The Gainesville Report's Filing Cabinet

Size Matters

2004-10-22T19:19:00.000-07:00

By Colin Whitworth
MOON Magazine
Originally published in March 2001.

Nestled around US Highway 441 and Interstate-75, about 15 miles north of Gainesville, the city of Alachua appears to be the prototypical sleepy southern town. There are few traffic lights, one post office, a picturesque but short Main Street, and a lot of farms. The 6,500 or so residents have long enjoyed a rural, small-town lifestyle that pretty much closes down after dark. A walk through town brings to mind the words “quaint,” “relaxed” and “friendly.”

In fact, Alachua is a sleeping giant about to be wakened, shaken from its slumber by several controversial proposals that, if approved, could turn the city once ruled by sausage into the distribution and industrial center of North Florida.

For the past quarter of a decade, city officials have followed a liberal annexation policy that has increased Alachua’s size by 16 times, from two to 33 square miles. But because the vast majority of that land is rural, agricultural property, the population has only tripled in those 27 years. Most of the annexed land has remained undeveloped, requiring few city services, and so far residents have experienced only minor growing pains.

That may soon change.

City officials are considering a proposed $539 million development that would almost double the city’s population and add tens of thousands of cars and trucks to the area’s highways and county roads.

The project, called Alachua West, would also create thousands of average-pay jobs, a virtue to many citizens still stinging from the closing of the Copeland Sausage plant, once the town’s major employer.

Centered around the one million-square-foot Dollar General distribution warehouse on County Road 235A, the proposed development is a massive industrial, commercial and residential project on 1,700 acres of farmland west of the city, an area roughly 18 times the size of the Oaks Mall.

If approved by city and state officials, Alachua West would require the widening of many area roads and highways, expansions of the city’s water and sewer plants, a new fire station, more police and likely a new school.

And in terms of its character, Alachua West would leave the city anything but sleepy. Alachua West’s developer is proposing to:

• Add at least 10 million square feet more of distribution warehousing and 924,000 square feet of commercial development, which the developer says will create more than 10,000 jobs;

• Build 975 single-family homes and 1,140 multi-family housing units, for more than 5,000 residents—a 76 percent increase in the city’s population; and,

• Put more than 5,000 semi-trucks, each weighing about 80,000 pounds, and thousands of cars on the city’s rurally designed road system every day.

“I don’t see it changing the character of Alachua,” said Alachua City Commissioner Jean Calderwood. “I see that as an enhancement.”

Calderwood and her four fellow commissioners are also considering three changes to its growth management plan that would allow Alachua West’s developers to save millions on the road improvements the project will require. That money would instead be borne by city and county taxpayers, while leaving many heavily impacted roads unimproved.

Like many of Alachua’s business and civic leaders, Calderwood extols the benefits of the potential job creation machine. Besides the thousands of jobs the project will create, other businesses will pop up across the city to meet the needs of those employees, as well as those of the 5,000-plus residents proposed to live there.

“You have got to have people to have paychecks to have dinner at Conestoga’s and to shop and buy groceries,” she said.

Alachua West has already raised red flags with state officials, who must determine whether the town and infrastructure can handle the enormous number of trucks, cars and people, and whether the developer and local officials can afford to widen all the roads and provide the necessary services such a mammoth project will require.

In their preliminary review of the proposed project, state transportation officials say the developer has underestimated the traffic Alachua West will generate, overestimated how much traffic will remain within the project’s boundaries, and offered few specifics about the army of trucks that will parade through town every day.

Many citizens believe they will be forced to pay for road and other improvements needed only because Alachua West rolled into town. Already the city has agreed to extend water and sewer lines to the entire 1,700-acre project at no cost to the developer, a multi-million project that city taxpayers must cover.

To some, the proposed development will ruin Alachua.

