This is an op-ed from Ken Wolkin, a Lansing resident and president of FLX Strong, which is involved in litigation against Town of Lansing Zoning Board of Appeals. To submit opinion pieces for consideration, please send them to Managing Editor Jimmy Jordan at jjordan@ithacavoice.org.
During the March 18th Lansing Town Board meeting, Dean Shea, the chair of the Planning Board, took umbrage with the Town Board’s appointment of an alternate member to the Planning Board, Aimee Caffrey. Prior to being selected to join the Planning Board, Caffrey expressed concerns regarding TeraWulf’s proposal to build a massive AI data center on the shores of Cayuga Lake. Shea believes these comments should disqualify Caffrey from serving on the Planning Board. Setting aside the irony that the arrhythmic cadence of Shea’s prepared statement sounds like an AI overview, I wish to address the implications of his comments.
First, there is a glaring double standard at play in his remarks. Caffrey made her comments as a Lansing resident, prior to being appointed to the Planning Board. Last year, the Chair of the Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA) publicly expressed favorable opinions of TeraWulf’s development intentions on multiple occasions; there is no public record of Shea taking issue with those statements. We can only infer that Shea finds it acceptable for Town officials to publicly express pro-development bias, while finding it unacceptable for the Planning Board to include any residents who might critically question a proposed development.
More insidious than this double standard is the assumption underlying it: that the largest development project proposed in Lansing in decades is not only inherently good, but unquestionable – and that anybody who dares to do so is heretical. This assumption obscures the fact that unconditionally advocating for a very large development project – whether for the sake of jobs, tax revenue, or any other supposed “good” – is itself a partial & political position.
The fact that the political and legal norms at play discourage town officials from making public expressions that critically question such development proposals should give us pause. We ought to question the role that impartiality supposedly plays in our legal and political processes, particularly when these expectations are invoked and enforced only when someone questions the logic and machinery of very large development. If publicly stating, “I’m not so sure this is a good thing for our town” is viewed as a transgression that disqualifies someone from holding a public position, we do not have a system that serves us. Rather, we end up with a municipal decision-making process that actively conceals the deeply political, ‘development-at-all-costs’ assumptions of some of those decision makers.
In Lansing, then, we have a Planning Board official brazenly admonishing a colleague for engaging in constitutionally protected speech critical of AI data center development, along with a ZBA that effectively re-wrote the zoning code to allow TeraWulf to proceed through a newly fashioned side door. And yet, all around the state and country, municipalities are taking bold actions of another sort: instituting moratoria on data center development (e.g., Oneonta), moving to ban data center development altogether (e.g., Dryden), while State Assemblymember Anna Kelles is co-sponsoring a statewide moratorium bill led by a groundswell of advocacy by grassroots organizations like FLX Strong, CLEAN, and No Data Center FLX.
The risks and harms of AI data centers are well-documented. It’s up to all of us to ensure that our Town decision-making committees contain members willing to bring those risks to light.
