SAN ANTONIO – Texas Gov. Rick Perry joined business leaders on Thursday in protesting the decision by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to select a site in Kansas for a new $450 million federal disease laboratory.

DHS chose Kansas State University in Manhattan over a site in San Antonio. The decision is expected to become official next week, after a comment period is completed.

The new lab will study livestock diseases and some of the world's most dangerous biological threats. Other contenders for the lab included sites in Georgia, Mississippi and North Carolina.

Perry and the Texas Bio and Agro-Defense Consortium, a business group, complain that even though the site selection process started in January 2006, DHS gave no indication until February 2008 that financial incentives provided by state and local governments could affect the site selection.

Texas, which has a Legislature that only meets every two years, was not in session last year, unlike the Kansas Legislature, Perry and TBAC wrote in letters to DHS.

"A process that asks states to put together $100 million-plus packages within a month – while some legislatures are not in session to assist with such appropriations – is fundamentally inequitable," Perry said in his letter to DHS.

TBAC Chairman John Kerr called the time limitations "fundamentally unfair."