“It’ll be the absolute, total destruction of any bucolic, small town life we have,” said Robert Perez, who heads a citizens group opposed to Alachua West. “There’s the fiscal impact on the tax base, the traffic—particularly the truck traffic—and just the general atmosphere that is going to be created by having that kind of business booming next to the city all day and night long.”

SIZE MATTERS

The city’s open door annexation policy has already lead to several large property tax increases that have doubled the city's tax rate in the past 20 years. Last year the city increase its millage rate 5.3 percent increase.

Ironically, one of the reasons so many people once thought it best to annex into the city was its formerly rock bottom tax rate. Now Alachua’s taxes are the highest in the county.

Alachua’s annexation push began when city officials approved, in August 1974, the annexation of 306 acres owned by City Commissioner James Lewis, who is still serving on the commission.

At the time, the city also annexed about 120 acres owned by Grady Alday, whose wife was a city commissioner. Lewis and Alday said they were worried what would happen to Alachua’s taxes and services if the county and Gainesville consolidated governments, which was being debated at the time; the consolidation never happened.

Many others followed suit, and the city was more than happy to have them. In a 1974 article in The Gainesville Sun, Lewis explained Alachua’s policy on annexation: “We want them in the city limits. Everyone who wants to merely has to petition this commission in order to be considered for annexation.”

Lewis told The Sun growth would help pay for needed programs, like a playground for a local school. He added: “Of course we realize if Joe Blow wanted to annex 500 acres contiguous to the city limits, it would break us if we had to pave those streets and lay those water lines.”

That year, the commission doubled the size of Alachua through annexations, including two parcels totaling more than 800 acres owned by Ralph Cellon, a former county commissioner and eventual co-developer of Turkey Creek.

Nearly all of those properties that requested annexation were zoned for agricultural uses.

By the end of 1977, Alachua had further tripled in size through annexation. Then-City Manager George Stevens told The Sun: “ I know of no one who has asked to be annexed and met the requirements and who was turned down.”

A pro-business attitude was emerging. Gainesville was seen as overly regulatory and difficult with which to deal, while Alachua was a handshake-and-howdy kind of town that eagerly wanted new business and residents.

By 1980, annexations were so common that few knew the city’s true limits. Since Lewis’s 1974 annexation, the City Commission had annexed 110 parcels, totaling 18 square miles.

Also that year, a group of Alachua-area residents known as Quail Roost Farms had agreed to sell IBM, the giant computer maker, 1,600 acres of agricultural land west of the city.

Quail Roost Farms was owned by Lewis, his brother and W. D. Pope, Jr., the father of David Pope, who now works for Waco Properties, the developer of Alachua West. After selling to IBM, Lewis and the other city commissioners voted to rezone the property to industrial, despite its farmland surroundings.

IBM officials had said they planned to build a campus-style development to do research and build computers. But nothing happened with the land until 1997, when IBM sold the land to Waco for $3.9 million, which quickly announced it was working to attract a large Dollar General distribution center that would employ at least 350 people and provide the city and county with a larger tax base.

While economic development officials had to strain to get the Alachua County Commission to resurface County Road 235A as an incentive to get Dollar General to relocate here, Waco had no problem getting the city’s cooperation. The city agreed in 1999 to buy 250 acres of land from Waco and give it to Dollar General, which would then close down its Homerville, Georgia, center and move it to Alachua.

Alachua, with an annual budget just over $13 million, agreed in writing to pay Waco almost $450,000 for 250 acres of industrially zoned land (at $1,250 an acre), and for the costs of clearing land and moving Waco’s irrigation system that had been used for the farmland.

City officials also promised to run water and sewer lines to any tenant of Alachua West at no charge, and to not charge hook-up fees or impact fees, for the next decade. Alachua’s cost just to run water and sewer lines to Dollar General was $750,000, and so far city officials have not said how much it will cost to supply the entire site with water and sewer lines and hook-ups.

The city’s agreement, known as the Waco Agreement, also pledged that Alachua would reserve all remaining available road capacity for Waco. Florida adopts levels of allowable service along roads, and when too much development has caused roads to go above their designated capacities, then either development must stop or someone—developers or government—must widen or otherwise improve the roads to make them “concurrent” with growth.

