Commercial Truck Insurance in Bainbridge, GA

Caitlyn Stroh-Page

The long-awaited establishment of Wawa in Georgia appears to be imminent.

The popular convenience store chain has a location selected in Bainbridge, in southwest Georgia, and submitted proposals to the planning commission earlier this year.

According to the tax assessor's office, a permit was granted in February for "landload site work for proposed Wawa gas station" at 1401 Tallahassee Highway. Google Maps imagery shows land clearing and prep work for new construction as of May 2023.

A proposed plan submitted in February to the city of Bainbridge indicated that construction was slated to be complete by fall 2023, however the Bainbridge location is not yet listed on Wawa's website as a "coming soon."

"We can’t confirm specific locations or timelines at this time," Wawa public relations manager Lori Bruce said in an email. "We can, however, say that we are actively looking into and planning for potential sites for new Wawa stores in Georgia markets."

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Wawa did not specify how many Georgia stores it is considering. There is a proposal for a Wawa in Pooler, near Savannah, as well.

Wawa, which was founded in Pennsylvania and has more than 1,000 locations nationwide, is largely known for its food items, specifically hoagies.

According to a 2022 press release, the plan was to open the first Wawa store in Georgia in 2024 with a potential of up to 20 additional stores entering the state depending on the success of the first store.

“Our continued expansion plans will allow us to reach more customers with our quality fresh food, beverages and community support friends and neighbors,” said John Poplawski, Vice President of Real Estate for Wawa, at the time. “Expanding to Georgia is a natural extension from the Florida Panhandle and we look forward to serving more communities along the East Coast.”

Update (January 25, 2024): PETA has learned that members of the Decatur County Board of Commissioners held an illegal meeting during which they voted to approve a 20-year tax abatement scheme worth at least $58 million to lure a dangerous company into town to construct the largest monkey prison in the U.S.

The public was given no advance notice of the December 11 meeting, violating Georgia’s Open Meetings Act. The move means that the vote to approve the sweetheart deal to attract a monkey warehouse capable of holding 30,000 primates is invalid. A new vote hasn’t been scheduled—but it could be.

PETA attended the Decatur County Board of Commissioners meeting on January 23 along with 150 residents, whose message was loud and clear: They don’t want the waste, the noise, the disease risk, or the cruelty in their county. Stay tuned for more.

Please TAKE ACTION below to keep the heat on public officials.

Original Post:

PETA has discovered that officials in a tiny Georgia town and surrounding county have agreed to cough up more than $58 million in incentives, hand over 200 acres of public land, and even design community college courses specifically tailored to one company’s needs in a bid to secure the construction of the largest monkey prison in the U.S., capable of holding twice as many monkeys as there are city residents.

We need your help to persuade city officials that this is a bad deal for both monkeys and residents.

TAKE ACTION

What We’re Up Against

Former executives of Charles River Laboratories, Envigo, and Covance recently formed a deceptively named company—Safer Human Medicine Inc.—with plans to build a colossal monkey-holding and -breeding facility in Bainbridge, Georgia, a town of fewer than 15,000 residents, located 40 miles north of Tallahassee, Florida.

The planned facility is gigantic. If built, it would be the largest monkey-holding facility outside Asia. The next-largest U.S. facility imprisons about 7,000 monkeys. The proposed Bainbridge operation would hold 30,000. That’s two monkeys for every resident of the city.

If carried out, the proposal—codenamed “Liberty,” without a shred of irony—would inflict nearly incalculable damage on already endangered monkey populations worldwide, risk spreading disease throughout the country, and spell ecological disaster for the residents of surrounding Decatur County.

How Did This Happen?

In August 2023, company representatives solicited bids from towns in several states interested in hosting its monkey prison, which would import, breed, and cage monkeys destined for experiments in laboratories throughout the U.S.

Bainbridge and Decatur County were among the bidders. Here’s what they promised:

They won the bid. Small wonder, with that stack of goodies.

What Does This Mean?

