Judge's remarks irk BU biolab opponents
Boston Globe
September 6, 2007
By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff
The state’s top judge yesterday characterized the campaign to stop construction of a high-security research laboratory in Boston’s South End as a not-in-my-backyard squabble, a potentially telling assessment in a high-stakes legal case.
Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall of the Supreme Judicial Court made the remarks during arguments in a case filed by 10 Boston residents suing to block the Biosafety Level-4 laboratory from being built on Boston University’s medical school campus. The lab, a cornerstone in the Bush administration’s effort to combat bioterrorism, will give scientists the ability to work with the world’s deadliest germs, including Ebola, plague, and anthrax.
A group of residents living near the lab has spent more than four years battling the facility, which is rising along Albany Street and expected to open in the fall 2008. The neighbors have argued that the lab’s work will put their lives at risk and that BU and the National Institutes of Health, which is underwriting the facility’s construction, unfairly located it in a densely populated area with many minority and low-income residents.
“It sounds in the context of this case rather like a NIMBY case,” Marshall said, using the acronym for “not in my backyard.” She said that it seemed inevitable that such a laboratory would have to be built near a medical research center, so that it would be accessible to infectious-disease scientists, technicians, and other health workers.
“Your honor, I strongly disagree,” said Douglas Wilkins, the Anderson & Kreiger lawyer who is representing the residents. “My clients just want to be safe. . . . I don’t accept the assumption that this has to be near a large medical area.”
The case landed before the Supreme Judicial Court after the residents won a partial victory in August 2006 before a lower court judge. Suffolk Superior Court Judge Ralph D. Gants ordered further environmental review of the lab, declaring that a decision by the state Executive Office of Environmental Affairs to approve the lab “was arbitrary and capricious.” Gants, however, did not block construction of the $178 million building, which will house the Level-4 lab as well as other research facilities.
BU appealed Gants’s ruling, and the Supreme Judicial Court decided to hear the case, bypassing an appeals court.
Klare Allen, a stalwart opponent of the lab, said after the hearing that she found Marshall’s depiction of the case as a NIMBY dispute “very insulting. We’ve been very careful in saying we don’t think this project should be built anywhere, period.”
The lawyer for BU, John M. Stevens, told the judges there was no evidence from the operations of other Biosafety Level-4 labs in the United States that the BU facility will pose a danger to neighbors.
Only two of the court’s six members, Marshall and Justice Robert J. Cordy, posed multiple questions to the lawyers during the oral arguments, which lasted 37 minutes. Their queries suggested they were mostly interested in technical aspects of the state’s environmental review.
The Supreme Judicial Court did not indicate when it will rule.
Stephen Smith can be reached at stsmith@globe.com.