To top it off, the city promised to pay Waco $2 million in cash if the city fails to meet any of the above stipulations.

SWEETENING THE DEAL

The concurrency issue is central to the growth management debate over Alachua West. The project is known as a Development of Regional Impact, which means it is large enough that it requires more intensive review by agencies like the Department of Transportation, the Fish and Wildlife Commission and the Department of Community Affairs.

DRIs can also allow local government to impose strict rules on a developer, so if roads need to be widened, officials can require the developer to improve the roads.

The essence of concurrency was to make growth pay for itself. But when concurrency stops development in an already congested area, some developers move further out, where road capacities are open. This encourages sprawl, an expensive form of growth that requires government to provide urban services to rural areas.

Alachua West is located on county roads 235 and 235A, a pair of two-lane roads that, before Dollar General moved in, were home only to farms and a few dozen homes on five or more acres each.

Almost every vehicle going in or out of the project will travel on one or both of these roads, which means they will have to be widened and strengthened to handle the thousands of trucks and cars.

Likewise, the traffic will mostly travel on parts of US 441 and the interstate; Alachua West officials estimate that almost 9,000 trucks a day will travel on I-75 to and from the distribution warehouses.

The impacts go out from there. Waco’s planners have plotted the project’s impacts on dozens of road segments, and many roads will go above capacity because of Alachua West.

Under the DRI process, Alachua could require Waco to pay for all of the road impacts its project will generate before finishing its development. That would mean, among other things, widening US 441 and several county roads, upgrading the interchange at US 441 and I-75, putting turn lanes and intersections at various points, and upgrading road surfaces to handle the heavy truck traffic.

The actual cost of those improvements has not been decided, as Waco and state transportation officials are still negotiating the traffic impacts of Alachua West. It is not an exact science, and several proposed amendments to Alachua’s comprehensive plan have made this calculation even more difficult.

Waco has proposed three comprehensive plan changes—to create a new land use category called mixed use; to rezone a 285-acre parcel of land to mixed use; and to allow the use of proportionate-share funding of DRI transportation improvements.

The mixed use parcel would include businesses, offices and homes in the style of a traditional village center. Conceptual drawings show a pretty Main Street and neo-traditional village square, complete with a giant water fountain in the middle.

Not shown in the drawings are the next door neighbors—the one-million-square-foot Dollar General and almost a thousand acres of land slated to house 10 million square feet of distribution warehouses, according to Waco.

These neighbors will be constantly and brightly lighted, causing a glow that will be seen for miles. Already people all over the region can see the dome of light Dollar General alone already creates.

Likewise, the people living, working and shopping in the village center will breathe the pollution and hear the constant rumbling of thousands of tractor trailers entering and leaving these warehouses every day.

An area example of mixed use development is Haile Plantation, which is a large residential development with a town village center that allows residents to stay within the development for some of their shopping and other needs. Those who live close enough can walk or bike to the town center.

Planners at the local and state level like mixed use developments because they reduce the need for driving. Most new suburban developments are gated communities with nothing but homes, which forces residents to drive for their every need, from work to school to shopping to recreation.

Some citizens doubt the concept will work. “What these people propose happening with their village center is basically ludicrous,” said Perez, a machinist who often speaks vociferously at city meetings about this issue. “The entire concept of having a business and community center in the middle of 10 Dollar General-sized warehouse complexes is completely irrational. Nobody is going to buy any property or rent an apartment there.

“What would happen if Dollar General was built next to Haile Plantation? What would happen then?” Perez said.

Alachua’s commissioners have not voted on the mixed use proposal, but the majority appears ready to support it.

For Alachua West, the mixed use category would allow Waco to count between 20 and 45 percent of its traffic as “internal capture,” meaning vehicle trips that do not leave the development. When counting traffic trips, the Florida Department of Transportation counts every time a person leaves or arrives at their residence in a vehicle as one trip. The more trips that do not leave the development, the less Waco must spend on road improvements.