For perspective, the total 2024 expenses for Bainbridge—including its payroll and every service the city government provides—is $43 million. It has promised a single company 36% more than the city spends to operate for an entire year, just so that it will set up shop.

The Bainbridge city budget is supported by a total of $8.8 million in property taxes from all residential and commercial property, according to the 2024 spending plan. The agreement to build a monkey prison supplying laboratories with thinking, feeling individuals to torment and kill gives away more tax revenue to a single company than the city could collect from its residents in nearly seven full years.

Meanwhile, residents are expected to continue paying full freight. That’s a terrible deal.

Heard enough? Jump down to the bottom of this page to TAKE ACTION immediately. Or keep reading to find out more about this calamitous proposal.

Potential Spread of Disease

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warns that imported primates—especially long-tailed and rhesus macaques—significantly threaten public health. One or both of these species would be imprisoned at the proposed facility.

PETA has obtained CDC documents showing that in recent years, there’s been a significant uptick in the arrival in the U.S. of monkeys infected with Burkholderia pseudomallie, tuberculosis, malaria, and other deadly pathogens and diseases. Life-threatening pathogens and diseases such as the herpes B virus, Ebola-like viruses, tuberculosis, and others that monkeys pick up overseas can spread to humans and other animals. Although monkeys brought into the U.S. are supposed to be screened, these diseases often go undetected.

Environmental Pollution

The proposed facility would generate massive amounts of biological waste on a scale never before seen in the U.S.

According to the company’s own projections, when the facility reaches full capacity, it would generate 444,000 gallons of wastewater a day. That’s nearly enough monkey saliva, feces, urine, blood, and other bodily fluids to fill an Olympic-size pool, every day—all of it potentially harboring pathogens.

That’s also 20 times the amount of waste generated by the next-largest monkey-holding facility. Located in Alice, Texas, it has struggled mightily to keep up with its waste, trucking away overflow loads every day.

Wildlife, including birds and insects, could consume soil and water contaminated by the vile facility, increasing the risk of passing parasites, viruses, and bacteria to humans. Mosquitoes feeding in the area could transmit malaria or other diseases between the monkeys and humans. And large colonies of captive monkeys have been implicated in local parasite transmission cycles for Chagas disease.

Monkeys Escape

It’s alarmingly common for monkeys to escape captivity. In Texas, four baboons escaped from the Texas Biomedical Research Institute in 2018 and were spotted by drivers on the highway, and several chimpanzees had escaped earlier from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. A monkey who escaped from the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Georgia was never found.

And there’s more:

Bad Actors

The leaders of Safer Human Medicine are former executives from Envigo, Charles River, and Covance, companies that profit from animal misery and are in charge of facilities that have faced federal citations for repeated violations of the most basic federal animal welfare regulations.

Jim Harkness, CEO Harkness was chief operating officer at Envigo, which breeds, procures, and sells animals, including monkeys, for experimentation. He was in charge of animal research models when the company’s beagle-breeding facility in Virginia was raided by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), which found and seized hundreds of dogs in acute distress:

David Johst, President In 2019, Johst retired as executive vice president of Charles River Laboratories, which has a sordid history of violating animal welfare regulations and damaging fragile ecosystems. It’s currently under federal investigation by the DOJ, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS), and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission related to the alleged illegal smuggling of long-tailed macaques, an endangered species, from Asia to sell to U.S. laboratories. Charles River is also attempting to set up a similar monkey facility in Brazoria County, Texas, where the county commissioners recently passed a unanimous resolution voicing their and their constituents’ opposition to the proposed project.

Kurt Derfler, Chief Operating Officer Derfler retired as executive director of nonhuman primate operations at Charles River in May 2023. During his tenure, the FWS denied entry to more than 1,000 long-tailed macaques allegedly illegally imported by the company into the U.S. from Cambodia.

Stop the Proposed Monkey Prison

Laboratory experimentation is among the chief drivers of monkey extinction around the world, and facilities such as the one proposed in Bainbridge contribute to the problem and inflict a magnitude of suffering that’s nearly unimaginable.

