We’re very excited to share that the Town of Tonawanda will hold a hearing on Monday August 3, 2026 at 7pm at 2919 Delaware Avenue at the beginning of the regularly scheduled Town Board meeting to vote on a proposed 1-year moratorium on hyperscale data centers above 20MW in size, and to then use the moratorium period develop a zoning amendment to regular data center operations.

The announcement of the hearing came one day prior to Governor Hochul’s Executive Order, and the proposed local moratorium helps cover some of the gaps in the Executive Order, such as the 50MW threshold.

Here is a copy of the Town of Tonawanda’s proposed moratorium law that we received.

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Please join us on Monday August 3 at 7pm at 2919 Delaware Ave to support the passage of the moratorium, and voice any concerns you may have with it.

Typically, members of the public are given 3 minutes to speak during Town of Tonawanda public hearings, and the hearing will be one of the first items on the agenda and the meeting will start promptly at 7pm, so please plan to arrive a little early. Doors to the meeting should open around 6:30.

Clean Air members and organizers have been urging that town officials take this action for several years through our Tonawanda Just Transition Teams – we have grown increasingly alarmed by the impacts of data centers in other communities where we organize, such as in North Tonawanda, and by the quiet ongoing development towards the “Data Innovation Technology Centre” at the Riverview Innovation Tech Campus, formerly Tonawanda Coke.

A moratorium is a sensible short term action to take for local policymakers to develop a zoning amendment – to be clear, though, ultimately Clean Air’s goal is to pivot the planned use of the site from a data center to renewable energy generation and storage, and regardless of whether this moratorium passes or not, we will continue to campaign towards this goal, as well as our other related goals to rein in this new industrial sector.

Learn more about our Erie-Niagara Data Center Campaign here, and our Tonawanda Just Transition Teams here.

Here at Clean Air, we are celebrating the news today of Governor Hochul’s Executive Order for a 1-year moratorium on data centers above 50 MW.

This order is attached to a number of broader actions, including developing a Draft Generic Environmental Impact Statement. We urge reading the full EO here – https://www.governor.ny.gov/executive-order/no-62-establishing-temporary-moratorium-data-centers-new-york-while-state-develops

Our statement celebrating this action today is shared below.

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Clean Air Celebrates and Thanks Governor Hochul for Today’s Data Center Executive Order

The Clean Air Coalition of Western New York organizes with fenceline and frontline residents in Erie and Niagara County NY to organize to fight for environmental justice and public health.

We first became engaged in data center site fights with the closure of the former Tonawanda Coke in 2018 and the announcement at that time that the future planned use was a hyperscale data center – from the beginning, residents expressed skepticism and concern about this planned use. They have since grown increasingly vocal in their opposition to a data center at that site, and in favor of renewable energy generation and storage instead.

In parallel to this, cryptocurrency mining data centers in Erie and Niagara Counties began to pop up at area industrial sites, and in 2021 Clean Air began actively supporting data center site fights in our region, starting with the DigiPowerX cryptocurrency data center at the Fortistar gas-fired power plant in North Tonawanda.

We thank Governor Hochul for her action today to sign an Executive Order initiating a 1-year moratorium on all new data centers larger than 50 MW, or of expansions of existing data centers of similar size – this is a bold and innovative action by our Governor, and deserves applause. We especially applaud the inclusion of organized labor provisions within the proposed Community Investment Framework.

We urge that the Department of Public Service, Empire State Development, Department of Environmental Conservation and other named agencies engage with environmental justice organizations and fenceline communities across the state for the Draft Generic Environmental Impact Statement, the Community Investment Framework, and the Data Center Interconnection Working Group.

We further urge that, as the New York Grid Acceleration Fund begins to take shape, that investments in publicly owned renewable energy projects and supportive transmission and distribution be strongly considered.

We also urge that local governments not consider this action to supersede local actions, such as developing zoning amendments to fit individual municipal concerns, and also flag that smaller data centers between 10-50MW are not included in the moratorium, so we would urge continuing to pursue local moratoriums to restrict these new developments.

For example, we urge that the Town of Tonawanda continue to pursue the planned hearing on August 3 to initiate a 6-month moratorium, as there are local zoning actions that can still begin to be initiated during this one year pause.

The Governor’s actions today are worth celebrating – this is a huge win for communities and grassroots organizers who fight for action to rein in this unregulated industrial sector.

We again thank the Governor, as well as all our members and supporters who have worked tirelessly this year to bring about this action.

Click here to subscribe to our monthly e-newsletter, and view this month’s edition by clicking the “More” link just below.

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Moving forward, Clean Air will be turning off all comments on our Facebook and Instagram posts.

Why are we making this change?

We have always regarded social media platforms as a tool for organizers to use – a digital bullhorn to amplify our message.

However, increasingly, these bullhorns are held by billionaires who do not share our values or goals.

In 2022, when Elon Musk purchased Twitter, we were one of the first WNY organizations to stop using the platform, because we knew what would come next – control by Musk of the narrative on that platform, and a far right authoritarian shift in the boosted content moving forward.

As we have all observed in the time since, this prediction has unfortunately borne out.

We now are acting on similar observations that we have made of our Meta accounts.

Mark Zuckerberg is not a friend, and his platforms are not safe.

The irresponsible lack of moderation and poor enforcement of community standards across Meta platforms and an algorithm that boosts controversial posts to drive engagement on the platforms has inflamed hate and violence globally. This is plainly evident to anyone who has ever waded into the comment section of any news post.

Globally, this has spilled into inciting violence and even genocide. In 2022, Amnesty International directly cited Meta as one of the main instigators of the Rohingyan Genocide in Burma/Myanmar.