The savings to Waco would be enormous, especially considering that the company can develop all of the industrial parts first, leaving the residential part of the development for last. Also, no one can force people to buy homes, which means much if not all of the residential development might never be built.

The Florida chapter of the Sierra Club is concerned with this proposal because the legislation that created it was intended to prevent urban sprawl, said Kathy Cantwell, state executive board member and chair of the local chapter.

“We feel that the city is using that legislation to do the exact opposite—to promote growth and development in an area far from an urban center,” Cantwell said. “Mixed use in an agricultural area is sprawl. Whether it is neo-traditional or not, it's sprawl.”

Lowell Garrett, a planner for the North Central Florida Regional Planning Council, said that while mixed use developments can be used in rural areas, “it is used most often in a downtown core.”

Perez said the concern over mixed use goes far beyond Alachua West. Once the land use category is in the city’s comprehensive plan, the pro-growth City Commission can rezone property anywhere in Alachua, including low density agricultural land, allowing industrial and commercial land uses everywhere, he said.

“This is an invitation to come to Alachua, buy cheap agricultural land and apply for mixed use zoning,” Perez said. “It’ll be like the Oklahoma land rush.”

At a Feb. 26 public hearing on the mixed use plan amendment, resident Ken Sulak, who lives next door to the Alachua West site, said the proposal says nothing about where it will be used, how the different uses would be mixed, or whether the city will protect neighbors.

“It’s a pretext to rampant development,” he said.

Howard Landers, the head planner for Waco, said that the mixed use category does not “cut loose developers to do what ever they want.”

Calderwood said she likes the mixed use proposal because it will have “a positive effect” on urban sprawl by encouraging higher densities and a concentration of houses and services. “There are people who want small yards,” she said.

SHARING THE LOAD

No matter how much traffic the state decides Alachua West will generate, Waco may end up spending far less to improve the negatively impacted roads, thanks to a third proposed comprehensive plan amendment that deals with a concept called proportionate-share funding of road improvements.

Proportionate-share funding was added into state law in 1999 and applies only to multi-use DRIs, such as the Alachua West project. An airport would be a single-use DRI, but because Alachua West has proposed industrial, business, commercial and residential uses, the state classifies it as multi-use.

If Alachua does not include proportionate-share funding in its comprehensive plan, then Waco would have to play by the normal concurrency rules, which means they would have to pay to improve all of the roads that the development would cause to exceed their allowed capacities.

But with proportionate-share funding, Waco determines its share of the impacts on all affected roads and then calculates their financial share of improving those roads based on a percentage. If the development’s traffic causes a 10 percent increase in traffic on a road, the developer’s share is 10 percent of the cost to improve it.

Once the state and Waco determine those percentages, they can negotiate a cost that the developer must pay. Then the developer and the city get to decide how to spend that money, using a method called pipelining, which allows the developer to funnel all of its financial responsibilities for fixing dozens of road segments into a handful of projects.

Importantly, this method allows the developer to satisfy the state’s concurrency requirements while leaving many impacted roads untouched.

Waco’s planners have proposed two alternatives:

• Widening parts of US 441, I-75, State Road 20 and county roads 235 and 235A, at a cost of just more than $24 million.

• Putting an interchange at I-75 and County Road 235, which would keep most traffic away from the city proper, and widening parts of I-75, State Road 20 and county roads 235 and 235A, at a cost of almost $17 million.

Both proposed mitigation plans have stumbling block. DOT officials say that 8-laning the 5-mile stretch of I-75 as suggested by Waco will not happen, because the state just finished 6-laning that road.

And the second alternative—a new interstate interchange at County Road 235—is even less likely to happen and requires so many different approval steps that Waco can not use the idea in its DRI application. Counting on a new interchange, transportation officials say, would be like telling creditors you’ll pay them when you win the lottery.

