Town Board - Regular Meeting

regular town board meeting, Cicero. 6 o'clock, so we're going to start things off by getting our meeting going. We have three emergency exits, one directly in front of us, one to the left of us, and one to the right of us in case you need it. Please make sure that all electronic devices are silenced during this meeting so we don't get disturbed. And also, let us know if you're having problems hearing at all, especially if we can adjust this to make sure it's going to work. I'd like to thank everybody who is watching here from home, from YouTube as well. We welcome all those people as well. All right, we'd like to start out with the Pledge of Allegiance. Well, here we are. It seems like it's been a month since we met, and actually it has been a month since we met, so it's time to come together and take care of all the business we have. Today, the state fair opened, in case anybody hasn't seen that yet. This is the unofficial end of summer, so to speak. So if you get a chance to go out to the fair and have a good time, please make sure you do. It's always bigger and better. And remember, the New York State Fair is being run by a former town of Cicero employee, Julie Lefebvre. So she is our commissioner. All right. At this point, I'm going to ask for public input on agenda items tonight, not hearing items, but agenda items. If anybody would like to come up and speak, they have up to three minutes. Please approach us and talk for, you've got three minutes to talk, and then we'll go from there. All right. Hear me okay?

Just a couple items. Number 13, the town of Cicero website management agreement. I see that we're going to award that. And you had bids for that, correct?

It looks like there was some bids that went out. Anyone better?

Okay. I like how you did that. You showed all the numbers there. The engineer, the same thing. You had an adoption of resolution for the new master services agreement with the town dated July 29th and the dollar rate. That's number 17. I'm glad you put that in there. But at number 12, there's a new managed service agreement for the resolution that the town board approves and authorize a town supervisor to sign a managed service agreement with JRC Technologies, but it doesn't say how much money it is. You're replacing BOCES for some reason, and then there's no dollar amount of what we're going to be spending with JRC Technologies. For your own information, JRC Technologies is a managed service company. They use cloud services and hyperscale data centers with Microsoft Azure. They deploy Office 365 and stuff for companies, and they use a hyperscale data center. I find it interesting that we have a moratorium on data centers that we're talking about, yet we're going to utilize one for our own infrastructure as we move away from BOCES. My question would be for the board, do we know where the data is going to reside? What data center that they're going to place that in? Is it going to be in New York State? Is it going to be in California? That would be a question I would ask before I'd sign any agreement, considering we're doing a moratorium. We're trying to get a moratorium here in Cicero. Thank you.

Thank you. Would anyone else like to address the board before we get going? All right. Thank you. Come on up. Identify yourself and where you're from. That's OK.

Anyone coming up at the end of the month? Hi, my name's Mike Banks. I live at Lakeshore Road. Lived in the town of Cicero for five years. I've been a resident of Central New York for nearly 60 years in the town of Clay. And I had the fortunate opportunity to be a HOA president of Bayberry Community Association during the Amazon warehouse build. So I've been through every question and everything else, trying to protect our neighbors, et cetera. And All the doom and gloom came forward before the town board, the county, et cetera. Town of Clay was gonna be ruined, Liverpool's gonna be ruined, yet it still stands, and there's a little bit of traffic there now. In fact, they're looking to expand another 235,000 square feet out there. I'm basically here to talk about my opposition to the moratorium on the data centers.

uh i feel it belongs in in the town sir would you like to place that before we're going to have a public hearing on this which i'm sorry they are except for those hearing items which i just said so we'd like to move you if we could move you to that would that be oh okay thank you thanks okay sorry about that it's okay you'll come back i'll be back any additional comments on other items that are not public hearing related items All right. Well, thank you very much. So we'll now move on with the rest of the program.

Abstracts. Move for the adoption of resolution approving abstract number 29 of 2026, dated 7-22-2026. Abstract number 30 of 2026, dated 7-29-2026. Abstract 31 of 2026, dated 8-5-2026. Abstract number 32 of 2026, dated 8-12-2026. And abstract number 33 of of 2026, dated 8-19-2026. Second.

Okay. Board comments on anything on the abstracts that we need to talk about?

I'm just going to state my usual, that I will be voting on the abstracts, excluding all National Grid items. So noted.

Any additional comments? Okay. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Abstentions? Motion is adopted. Okay. All right. Let me, we're double teaming this here. Continuation of the public hearing to consider the following proposed local law regarding temporary moratorium prohibiting any zone change or special permit applications related to the establishment of large scale data centers. I would like to move to waive the reading of the local notice, which had been printed and published at the proper time. Do I have a second to waive the reading? Second. OK, thank you. A call for a voice vote. All in favor of waiving the reading, say aye. Aye. Opposed? It is adopted. OK. The town board meeting held on July 22, the public hearing we left open. And we are now going to open the public hearing at 6.08 PM. 6.06 PM, sorry. So you'd be reading that in the duration, right?

No, this is to approve or deny. We're not going to approve or deny.

Okay, so approve or deny this. Okay, so now we're going to be calling the, I'm sorry, the open hearing. We just want to make sure we get this right. Please identify yourself and speak out.

