The Orangetown Planning Board voted Wednesday night to require a data center company to go through an environmental review before moving ahead with plans to expand its footprint -- a process the company had wanted to avoid.
DataBank, which already operates an 145-megawatt data center in Orangeburg, Orangetown, referred to as Phase 1, next to Lake Tappan, wants to build another data center, called Phase 2, which the company scaled back to half the size of the first in the face of public pushback.
Before Wednesday's public hearing began, the Planning Board voted to require Dallas-based DataBank to go through an environmental review known as SEQRA, and told the company, “you’ve got a lot of work to do.”
During the public hearing, dozens of Orangetown residents spoke about the risks of having a data center next to their backup water supply, Lake Tappan, the nuisance they say the existing data centers in Orangeburg already cause, and the growing dangers of AI.
Orangeburg is already home to several data centers owned by Bloomberg, JP Morgan Chase, DataBank and others.
Before the Planning Board voted, representatives for DataBank said they wanted to counter lots of “misinformation.”
The representatives, led by attorney Lino J. Sciarretta with Bleakley Platt & Schmidt, explained the company is not planning to build a new substation, in response to concerns that the datacenters would require more energy.
DataBank said they would not be using water from Lake Tappan because their water usage was a closed-loop system.
DataBank representatives also addressed an eagle's nest potentially being affected by the site, saying the rumored nest had been destroyed in a storm. But Tom Warren on the Planning Board countered, “the Eagle’s nest is back,” and said DataBank would have to monitor it.