There’s an adage that you do not engage in arguments to change the mind of the person you are talking with, but instead to change the minds of the people listening in, and to show you are an ally to marginalized communities by pushing back on hateful rhetoric rather than letting it stand unchallenged.

But, with the rise of AI, much of that audience are no longer real people. An estimated 20% of all social media accounts are now AI bots – and some estimates of Meta platforms put this well above 50% of accounts.

Of the real people on Meta, many others are paid by the far right to post hateful content, and still others are paid to spread divisive content, especially in the lead-up to elections. “Troll Farms” have been a major issue on Meta platforms for well over a decade now, and there doesn’t seem to be any meaningful effort by Meta to rein these in.

Meta makes money by keeping people engaging on their platform – they do not have an incentive to reduce the engagement that that these farms drive.

In 2018, operatives in Russia targeted WNY through Facebook and seized on the murder of India Cummings to try to set up a rally. This was not an attempt by people driven by the injustice and horrors of the conditions at the Erie County Holding Center. This was an attempt to try to use the murder of Cummings to incite divisiveness and suppress turnout in the midterm elections. Local organizers immediately called out the suspicious nature of the rally, and the lack of any local leadership in the organizing of this rally.

Engaging with these bot accounts and troll farms just makes hateful and divisive content more attractive for Meta’s algorithm to spread widely. News stories which have attracted ugly and bigoted comments are boosted to the top of the feed, and people from marginalized backgrounds are then subjected to that hateful content when it then pops up on their feeds.

Every time staff needs to take time to reply to a comment on one of our posts and engage in a back-and-forth discussion, that takes away from their time and capacity for their other work.

Posting in Facebook comment sections is not organizing and does nothing to build our power or our base, but is a very effective distraction.

To be clear, we are not deleting our Meta accounts and will continue to post new content – because of a lack of appetite for monopoly busting, Meta has made itself, for now, irreplaceable in modern comms strategies.

For example, there is no easy replacement for neighborhood Facebook groups, which we find valuable for learning of possible industrial polluters. We also are keeping the Meta private message functions open.

However, until Meta is forced through monopoly busting and regulatory legislation to create and enforce equitable moderation and is held to account for the harm it has caused by allowing violent, white nationalist and fascist rhetoric to spread and thrive on it’s platforms, we cannot in good conscience continue to use Meta platforms as we have, and we will reduce our use of their platforms.

Comments are now off.

Learn More –

• https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/
• https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-mark-zuckerberg-should-be-on-trial-for-crimes-against-humanity-71796243
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-96372-1
• https://arkansasradio.com/2026/01/ai-generated-content-now-dominates-facebook-feeds-studies-show-2/
• https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8179701/
• https://opentools.ai/news/metas-ai-crawlers-reign-supreme-with-52percent-of-web-bot-traffic-fastly-report-unveiled
• https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-troll-farms-peddling-misinformation-reached-nearly-half-of-americans-2021-9
• https://www.wkbw.com/news/russian-internet-trolls-targeted-wny

Our energy bills are going up, and data centers are among the contributing causes – join the Clean Air Coalition of Western New York and PUSH Buffalo, both members of the NY Energy Democracy Alliance, for a workshop on the root causes of our rising energy bills and a discussion about what we can (and are!) doing to fix the problems, including actions to directly take on the tech billionaire data center build out, and how you can also become a leader in this fight!

All of us are needed if we hope to curb the development of data centers and win affordable energy solutions.

We are excited to welcome Milo Lister to our team! Here’s more info about Milo:

Milo Lister, they / them or she / her

Coalition Organizer

milo@cacwny.org

Milo, also known as Mary, is excited to join the Clean Air Coalition team as a Coalition Organizer. Milo brings over 10 years of community organizing experience to the role, with wins in tenant organizing, workers rights, public health, and reallocating police-related funding and resources.

Milo is passionate about member-led and working class-oriented organizations, and has interned with the National Mobilization Against Sweatshops, worked as an organizer with WNY Council on Occupational Safety and Health, and served as an upstate coordinator on the Securing Wages Earned Against Theft Campaign and the Ain’t I A Woman?! Campaign. Milo helped found Queen City Workers Center (QCWC), a member-led, working-class organization in Buffalo that fights for workplace rights, builds tenant power, and has provided support to families experiencing the effects of incarceration. Milo has served as a housing organizer, board treasurer, and board president with QCWC, and loves seeing member leaders grow. Milo has a bachelor’s degree in Sociology with a minor in Spanish from Binghamton University. Apart from organizing, Milo has spent much of their career working with people with disabilities.

In their free time, Milo enjoys spending time with their large family, especially chasing around their niece and nephew. Milo is known for their huge sweet tooth and enjoys baking. Milo has lived in WNY for most of their life, and loves to take in the scenery through long runs along the waterfront.

Click here to subscribe to our monthly e-newsletter, and view this month’s edition by clicking the “More” link just below.

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Enjoy some of the photos from our event last night!

Click here to subscribe to our monthly e-newsletter, and view this month’s edition by clicking the “More” link just below.
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Clean Air members joined representatives from Senator Baskin and Assemblymember McMahon on May Day for a short rally as part of the May Day Strong day of action to call for the passage of S9144/A10141, which would implement a three-year moratorium on data centers in New York State.

Send a letter today urging the rapid passage of this bill by clicking here, and sign up to join us for a lobby day in Albany next Wednesday May 13, with a free bus leaving from our office in Buffalo!

Check out the coverage from Niagara Gazette, the press release, and a partial recording of the press conference below!

• Clean air group, state lawmakers rally in Buffalo against ‘tech billionaires’ and data centers
• Two Projects: What if the ‘Two-Project Solution’ offers no real solutions for NF?

 

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