I'll speak as loud as I can, which is generally not a problem. My name is Mike Banks. I live on Lake Shore Road, and as I said earlier, I've lived in Cicero for five years and in central New York for over 60 years. And my opinion is to not approve this moratorium. I feel that there's data centers can be used in the town of Cicero at some point in the right area. Obviously, it's not a carte blanche. There's going to be a lot of research done on it. And unlike other towns around us, they pretty much shut the door for up to a year, including the state of New York. But that's a whole nother story. Cicero's right in the center of central New York and right near the Micron plant. They're investing $250 billion in a semiconductor plant. I don't have to go too far into that. I think we all know about that. One thing about these data centers, one concern is the power, okay? I think the town of Cicero should learn from what's been going on across the country, one of them being the state of Texas, who approved these data centers, and now we're finding out they're going to be short on power, electricity, infrastructure, and that's something that should be obviously monitored in this town and in this state. We also have a National Grid substation on Brewerton Road that can be updated, upgraded, not by the town of Cicero, but by any of these companies coming in. Also, if upgrades are needed, the company should make that, as I just stated. The economic benefits will be quite significant to the area. There's going to be jobs. And most importantly, for all of us here, those of us who live in the town of Cicero, millions of dollars in property taxes, school taxes, et cetera, to be reinvested into the area and not having to raise our taxes anymore. Thank you very much. Knock on wood there. Also, I would definitely oppose any pilot programs. There's other towns in the area who put up solar panel farms with pilot programs, and they shot themselves in the foot, in my opinion. There'd be hundreds of construction jobs, if not more. Ongoing operations would require well-paying jobs for maintenance people, as well as people actually working there. And the people who come here to work at these data centers will be spending their money here as well. Modern data centers... The issue's been the sound, okay? It makes noise. It'd be humming all night. We live in a town that has an airport, okay? So we've got a pretty noisy situation over there. We could also place it over in that area. There's industrial areas. Obviously, any data center, in my opinion, of course, would go in an industrial area. As far as the cooling goes, a lot of these cooling units are self-contained, and they recycle the water. Plus, we live in such a warm climate, nine months of the year, that they could pump in air from outside to cool things down. They power everything that we use today, phones, computers, this guy over here. We're on Zoom. I mean, it's powering everything that we're using here tonight. And that's basically, in a nutshell, I feel that it would be terrible if we missed out on an opportunity by basically closing the door on even looking at data centers coming in here, at least investigating them, and it'd be a terrible opportunity for Tana Cicero to miss out on. Thank you.

Thank you. Would anyone else like to speak for or against?

Mike Boyle, Hebrides Trail. Again, I'll parrot again what I said the last time I was here a month ago. I'm a subject matter expert in regards to data centers. I've done this for 30 years of my life. I know there's a lot of misinformation that goes out in the media. That's just a fact. Microsoft and other companies are looking to do behind the meter power for their own facilities. It's a faster uptime for them when it comes to data centers as opposed to relying on the national grids of the world to get the infrastructure in place. Many different companies like Facebook, I mean, they have huge data centers, like in Louisiana, they worked with the state two years ago to get it in place, and now we're two years behind, okay? Other things that the data center, Mr. Banks made some good points. Data centers can be cooled without massive amounts of water, immersion cooling. Multi-phase cooling, easy to implement, higher cost to the data center provider, but at the same time, too, long-term benefit, the ROI is better. As far as the acoustics that I hear, people talk about the noise and buzzing, immersive cooling stops all that. That's another side benefit and pro. Once it's submerged in the liquid, the noise isn't there. It's harder to do the upgrades, but that's the data service provider's issue. That's not the town of Cicero's issue. As far as the acoustics, you can also do in barrier walls and things of that nature to keep things quieter. He made a comment about the airport. I thought that was funny because that's where the Sage data center was. The original 1958 data center for NORAD and that big concrete building. And guess what they had in there? A data center. That was where the birth of the internet happened. So that actually had two major mainframe computers that were uptime and 96% of the time. And they collected all that data. OK, for NORAD. They actually had a button there that could push the Atlas missiles in the Adirondacks to fire at the Soviet Union at one time. Data center. OK, so I know you're looking for a moratorium. The state of New York had already put a moratorium on after local towns did. We're deciding to do that after the fact. They limited the size of the moratorium in New York for 50 megawatts of power. So what you have here in a moratorium doesn't outline the size of the data center you want to put a moratorium on. I don't know if it's going to mirror what New York State has put out there. We are behind the eight ball right now. If you put a moratorium on, that means the permitting application, the discussion with power from these data center companies will not take place. This is a midterm election issue, in my opinion. I think after November, come January, December, that moratorium is going to get lifted. We have some very large data centers in New York City. Google has the biggest square footage one that's located in Manhattan. AT&T has got a massive data center in a building that looks like the Sage data center without any windows down in New York City. So my point is they have data centers in New York. The question is, why don't they want them upstate? Micron is going to have a, you know, a pen a byte data warehouse sitting in that property in clay. They're going to use massive amounts of water in order to do that plant to make the chips. Again, I'll say it again. I find it interesting. They're going to make the chips that go into the servers that Dell and HP and everybody makes, and then they're going to take those servers and not be able to put them in a data center in New York, right around the corner here. I find that kind of a bit of a hypocrisy with the state that they want the $100 billion investment from the chip manufacturer, but they don't want the chips to go into servers that go into data centers in New York. That's all I got to say.

