Member Mobilization: Food Lab Victory

By DARCY WELLS
The highly trained food chemists and microbiologists charged with safeguarding the food we eat will soon be able to do their critical work in a $40 million, state-of-the-art facility being built at the Harriman Research and Technology Campus in Albany.

Food laboratory employees, who are mainly PEF Division 275 members working for the state Department of Agriculture and Markets, have been fighting a threat started by former Gov. George Pataki to build a new lab in Geneva.

Location, Location, Location
“The commitment to the Albany location has been a long time coming,” said PEF Vice President Tom Comanzo.

Members mobilized quickly in the fall of 2006 to fight the proposed move to Geneva.

Divison 275 Council Leader and Executive Board member Ron Brown recalled the announcement of the proposed move by the former commissioner.

“The commissioner was asked if there was any chance the decision could be reversed and he said ‘no chance,’” Brown said.

But as Brown pointed out, that was before members pulled together.

“Members attended rallies against the move and provided facts to the union and the media,” Brown said.

They also held press conferences outside the current lab and on the steps of the state Capitol, lobbied legislators and told anyone who would listen how important it was to keep the lab in Albany.

It paid off.

“Having a new state-of-the-art facility with additional work space, ‘clean space’ and proper ventilation is critical for the important work these scientists perform,” Comanzo said.

“And having it located in Albany is vital to the timely receipt of food samples.”

Albany is centrally located between the western areas of the state, where many of the dairy samples come from and close to New York City where a large number of other samples originate.

The new three-story, 70,000-square-foot food lab will be located approximately 100 yards from the existing laboratory.

State-of-the-art
Food chemist Bob Sheridan is eager to begin work in the new, modern facility.
“It will make our jobs a lot easier,” Sheridan said.

“We are constantly battling poor working conditions in our current facility such as inefficient power and inadequate temperature control.”

According to Sheridan and others who work at the lab, chemists once had to shovel snow off a lab bench after snow drifts came through the ceiling.

“Our current building was built in 1963,” said senior food bacteriologist Brian Sauders.
“The nature of the work we do has evolved in that time and the complexity of the testing has increased dramatically.”

Last year alone, scientists performed approximately 140,000 analyses on more than 19,000 samples of food, beverages, animal feeds, fertilizer and lime.

The analyses were part of regulatory surveillance programs, foodborne-illness-outbreak investigations, consumer complaints, and investigations of suspected food adulteration.

“A new lab will allow us to expand our testing capability while increasing our efficiency and taking advantage of the latest diagnostic technology,” Sauders said.

The new facility will provide the added capability of testing food, beverages and animal feed for select agents through biosafety level 3 and chemical terrorism laboratory programs, which are lacking in the current facility.

The new lab is still in the design stage. The state plans to break ground for it within a year. Construction is expected to be completed within 18 months.