A New Jersey town is changing its policy on a proposed AI data center after a recent council meeting turned violent, with city officials saying they have received death threats over the center.
Andover Mayor Thomas Walsh and Deputy Mayor Christa Gilchrist announced in a joint Facebook video message shared on Saturday, May 9, that the Town Board plans to rescind a controversial ordinance related to the proposed data center project and move forward with the data center ban.
The proposed project would be built on 97 acres of the long-vacant former Newton Airport site at 248 Stickles Pond Road in Andover. According to IBM, an AI data center is “a facility that houses the specific IT infrastructure needed to train, deploy, and deliver AI applications and services. It has advanced compute, network, and storage architectures and energy and cooling capabilities to handle AI workloads.”
Mayor Walsh’s announcement comes two days after disorder broke out inside Hillside Barn on Thursday night, May 7, as residents packed into a room to protest the proposal.
A video clip shared by the Sussex Visibility Brigade on Facebook shows one resident physically struggling with police officers who tried to remove him from the gathering. As officers escorted the man toward the exit, he kicked the door frame and ran back into the room, where officers struggled with him and forced him to the floor.
“What’s going on?” a person can be heard shouting from behind the camera. The video quickly went viral online and garnered widespread attention.
Walsh and Gilchrist said in a video release that officers have been unfairly maligned over the incident. Walsh also stressed that while the data center would bring in up to $5 million in revenue and create skilled jobs, “there is no project that will tear the town apart.” He also said the data center proposal is “not unprecedented,” noting there are more than 80 data centers in the state, including Mahwah, West Windsor and Edison.
“Significant public opposition led the commission to draft an ordinance to eliminate data centers as a permitted use within the Route 206 Economic Development District and redevelopment plan,” Walsh said.
The Sussex Visibility Brigade called the reversal “an important milestone in efforts to protect the local environment”.
The Andover County Commission has scheduled a special meeting for Tuesday, May 12 at 7 p.m. to repeal two pending ordinances and move forward with a complete ban on data centers.
The Sussex Visibility Brigade said concerns about transparency surrounding the process remained.
“While we agree with Mayor Walsh’s recent statement that ‘no amount of money is worth tearing our town apart,’ we were very disappointed in the defensiveness of his response,” the release states.
Sussex Visibility Brigade co-founder Birdie Green said residents still wanted accountability.
“Once you lose trust on this scale, it’s hard to regain it,” Green said.
