Council’s plasma center restrictions lead to lawsuit
Albany mayor had called ordinance “unconstitutional”
The development group attempting to build a blood plasma collection center in the Upper Washington Avenue neighborhood has sued the city over an ordinance passed earlier this year that effectively prevented them from opening.
The lawsuit will force the city ’s Common Council to hire an outside attorney because of the back and forth between the council and mayor’s office during the legislative process that raised some of the same issues as the developer’s lawsuit.
Filed on Sept. 17, the lawsuit asks a state Supreme Court judge to overturn the Common Council’s decision to pass an ordinance requiring a 1,000-foot setback for any proposed blood plasma collection center from any church, school or park.
That requirement limited the number of properties within the city the developer would be able to use for the project.
The lawsuit is the fulfillment of a warning that Mayor Kathy Sheehan issued when she vetoed the council’s legislation.
“While I understand the approval of this ordinance by the Common Council was driven by the best of intentions, I have been advised by corporation counsel it is an unconstitutional zoning action with no rational basis in law,” she wrote.
The council promptly overrode her veto at its next meeting.
The council will now have to hire private attorneys to represent it in the proceedings after the city ’s corporation counsel decided it would be a conflict of interest to represent the council along with the city Planning Board and Sheehan.
The city ’s lawyers defended the planning and zoning decisions to the council before the council passed the ordinance and raised them again in Sheehan’s veto messages, said Marisa Franchini, the city ’s corporation counsel.
“Both of these actions raised some of the same issues that the plaintiff is raising here in the lawsuit,” she wrote in a letter to the council’s leadership.
Council members briefly discussed the issue during their caucus session on Monday before going in to executive session to talk about it further.
The project called for CSL Plasma to open an 11,000square-foot blood plasma collection center in the Hannaford Plaza on Central Avenue. Neighbors, led by Councilman Michael O’brien, opposed the project. The project would be similar to a collection center operating in Schenectady.
Plasma collection involves drawing blood from donors, spinning the blood to remove the red blood cells and keeping the remaining liquid, which is mostly water and proteins. That plasma is then used in therapies and medical procedures.
On its website, CSL Plasma says donors can earn up to $400 a month but an average session pays around $30 to $40 an hour, generally paid in prepaid debit cards or gift cards.