A public hearing concerning the environmental impacts of a proposed mouse-rearing facility at the University of California, Davis, is scheduled for 7 p.m. Monday, Jan. 29, at the campus's University Club. The facility, to be known as The Jackson Laboratory, JAX West, at UC Davis, will include a 96,000-square-foot building on a 6-acre site near the University Airport, west of the main campus. This will be the first facility established in the West Enterprise Zone, a 44-acre area of campus designated for lease to firms and organizations collaborating with UC Davis researchers. The mouse facility will be leased to The Jackson Laboratory, a private nonprofit research organization, for breeding and maintaining genetically standardized mice used for biomedical studies. Copies of the recently completed Draft Environmental Impact Report on the project can be obtained from the UC Davis Office of Resource Management and Planning, the Yolo County Library, the Vacaville Public Library, and online at http://www.pbo.ucdavis.edu/env/envplan/. The deadline for submitting written comments regarding the project's environmental impact report is 5 p.m. Monday, Feb. 12. Written comments will be included as part of the formal public record and may be sent to John A. Meyer, vice chancellor, Office of Resource Management and Planning, University of California, One Shields Ave., Davis, Calif. 95616. The proposed JAX West facility, to be located on an undeveloped site on Hopkins Road opposite the University Airport, will be a highly sterile building for producing inbred and genetically standardized research mice. It also will be used to distribute such mice to researchers at UC Davis and other West Coast universities and research centers. The building will include rooms for breeding and housing mice, laboratory and administrative space and employee facilities. It will accommodate 300,000 mice and be staffed by approximately 131 employees, mostly animal caretakers. Since preliminary environmental documents were prepared in August, The Jackson Laboratory has requested that the proposed project be evaluated for 6 acres, rather than 5 acres, and for a 96,064-square-foot building, rather than the original 65,000 square feet. Neither change is expected to affect the environmental impacts of the project. UC Davis and The Jackson Laboratory, headquartered in Bar Harbor, Maine, have had an ongoing research collaboration since July 1999. The proposed mouse facility will be the second Jackson Laboratory building on campus. A 10,000-square-foot building, housing up to 20,000 mice, has been in operation at UC Davis since June 2000.