Either way, Waco has not yet released the total cost to improve all of the roads Alachua West will negatively impact. It would certainly be tens of millions of dollars more than they are proposing to spend.

“Every transportation artery within the city and the surrounding two or three counties is going to be affected when you put a hub of traffic in one area like this,” Perez said. “We’re talking the biggest truck stop in the world.”

The thousands of trucks parading through town worries state officials, because many of them will pass by Santa Fe High School. In a June 22 letter from Lea Gabbay, a DRI coordinator for the state transportation department, she pointed out that the school has one intersection used mostly by school buses and another unsignalized entrance down the road used mostly by students.

“The mixing of this large number of trucks with passenger cars and school buses near the high school may create unsafe conditions,” Gabbay wrote.

Alachua County officials are worried because they own and maintain many of the most impacted roads. Already facing a backlog of needed road improvements, the county is asking Alachua officials why it wants to add an intense, high-traffic development on two county roads that otherwise would not be widened for decades, if ever.

“We continue to have many concerns about the impacts that this development will have on the county’s infrastructure and land uses,” County Manager Randy Reid wrote on Dec. 18 in a letter to then-Alachua City Manager Fred Hays.

Similar concern was addressed when proportionate-share funding was added into the state law. During a meeting of the House Transportation and Economic Development Appropriations Committee, members were discussing a growth policy act sponsored by then-Rep. Lee Constantine, which he said “reduces sprawl (and) promotes economic development in urban areas.”

With no explanation, Rep. Alzo Reddick proposed the proportionate-share amendment to the bill. None of the committee’s dozen-plus members asked him any questions about the amendment.

The amendment was apparently added at the last minute to the committee’s agenda. Marcia Elders, a lobbyist who represents the American Planning Association, told committee members that “a lot of organizations would be here right now if they had had any idea that this amendment was coming forward on this bill. I learned of it about five minutes ago."

Elders called the proportionate-share idea “controversial” and “very bad,” adding: "It undermines transportation concurrency, which is a vital part of growth management."

The only other person to speak on the amendment was Dan R. Stengle, a lobbyist representing the Florida Home Builders Association and the Association of Florida Community Developers. He said the proportionate-share funding “would act as an incentive for developers to undertake large multi-use development projects.”

When the bill made it to the floor of the House, there was no debate on the proportionate-share amendment. It passed unanimously and was signed into law by Gov. Jeb Bush.

Jim Crews, a DRI plan reviewer for the Department of Community Affairs, said that once the city adds proportionate-share funding into its growth management plan, the city has to allow any developer of a multi-use DRI to use that funding method.

“If a developer wants to use it, it is no longer at city's discretion,” Crews said. “And the responsibility for putting the improvements in place moves from the developer to the government.”

Calderwood said she supports the proportionate-share amendment to the comprehensive plan, although she said it is a relatively new growth management tool without a track record.

“We should be willing to try a new tool that was put into place by the people who we put into office,” she said. “If we can use it for the benefit of Alachua, we ought to use it.”

Others don’t see it that way. Cantwell said the Sierra Club is so concerned with this proposal it has allocated $1,500 and legal help to challenge the comprehensive plan amendments if they go forward.

“This will cause tremendous transportation problems and road deterioration problems that the taxpayers of Alachua have to foot the bill for,” Cantwell said. “If you calculate out the full cost of road improvements, and you look at Waco's responsibility—theirs is only about a third of true costs. The rest will have to be footed by us.”

DETAILS, DETAILS

State planning and transportation officials say that Alachua has a lot to do before getting either the Alachua West DRI or the three proposed comprehensive plan amendments approved.

The city is using the data and analysis from the Alachua West DRI application as the supporting information for the comprehensive plan amendments. But the DRI process is in its early stage of a two- or three-step sufficiency review, in which sate agencies ask dozens of questions, ask for more information and point out flaws in the developer’s plan.