Thank you. Would anyone else like to speak for or against this before the board has the discussion? OK. So we're going to have board comments. Members of the board, what say you?

Well, as I stated last meeting, and we kind of kicked the can on this, held it open until this meeting, I wanted more information. And in the last meeting that we had, Mr. Boyle offered to provide extensive information to us individually if we wanted to meet with him. And a thought that I had was, was wouldn't it be great if we had a town workshop meeting? So another public meeting, but not one where we're conducting business. It's not a public hearing, but it's a meeting for us. And since it's open to the public, the public could also come and hear these learn about data centers. And to be fair, you know, obviously, Mr. Boyle is very in favor of data centers and has lots of upside. So What if we brought in somebody else that had the counterpoint argument so that we could hear both sides? I read something somewhere. There's a professor up at SU that recently gave a talk on data centers. So I made the suggestion that why don't we schedule that before we get to this meeting, see if we can get something set up and or after this meeting and learn. that idea fell on deaf ears, unfortunately. So now here we are again just talking about doing a moratorium. And in here, we talk about after the moratorium, that's exactly what we're going to be doing anyway, is putting a committee together, gathering information. Why not be transparent and open now? There's already a moratorium in place, so this is legislatively duplicative. I am not in favor of moving forward with this.

Counselor Daniels, was it? Did it fall on deaf ears? Did it really fall on deaf ears? I believe... that Councilor Pardee tried to set up that workshop.

Yeah, so to bring the key word that you mentioned, Councilor Daniels, was transparent. That was one of the things that I tried to set up with you, Mr. Supervisor, and you were dead set against having a meeting with Mr. Boyle to discuss this and open it up to the public, and I think that's a bad decision. And tonight, I would like to make a motion for us to get with mr boyle and do a special workshop after one of our meetings preferably if he's available the next one and then you know we'll coordinate with another individual and we will do a um workshop after the meeting open to the public do i have a second i would have second hold on i Should be allowed to speak on that. Well, no, because there's a motion on the floor. Well, there's not. We have comments. We're not.

You can have a motion, but you have to also address the hearing itself. This hearing is basically an extension of another hearing. You wanted to, Counselor, you wanted to have another workshop, which essentially was another hearing on top of a hearing that was suspended for a hearing. Okay? Okay. Playing romantics with those. I said, well, I am, but I said that we know enough about this to have someone come in and make a presentation on one side or the other was going to just extend a hearing upon a hearing upon a hearing for essentially, in this case, one person's view. Okay?

No, I suggested a second side. This thing, I guess, there's two sides. We're looking to have both sides.

I disagree, and that's why I said that we would not have that. I sat in that office with you and had that conversation, sir. I also said Mr. Boyle could talk to us individually.

And circumvent open meeting law?

No, no, no, one-on-one. He offered to talk to each one of us individually, and I reached out to him and said, when can you meet with me? And he said he would get back to me, and I never heard from him.

Absolutely.

Sure.

Here, get up. Go to the mic so everybody can hear it so it can be transparent.

In all fairness, we did have that discussion, and I said, well, Mr. Pardee was looking to do a workshop, and you said that you weren't interested in doing the workshop because it was in the middle of the open moratorium. I gave you dates and sent you a bunch of dates in September that I would be available at any time. My view, and as I communicated to Mr. Pardee and you, was I didn't think it was fair for somebody to ask a question, especially a board member, not hear the question, that was asked and then my response. It would be better to have a group to do that so that I could hear the question, give the response and everybody hears the response and they heard it the same moment as opposed to hearing it differently maybe in an individual meeting. And that way you'd have a record of it, it could be recorded, you could go back and refer to it. That was what I was trying to accomplish from an education standpoint. But if I can meet with you guys individually, but I don't think that that's in the best interest of the town, and that means instead of doing a two-hour meeting, I've got to do eight to ten hours.

It's not, but it was in the best interest of the town when you offered it.

Oh, no, I've offered this information for free.

Right, to meet with us, that was the best interest of the town. You said you would meet with us individually, and now all of a sudden that's not the best interest of the town.

Well, sure, but then I asked Mr. Pardee, and his recommendation was he wanted to do something different, so...

Instead of going down that back and forth, back and forth, we have a clear display of what open conversation does that occurred here tonight, because Mr. Boyle was done speaking, but as we had further conversation and more questions were asked, Mr. Boyle, based on the questions that were asked in the conversation, had more comments. That's what happens when you meet as a group. You have discussions, questions and answers, create other questions and answers, which is in the best interest for gathering the knowledge that we should have and we should obtain on making a decision on anything related to the town.