Lysander Committee Weighs a No Wells, No Evaporative Cooling Rule for Data Centers at July 17 Water Session

At 9 a.m. Friday, July 17, in the auditorium at 8220 Loop Road, Supervisor Kevin Rode’s Data Center Advisory Committee takes up the hardest question a town without its own water system can face: how do you write water rules for a 300 megawatt neighbor? The committee’s meeting packet, posted to the town website this week, puts a first draft on the table, and it reads less like small town zoning than a data center engineering spec.

Among the options the packet lists for discussion: require any data center to use municipal water with no on-site wells, ban evaporative cooling systems outright in favor of closed loop designs, make the developer pay for infrastructure upgrades, and require a water impact study before any site plan approval. One option would even push the Onondaga County Water Authority to demand offset projects, such as finding and fixing large leaks in the municipal system, to balance any large scale water draw.

That is a striking level of technical specificity for a town of roughly 23,000 that, as the same packet concedes, does not run its own municipal water system. Water in Lysander comes from OCWA. Wastewater is handled by the county’s Department of Water Environment Protection. What the town does control is zoning, and the packet makes the leverage explicit: the town can mandate connection to municipal water supplies and can regulate wells, including limits on large scale withdrawals.

The technology question is now a zoning question

The packet walks committee members through the cooling technologies that drive data center water demand. Evaporative cooling is cheap and effective, the town’s materials note, but “extremely wasteful of water.” Closed loop liquid cooling recirculates water and uses dramatically less, at higher cost. Geothermal designs run the loop underground. Immersion cooling, which submerges hardware in nonconductive liquid, gets a mention as an up and coming approach.

Writing a preference among those systems into town code would put Lysander in rare company. Most municipal battles over data centers turn on setbacks, noise and taxes. Lysander’s draft options would reach inside the building and dictate the cooling plant itself.

The committee is doing this blind in one important respect. “We’re not sure how much water they’ll actually need. We haven’t seen a proposal at this time,” the packet states. The developer behind the project that started all of this, Ranalli Super DC, LLC, applied to the New York Independent System Operator in May 2025 to connect a proposed 300 megawatt data center to the grid near Hencle Boulevard and Oswego Road, but has not filed a data center application with the town. The roughly 124 acre site, zoned industrial, was listed for $60 million through Pyramid Brokerage this spring, CNY Central reported in April.

For scale, residents have pointed at the town’s own water history. At the June 4 town board meeting, speakers pressed the board on water demand, and CNY Central reported a resident’s calculation that the town’s highest demand day in 2025 moved 1.29 million gallons, an amount a hyperscale data center could consume on an ordinary day.

A second energy freeze, quietly extended

The data center moratorium gets the headlines, but Lysander has been running a parallel freeze on utility scale batteries, and it just moved to stretch that one into the winter.

On June 4, the board voted 4 to 0, on Resolution 100 of 2026, to set a June 18 public hearing on a local law extending the town’s moratorium on Tier 2 battery energy storage systems to December 19, 2026. Town code records show the battery freeze has been in place in some form since 2023 and was last extended to June 20, 2026 by Local Law 1 of 2026, adopted February 19. The extension text drafted by town attorney David Herkala is blunt: no Tier 2 battery storage applications may be accepted by the town board, planning board or zoning board of appeals, violations carry a $1,000 per day penalty, and even the ZBA’s power to grant relief under state Town Law is suspended. A hardship exception exists, with a $100 application fee and a public hearing.

The town had not posted the June 18 minutes as of Thursday evening; adopting them is on the board’s July 16 agenda. But the direction is unambiguous. Batteries and data centers are being held at the gate by the same four member board: Rode, plus councilors Vince Mangan, Ed Schmitt and Jeffrey Kudarauskas.

The data center freeze itself, Local Law 4 of 2026, moved fast by municipal standards. The board authorized its attorney to draft a moratorium on April 16, referred it to the county and town planning boards on April 24, collected a 5 to 0 planning board recommendation on April 27, and adopted it after a May 7 public hearing, according to the supervisor’s own published timeline. WAER reported more than 1,800 residents had signed a petition against the project by the night of the vote. The six month clock runs into early November.

Albany added a third layer on July 14

Then the state stepped in. On July 14, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed Executive Order 62, a statewide pause on new hyperscale data center permitting while the Department of Public Service builds a Generic Environmental Impact Statement under its large load proceeding, Case 26-E-0045. The order’s recitals carry a number that explains the rush: as of May 2026, nearly 12 gigawatts of data center load requests sat in the NYISO interconnection queue, more than 8 gigawatts of it entering in 2025 alone.

