Excerpt:

Both Alameda and Richmond will do just about anything to be chosen as the location for the second campus of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, including displaying billboards and lawn signs all over their cities to make for stronger advertising campaigns.

The lab will be building a second campus to complement its original campus up in the Berkeley Hills, and the cities are two of six finalists that are competing for the top spot, after a seven month search that began in January. Approximately 20 percent of the lab’s facilities are situated across Emeryville, Berkeley and Walnut Creek — the future 2 million-gross-square-foot campus will consolidate these facilities, which include the Joint Genome Institute, the Joint BioEnergy Institute and the Life Sciences Lab.