[This speech was delivered at the November 15th, 2005 scoping hearing on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Columbia expansion proposal]

My name is Mark Levine. I'm actually a member of Community Board #12, but I'm here because, if Columbia wants us to trust them on the Manhattanville expansion, I think we have the right to ask how they behaved on other recent expansions in Upper Manhattan.

Columbia owned real estate from not only its main campus but all the way up to the tip of Manhattan Island on 218th Street, and it included at least one major expansion project which has been underway for a decade and a half at 168th Street. That's the hospital, which is the Audubon Biotech Center. I've been involved in that project and there are some key lessons that we have to take away from it to look at Manhattanville.

I'm sorry to say that in at least two critical fronts the news is not good and there is cause for concern. The first is a pattern Columbia has of reneging on the very promises that it makes in a community to win its support during the expansion. And the second is what I would call obsession with secrecy in the area that's so critical of safety around biomedical and biotechnical research---a significant amount. The Audubon Biotech Park, as its name would suggest, has a significant amount of that type of activity.

This project won agreement in the community of Washington Heights because of promises of jobs, of internships, of union memberships, of scholarships for careers in the health sciences. But on each of these accounts, after a decade and a half, the record is abysmal. Very few, if any, community members have gotten internships. Very few, if any, community members have gotten union memberships. And today only one-seventh of the promised scholarship money has even been allocated. And, again, we're a decade and a half into this.

So the lesson for Manhattanville is very clear. We must have rock solid promises with built-in, robust enforcement provisions and monitoring. And it has to have the force of law behind them or they are going to renege again as they have uptown. Secondly, on biohazards, we must understand that Columbia has been fined repeatedly by the EPA for mishandling of toxic waste. Despite this fact, they have been granted by the EPA the right to self-audit their compliance with biohazard safety. It seems remarkable to me. And the worst part is this means that information will be taken out of the public domain. We no longer have direct access to the audit of biohazard safety.

This is scary stuff because, as far as we know, Columbia is engaged in anti-bioterrorism work. Does that involve, for example, anthrax spores? We don't know what we don't know. So uptown at Audubon we have demanded full access to the audits and we've been stonewalled. The most we've been offered is a summary in Columbia's own words of its audit, which we consider to be laughably insufficient. And even that has not been delivered despite a year of pressure from the Community Board.

So here again the lesson is clear. We have not been able to trust Columbia on the Audubon project. There's no reason we can trust them here on Manhattanville.