Instead of pouring money into more pointless experiments on animals, resources should be redirected to fund superior, animal-free methods that could actually produce effective treatments for people who desperately need them.

Please TAKE ACTION today and let Bainbridge city councilors know the proposed monkey prison is a terrible deal for monkeys and residents.

Using our sample letter below, please e-mail them today. You can copy and paste the following block of e-mail addresses in the “To” field of your e-mail to contact the entire committee with one message:

edwardr@bainbridgecity.com, keenan.adams@bainbridgecity.com, glennieb@bainbridgecity.com, kreggc@bainbridgecity.com, roslynp@bainbridgecity.com, sylviaw@bainbridgecity.com, donw@bainbridgecity.com, chrish@bainbridgecity.com

Elena Barrera

Dozens of Bainbridge residents gathered at Tuesday's city council meeting upset about their soon-to be neighbors: thousands and thousands of monkeys.

The Georgia city — just 40 miles from Florida's capital city and county — is planning to build the nation's largest monkey warehouse where up to 30,000 primates will be bred and housed.

Concerns about monkeys running wild, escaping during a hurricane, spread of disease, environmental impact and how the monkeys would be treated were all brought before the city leaders.

"This monkey breeding business is an all-time low," a Bainbridge resident said. "Money is one heck of a drug."

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals also spoke out about the facility's inception in hopes of convincing the city council to shut the plans down before construction ever begins.

"At full capacity, the proposed facility in Bainbridge would produce more than 440,000 gallons of wastewater a day—enough feces, urine, saliva, and other fluids to nearly fill an Olympic-size swimming pool every day," PETA said in a press release. "This poses a major risk of environmental damage to nearby land."

Bainbridge Mayor Edward Reynolds pointed out Tuesday night that the development isn't a city project. But the city, alongside other local government entities, voted to approve a 100% tax abatement for the facility's first 10 years that will be reduced by 9% each year until fully taxable, according to the Bainbridge Post-Searchlight. Reynolds said this was the only time the city was involved.

Safer Human Medicine, the company building the massive monkey breeding ground, wrote an open letter to residents to address community pushback. The company emphasized that the facility is "strictly an animalhusbandry facility meant to house and care for primates," and won't be used for research.

The company said the monkeys will be housed in state-of-the-art facilities, provided with toys and kept in groups to foster playtime and interaction.

"The welfare of our animals will always come first, and we will provide them with the care they deserve," the company wrote.

BAINBRIDGE, Ga. (AP) — Some local residents and an animal-rights group are protesting plans for a monkey-breeding facility in southwest Georgia.

Opponents recently urged the Bainbridge City Council to block plans by a company called Safer Human Medicine to build a $396 million complex that would eventually hold up to 30,000 long-tailed macaques that would be sold to universities and pharmaceutical companies for medical research. The company says it plans to employ up to 263 workers.

Council members didn’t directly address the concerns at a meeting Jan. 17, WALB-TV reported.

Safer Human Medicine is led by executives who formerly worked for two other companies that provide animals for medical testing. One of those companies, Charles River Laboratories, came under investigation last year for obtaining wild monkeys that were smuggled from Cambodia. The monkeys were falsely labeled as bred in captivity, as is required by U.S. rules, federal prosecutors have alleged. The company suspended shipments from Cambodia.

Charles River had proposed a similar facility in Brazoria County, Texas, south of Houston, but it has been stalled by local opposition.

The Bainbridge facility would provide a domestic source of monkeys to offset imports, the company said. Medical researchers use the animals to test drugs before human trials, and to research infectious diseases and chronic conditions like brain disorders.

“In the aftermath of the pandemic, we learned the hard way that our researchers in the U.S. need reliable access to healthy primates to develop and evaluate the safety of potentially life-saving drugs and therapies for you, your family, your friends, and neighbors,” Safer Human Medicine wrote in an open letter to the Bainbridge community. “Many of the medicines in your medical cabinets today would not exist without this essential medical research and without these primates, research comes to a halt.”

