyota in north Mississippi. About 200 of the nation’s top scientists would move to central Mississippi to work at the lab, which would test and evaluate combating bio and agro terrorism threats. Another 150 support workers would converge in the Flora Industrial Park on U.S. 49 daily. Pharmaceutical companies likely would locate nearby, hoping to sell the results of the medical research. The average salary of the 400 jobs it will provide is $75,000 — with a total payroll of about $30.5 million annually.

Studying contagious animal diseases, such as avian flu and foot and mouth disease, and developing defense mechanisms for bioterrorism will be the facility’s main duties. It will be state of the art, with the same security level as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. It will have a BioSafety Level 4, which is the nation’s highest. In fact, the unofficial name for the lab is “an animal CDC,” and like the huge medical complex in Atlanta, it will have huge spinoff opportunities.

Partners collaborating on developing the facility include University of Mississippi Medical Center, the Ole Miss School of Pharmacy, Mississippi State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, and Jackson State University. This facility should provide a multiplier effect of more research, more grants, more jobs — all high-tech, high-paying — making the competition to land it intense. Greaves said that the metro area offers the quality-of-life features along with the technical support to land this project, but public support is critical to landing it. The hearing in Flora is open to all interested and should answer any questions the public may have about the proposed facility.

You may know that just outside of the Flora city limits lies a forest collection of petrified wood, the Mississippi Petrified Forest, which purports to be the only such forest east of the Mississippi River.