Florida County Picks New Site for Scripps

The Florida site of the Scripps Research Institute will be located in Jupiter, Fla., after Palm Beach County commissioners on Valentine's Day voted by a narrow margin to locate the biotech institute in the northern end of the county on the campus of Florida Atlantic University, in an urban area some five miles from the Atlantic Ocean, near Interstate 95, and the Florida Marlins spring training home.

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) had lobbied for a location in Boca Raton, in southern Palm Beach County, hoping to recreate an atmosphere for biotech R&D like that surrounding Scripps in La Jolla, Calif. The state and the county have pledged some $600 million to this effort, which echoes the biotech bonanza hopes of economic development authorities throughout the country, and indeed throughout the world.

A 2002 Brookings Institute study found that 83 percent of local development agencies have biotech among their top two priorities and 41 states have biotech programs. Still, for the wanna-be hubs, the bottom 42 of the top 51 urban areas in the US -- outside of Boston, San Francisco, San Diego, Washington, and Raleigh-Durham -- the risk and expense of creating a biotech hub de novo may never produce a profit, with the real estate adage of location, location, location, mattering most.

Still, Palm Beach County is an attractive place to live.

The county commissioners' decision overturned a 2003 decision by Scripps to place the facility on Mecca Farms, a 2,000-acre former orange grove located adjacent to the Florida Everglades. The Mecca Farms project was stopped last year after environmental groups successfully got a federal court to order construction halted until the completion of an environmental impact statement, leaving the farm bulldozed of its orange trees and in the hands of the county, which had already spent $60 million to buy it.

Apparently, according to news reports, an $8 million guarantee of funding for minority programs, provided the voting edge the proposition needed to pass the commission.

The new facility, on land the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel quoted as valued at some $230,000 an acre, is expected to open in 2008 with all land and construction costs, estimated at nearly $175 million by the newspaper, borne by the county. Scripps already has some 100 scientists working in the area in temporary laboratories.

The town of Jupiter has erected a website, the Biotech Research and Development Opportunities page, which gives a prospectus of 4.6 million square feet of potential R&D sites in the area.