But People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and some local residents say they fear the possibility of monkeys escaping into the community along with other harms.

“They’re an invasive species and 30,000 of them, we’d just be overrun with monkeys,” Ted Lee, a local resident, told WALB-TV.

Lisa Jones-Engel, PETA’s science advisor on primate experimentation, said there’s a risk that local people will be exposed to pathogens and diseases.

“In a bid to attract a few jobs — many of them low-paying and risking exposure to zoonotic diseases — city and county officials have rolled out the red carpet for an unethical plan by some questionable characters that could spell ecological disaster and potentially spark the next pandemic,” Jones-Engel said in a statement last week.

“PETA urges Bainbridge officials to withdraw their support and shut down this project before a shovel hits the dirt,” she wrote.

The company and local officials said the nonprofit and community’s concerns are baseless. Rick McCaskill, executive director of the Development Authority of Bainbridge & Decatur County, said risks are low because veterinarians and trained staff will be working with the monkeys.

“There are going to be a lot of monkeys, there’s no question. We got more cows in the county then we got people too, and we got more chickens in the county then we have people too,” McCaskill said.

Local officials in December agreed to property tax breaks for the project — waiving them for the first 10 years and then gradually decreasing tax breaks until they end after 20 years.

Photo: A long-tailed macaque, the species that would be raised in the Georgia site in Saraburi Province, north of Bangkok. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit, File)

Copyright 2024 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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BAINBRIDGE, Ga. (WALB) - The company behind the country’s largest monkey facility in Bainbridge said it plans to move forward and won’t be deterred by what they call misinformation in the community.

On Friday, Feb. 2, the Bainbridge Decatur County Development Authority voted to take back its support for the monkey facility — that support includes the tax incentives that were previously approved.

“It doesn’t mean that those incentives are unwound. So we’re going to continue to move forward as planned,” said Jim Harkness, Safer Human Medicine CEO. “I think right now, we still think that this is an important project. The timelines are, I would say tight because it’s a critical need for researchers in the United States.”

Safer Human Medicine, the company over the primate facility, says it understands the flood of concerns coming from Bainbridge residents. They say they’ve been in and out of town to hear those concerns and clear up any misinformation.

Many Bainbridge neighbors have not been shy about their opposition to the facility — saying the facility will bring environmental impacts and unsafe living conditions.

Kurt Derfler, Safer Human Medicine’s COO, said the facility will be a state-of-the-art building that can withstand weather impacts.

“Our buildings are engineered to withstand a direct category 4 hurricane hit. Additionally, our buildings allow air to pass through which further reduces the risk of the roof being taken off,” he said.

As far as the environmental impact, Derfler said there won’t be any discharge of waste from the site. He says all of the waste will go directly to the municipal wastewater treatment plant in the city.

David and Donna Barber, who live just 400 feet away from the facility, said they still have concerns about the smell and noise from the monkeys.

“I don’t think anybody would want 30,000 monkeys next door,” David said.

Harkness said it will take 20 years before 30,000 monkeys will be in town.

“So in the first few years, we’re only looking at a few thousand primates on site. So a much smaller operation,” he said.

Safer Human Medicine said overall, they want everyone to keep bringing their questions to them.

“We have nothing to hide. We’ve been very transparent about who we are and what we’re doing. We just want to share with people and help them alleviate their concerns and understand how we can benefit them and the community as a whole,” Harness said.

David said he won’t stop speaking out against the facility until it’s shut down.

“We’re not going to stop. We’re not going away and we’re not going to give up,” he said.

At this point, the project is still in progress, but there will be a public hearing scheduled at a later date with a judge to discuss the legalities around the tax incentives.

“We need to get all of the legal elements resolved but everything is largely ready to go. So, as soon as that’s done, it’ll probably be about 6 months from the time we start construction to the time we’re fully operational,” Harkness said.

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