The city will possibly vote to transmit the three plan amendments some time in March. Crews said if the city sends the amendments with the current DRI analysis as support, the state will automatically reject it.

Plan amendments go through a two-phase approval process—transmittal of the proposed changes, which is reviewed by the state to ensure they are consistent with state law, and adoption, at which point the DCA must rule whether the plan amendments are in compliance with the law.

That ruling can be challenged in the courts, which Crews said can take years to resolve. Meanwhile, he said the DRI cannot go forward until the plan amendments are resolved, because the DRI’s traffic analysis and mitigation plan are based on using the mixed use zoning and proportionate-share funding.

The city hosted two public workshops in February and have scheduled another for Wednesday, March 14, at 5 p.m. in city hall. So far the city has not advertised a meeting at which the City Commission will vote on the transmittal of the three plan amendments.

Meanwhile, state, county and city officials, as well as many citizens, were eagerly awaiting Waco’s responses to the state’s first sufficiency review of the DRI.

MOON Archives: Desert Scorn

2004-10-20T07:22:00.000-07:00

Did Jim Moss Discover A Cause For The Mysterious Gulf War Syndrome And Did It Cost Him His Job?

Originally published in MOON Magazine, Sept. 21, 1994

By Mitchell Gibbs

A local scientist who may have discovered the cause of the mysterious Gulf War Syndrome says government and corporate pressures have cost him his job and swept his research out of sight, leaving the health of more than 20,000 veterans in the hands of government officials reluctant to solve the mystery.

The government's lack of action on the Gulf War Syndrome is not surprising. Jim Moss, a Gainesville researcher for the US Department of Agriculture until he was "let go" in June, says his research indicates the illness may be the result of the interaction of three chemicals designed to protect soldiers in the Iraq campaign.

Despite a senate committee recommendation and pleas from a powerful US senator to continue Moss' research, USDA officials told this summer Moss they were not renewing his contract. While the USDA says Moss was let go because his contract ended, Moss says he believes a maker of the chemicals pressured the USDA to squelch his findings, which carry implications far beyond the Gulf War Syndrome.

Moss has filed an official complaint within the USDA, charging officials with impeding his research—research he considers vital to the public's health. Meanwhile, the Veterans Affairs Department struggles to provide medical care for thousands of Gulf War vets.

Many doctors and scientists have contested that the Gulf War Syndrome doesn't really exist because no one cause can explain the broad variety of symptoms veterans are experiencing. Since the Gulf War ended in early 1991, more than 20,000 vets have complained of symptoms that include diarrhea, fatigue, joint pains, birth defects in their newborns and memory loss. More people are added to the victims' list everyday.

Although USDA officials say Moss' research wasn't authorized, they say it wasn't why his contract was not renewed. Moss is now collecting unemployment and searching for a place to continue his research.

"I've been blackballed by the agency," says Moss, his work left incomplete and unpublished.

His treatment as an employee is not as scary as the implications behind his complaint: that a chemical manufacturer somehow influenced the Agriculture Department's decision to get rid of Moss. In the complaint, filed July 11 with the Labor and Employee Relations Board of the Agricultural Research Service, Moss wrote: "It appears that a private corporation can dictate health and safety policy of a federal agency by making a phone call."

BUGGIN' OUT
Moss, 43, is the first person to admit that the purpose of his job at the USDA's medical and veterinary entomology laboratory in Gainesville was not to look for the cause of the Gulf War Syndrome. He was hired four years ago on a post-doctorate appointment to research the way that boric acid kills cockroaches.

But scientists have a holy word to describe how Moss' work with chemicals and cockroaches put him in the middle of a national controversy—serendipity. Although, in his case it may have just been bad luck.

The most popular theory to explain the Gulf War Syndrome is called multiple chemical sensitivity, but it has been mostly dismissed by the medical community because the theory only describes the effects of the illness, and does not address the cause.

