Fran Caracappa has many concerns about the possibilty of bringing a one-gigawatt datacenter to her home of East Fishkill one day.
“East Fishkill is a town basically on well water and we sit on aquifers,” she said. “So the idea really is how much water would be used, where would the water come from? The heat that’s generated?”
Although the East Fishkill Town Board says the project wasn’t in front of them yet, at a meeting, the board unanimously approved a three-year moratorium on data centers.
“A moratorium gives us time,” said East Fishkill Town Supervisor Nicholas D’Alessandro. “It gives us a time out for us to say, let’s review everything. Time to study the infrastructure impacts the environmental impacts. Time to hear from the experts.”
It’s a route more communities in New York are taking while they try to determine what kind of effect on these facilities would have on public health, water and the electric grid.
Meanwhile, there’s a one-year statewide moratorium that passed the state legislature but has not yet been delivered to the governor. Assemblymember Sarahanna Shrestha was a co-sponsor on it.
“We are also looking at land use and water quality issues that we are already seeing in other states where these data centers are starting to pop up,” she said.
The assemblymember says during the state’s one-year moratorium, research will be gathered to get a better idea of the impacts these data centers will have. She adds that she’d like to have seen a longer statewide moratorium but that won’t prevent communities like East Fishkill from passing their own.
“But there’s nothing preventing localities from doing a local decision to have a moratorium for a longer time,” Shrestha said. “If a town wants to go for three years, I highly recommend that they should.”
Caracappa, who’s also running for county legislature, calls this a non-partisan issue.
“People have lived here for some time and they don’t want their property levels to diminish because of the fact we have this huge data center here in East Fishkill,” she said.
The company behind the proposed project in East Fishkill, Treetop Companies, did not immediately return a request for comment.