“New York will lead the way in creating the strongest standards in the nation for data center development, ensuring that when companies succeed because of New York, New Yorkers succeed too,” Hochul said in announcing the order, as reported by CNY Central.

The order defines its target as facilities that consume or can consume 50 megawatts or more, with carve-outs for manufacturing, research, higher education, the Empire AI consortium and medical care. It directs the Department of Environmental Conservation to hold data center permit applications in abeyance until the environmental study lands, tells Empire State Development to publish a Community Investment Framework within 60 days, and gives DEC twelve months to report on whether its water withdrawal rules under 6 NYCRR Parts 601 and 602 actually capture data center demand.

Here is the detail that matters most in Lysander: the abeyance explicitly does not apply to permits and approvals from local governments. Albany paused its own desks, not the town’s. When Lysander’s moratorium expires in November, the town’s code, whatever the committee recommends by then, is still the rulebook a project would meet first. Lysander is not alone in racing that clock. Clay adopted a one year data center moratorium on June 29 and Manlius followed on July 8, per CNY Central, and Onondaga County launched a $500,000 data center study on June 15, assigning a task force drawn from its planning, water, environmental protection and health departments, with results expected in five to six months. “How do you give them the answers they’re asking for if you don’t have a thorough analysis done to support them?” County Executive Ryan McMahon said of the towns seeking guidance.

Inside the committee doing the homework

The advisory committee was created by Resolution 104 of 2026 on June 4, another 4 to 0 vote. As proposed at the board’s early June discussion, it seats four town representatives, four county or state representatives, and three community members, with technical help available from CenterState CEO, Empire State Development and Onondaga County. Its kickoff deck, presented June 26 at a 10 a.m. session in the town hall auditorium, confines the mission to code recommendations on matters “within the control of the Town of Lysander” and promises that meeting recordings will be posted, that members must confirm they have no financial interest in the project, and that a public hearing will precede any recommendations going to the board.

The committee skipped the July 3 holiday week, then held its first working meeting on July 10 and published a two page concerns worksheet that reads like a transcript of every public comment period since April: constant noise including low frequency and infrasound, PFAS in water, brownouts, generator air pollution, heat dissipation, impacts on the Seneca River and Three Rivers area, rising electricity costs, property values, tax breaks, radio frequency interference, eminent domain, emergency response plans, even a line item for on-site nuclear generation and one labeled “Skynet and other theories.” By Friday’s packet, those had been distilled into scored priorities. Wastewater handling and the question of who pays for infrastructure upgrades each scored 3.0, the highest marks on the water list. Water usage scored 2.7, pollution including PFAS 2.5, residential water pressure 2.1, groundwater levels 1.8.

The June 26 deck also answered the question the board hears most often, why not just ban data centers? Its case study was Saline Township, Michigan, where the township board denied a data center rezoning on September 10, 2025, was sued by the property owner two days later, voted to settle on October 1, and watched the project, backed by Related Digital, Blackstone and Oracle financing secured in April 2026, break ground on June 1, 2026. A ban is not the end of it, the deck argues; durable code is the defensible play. It is why the committee has a noise consultant, RSG, under contract since June 4, with proposed noise ordinance language listed as pending in Friday’s agenda, and the town attorney confirmed to attend.

The definitions fight underneath it all

One more technical wrinkle the committee must untangle: nobody agrees on what a data center is. The state’s Senate Bill 9144-A pegs the definition at facilities capable of using 20 megawatts. Hochul’s executive order sets its threshold at 50 megawatts. Lysander’s moratorium simply says data storage facilities. Where the town’s eventual code draws its own megawatt line will decide whether a future mid size server operation sails through as a warehouse or faces a special use permit. The committee’s kickoff materials stake out a position: a data center, they argue, should require a special use permit, the zoning board process that tests a proposal for noise, vibration, glare, fire hazards, traffic and fit with adjacent uses, and that can attach binding conditions.

Rode has warned that the paper trail matters either way. The Hencle Boulevard site already carries a site plan approval for a warehouse, and any data center would restart the clock. “That process would be lengthy, as it would be considered an entirely new application compared to the warehouse for which they have site plan approval already,” Rode told CNY Central in April.

None of Friday’s work is theoretical for long. The data center moratorium runs out in early November. The battery storage extension, if filed with the Secretary of State as drafted, holds only until December 19. The county’s $500,000 study will not report back for months after that. Lysander’s committee, meeting in a town hall auditorium on summer Friday mornings, is effectively writing the first draft of Central New York’s data center rulebook, and its own next agenda is already set: wastewater handling and treatment, then electricity, if time permits.