Moss's findings may explain that cause. Despite the complex biochemistry that underlies his work, Moss' findings are fairly simple to grasp. He studied three chemicals—a common insect repellent, a common insecticide, and an experimental drug designed to combat the effects of nerve gas. All three chemicals were used by American soldiers during the Persian Gulf War three years ago.

Each of the three chemicals is powerful and can be toxic to humans, but each was individually used during the war at what is considered safe levels.

But the chemicals may not have been acting individually. Using cockroaches, Moss tested the effects of combinations of the chemicals and observed what scientists call "synergism"—one chemical boosting the effects of another. When Moss combined a very low dose of one chemical with a medium dose of another , his cockroaches died in much larger numbers than normal. The mixture of the common bug repellent, DEET, with the anti-nerve-gas chemical increased the overall toxicity by five to 10 times, Moss said.

Moss is most interested by the interaction between DEET and the anti-nerve gas chemical, pyridostigmine.

Both chemicals have tainted histories. While DEET is used in about 90 percent of all commercial insect repellents, no one knows exactly why it works, Moss and other scientists say. And according to congressional testimony and records from the US Food and Drug Administration, the FDA hastily approved pyridostigmine under military pressure for use by soldiers immediately before the Gulf War, even though it had not been thoroughly tested.

Moss, who holds a doctorate in entomology, with a major in physiology, and minors in toxicology and biochemistry, realized that any of the chemicals could become toxic if their power was boosted. What's more, the chemicals had the potential to harm many different human functions. It was possible that he had come across an explanation for the long list of symptoms that Gulf War veterans were experiencing (see chart).

Moss was also alarmed that two of the chemicals, DEET and permethrin, are in common use and could pose a health risk to the general public.

The results of his cockroach tests were striking enough that he sent faxes last November to the USDA in Beltsville, Maryland, and a corporation with an interest in the cockroach research, which Moss declined to name.

Moss says that's when his problems began. Within two days, Moss "was told not to do the research and not to talk about it to anyone," he said. Moss asked that the order be put in writing. One week later, his supervisors told him he could continue the research as long as he kept his mouth shut, according to Moss.

No one besides Moss had access to his test results before he sent the faxes. His supervisors told him that releasing the information "would result in undue panic."

What Moss saw as an immediate human health issue, both to the military and public, was being squelched.

"Nothing was done," says Moss. "That's not ethical." The secrecy order, says Moss, "had to come from Beltsville or from the corporation." Moss says a USDA official privately confirmed corporate involvement, but lacking hard proof, Moss is unwilling to give names.

Moss' next move was to write a letter to a high-ranking official in the USDA, and then to a Senate banking, housing and urban affairs committee, headed by Michigan Democrat Donald Reigle, which was investigating US involvement in selling chemical/biological warfare materials to Iraq. Moss says these letters were aimed at finding grant money to fund further research.

Moss finally got the attention of Diane Zuckerman, an aide to Sen. John D. Rockefeller, (D-West Virginia). Rockefeller heads the Senate's Veteran's Affairs Committee and was investigating the anti-nerve gas pill. Moss was soon asked to testify before the committee.

"It took (the USDA) five days to say no, and six hours to say yes," says Moss about the USDA's reluctance to allow him to testify until pressured by the committee.

UNDER THE RUG
The USDA was reluctant but eventually let him appear before the committee. Moss says his May 6 testimony was the first time the public heard about his research. "I stayed away from the press for quite a long time," Moss says, "but the institution was unwilling to deal with the issue, and the only way the research is going to get done is by publicity."

On June 30, less than two months after his Senate testimony, Moss' appointment at the USDA lab ended. Gary Mount, director of the USDA Medical and Veterinary Entomology Laboratory in Gainesville, said Moss' post-doctoral appointment could not be extended. Mount denies "any direct political pressure."

"I'm not saying (Moss) made any mistake," Mount says, "but his studies were unauthorized."

Mount did acknowledge that two of the chemicals in question, DEET and permethrin, had been developed in USDA labs and that there was corporate interest in research conducted there, especially research that might have negative publicity.

