Bainbridge ponders: How many monkeys equal prosperity?

Are you bent out of shape about that self-storage place they’re building up the street or the manufacturing plant they’ve just announced down the road? What if economic development came in the form of 30,000 monkeys?

To be precise, 30,000 cynomolgus macaques, a Southeast Asian primate considered ideal for medical and scientific research. A company called Safer Human Medicine wants to breed the monkeys on a 200-acre site near Bainbridge for sale to pharmaceutical companies, universities and other facilities doing animal research.

Last month, several city and county boards held a joint meeting to approve what the Development Authority of Bainbridge and Decatur County called “Project Liberty.” It gave Safer Human Medicine a total tax abatement for ten years, followed by a decade of gradual movement toward the company’s total tax obligation to the county.

The facility is projected to bring 263 jobs to the county and, over time, a total investment approaching a half billion dollars. The monkeys, however, are proving to be a hard sell.

Last week, a Bainbridge city council meeting was packed with residents who had lots of concerns about the project. What if the monkeys carried diseases? What if some of them got out? What if there’s a hurricane like the one that came through a few years ago? More fireworks are expected at this week’s meeting.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has voiced strong opposition to what it says would be “the largest monkey-holding facility in the Western Hemisphere.” A facility that size, according to a PETA release, would produce “enough feces, urine, saliva, and other fluids to nearly fill an Olympic-size swimming pool every day.”

The company’s founders responded to some of these criticisms in an open letter in which they emphasized how important it was that U.S. researchers have access to primates for research. They described the planned facility in terms reminiscent of a flier for a daycare center or retirement village: “Animals will be housed in groups so that they can interact and play with one another. We will provide them with toys, opportunities for foraging, and other forms of enrichment. We will supplement their diet with fresh local produce straight from the surrounding community.”

Bainbridge’s monkey dilemma highlights some of the paradoxes of economic development in Georgia. While some might look at rural Georgia and see vast stretches that have declined economically, others see a field of dreams, complete with quasi-governmental organizations to assist them in getting tax breaks.

Bainbridge already has used a total of $39 million in government sweeteners to lure Taurus, a Brazilian-owned gun manufacturer, from its previous location in the Miami area. That deal, finalized in 2019, brought some 300 jobs to the area.

That boost in local manufacturing jobs may have left some residents a little more cautious about how far they’d be willing to go to create more jobs. Bainbridge has a population of less than 15,000, so its local economy doesn’t have to be sustained by an endless supply of new jobs.

The fact that the monkey population could potentially grow to be twice that of the human population has been mentioned more than once since Project Liberty was announced, but Rick McCaskill, executive director of the Development Authority of Bainbridge and Decatur County, dismissed the idea that the county in Georgia’s southwest corner would be overwhelmed by the facility.

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

In a way, it’s not surprising that monkey incarceration might be taking place in a part of the state where private correctional facilities — in other words, human incarceration — have become a problematic part of the local economy. It is a little puzzling how this project came to be called Project Liberty.

In the future, a lot of Georgia communities are going to be faced with choices like those Bainbridge is facing, though likely with fewer monkeys involved.