Mount and other officials feared Moss's research, which is only preliminary, would cause an overreaction by the public that might have DEET taken off the shelves.

"We don't want to lose these materials...unnecessarily," Mount says.

One corporation that has been deeply involved in DEET research is S. C. Johnson, the maker of Johnson Wax, Off insect repellent and Raid insecticides. Carl Schreck, a research entomologist at the USDA Gainesville lab who worked on the development of DEET, says, "S. C. Johnson Inc. was very interested in early work with DEET back in the 50s. They were the first company to come out with DEET as a product. "

Schreck, who has worked at the lab for 32 years, says the company "sponsored research on cockroach toxicants," but that "I personally have never seen any influence."

Marilyn Blood, an official at S.C. Johnson, would not answer questions and said she was not aware of Moss' complaint and was unable to provide information of the company's connections with the USDA.

The only producer of the anti-nerve-gas chemical, pyridostigmine, is Hoffman-LaRoche Inc. Several companies produce DEET and permethrin.

Concerning any corporate blame if his theory were to be proven, Moss says, "I wouldn't worry about liability if I was any of them." Instead, Moss believes the Defense Department and the FDA have more to lose because of their handling of the anti-nerve gas pill. Many soldiers said they experienced side-effects from the pill, but had received no warnings, despite FDA recommendations. Soldiers also reported taking more pills than were recommended.

A recent study of the effects of the anti-nerve gas chemical on monkeys reported in the journal Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology, said the monkeys experienced toxic effects at four times the recommended dose.

If DEET boosts the anti-nerve gas pill in humans as much as it did in cockroaches (making it five to 10 times more powerful), the pill may have been strong enough to be toxic.

The anti-nerve-gas chemical primarily affects an enzyme in the nervous system, Moss said, but it may also affect vital enzymes
all over the body. He said there are numerous examples of chemicals
that are similar to the anti-nerve-gas chemical which have "secondary targets."

Mount says he was requested to preserve Moss' data books. He also says he was asked to give a summary of Moss' data to the Defense Department's Armed Services Pest Management Board in Washington, D.C. Neither Moss nor the public has seen Mount's summary, and Moss worries his research may have been misinterpreted.

Moss says Mount is "ill-equipped to judge my research. Why the Department of Defense didn't come to me, I don't know."

Mount would not discuss his summary of Moss' data except to say his results were "in the ballpark" with Moss'.

Mount also has a doctorate degree in entomology and has more than 30 years experience. He says, "(Moss' data) is not being taken out of context."

Mount admits, "The people in the Department of Defense have more comprehensive and complete knowledge (about biochemistry) than I do."

Moss says he was misled about the position when he was hired and wonders why he was allowed to design a laboratory and train a technician if his job was considered temporary.

According to Moss, the USDA contention that Moss' research was not in line with the lab's purpose holds little water. Moss says that figuring out how DEET works ought to be of interest to a lab that has been involved with the chemical for 40 years. Moss also has evidence that Sen. Rockefeller specifically requested that his research be continued at the USDA.

In a June 28, 1994 letter from Rockefeller to the US Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, which was later faxed to Moss by Diane Zuckerman, Rockefeller writes: "I have not yet received a response to my May 23rd letter to you, in which I asked about USDA's plans to support future research in this area since Dr. Moss' role has been terminated. It appears that USDA has no plans to support research in this area. Nevertheless, I remain hopeful that the department will support similar research in the safety of these commonly used pesticides in the future."

Moss filed a complaint through the USDA on July 11 and expects a response in October. He says his actions have created "some very deep hostility," and that any job he gets in the future "will be based on politics as much as science."

All of the staff at the Medical and Veterinary Entomology Lab interviewed by MOON felt that Moss' findings were important, but that he had talked too early or too much.

Mount said, "The Government has a responsibility to unravel this....What Dr. Moss has done may turn out to be a good thing."