Development at STAMP would change character of rural community

Editor:

There are many reasons for Genesee Countians to strongly oppose the monster data center – or any other development – at the STAMP speculative industrial mega-site in the Town of Alabama.

STAMP borders the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, which considers STAMP nothing less than an existential threat to its sovereignty, ecology, and ways of life; and would have huge impacts on the rural, agricultural economies, traditions, and character of the county.

The proposed data center would be the size of eleven Walmart Supercenters, and its developer is asking Genesee County for an absurd $1.44 billion in tax incentives.

It’s also important to know that STAMP violates all the principles and tenets of “smart growth” land use and development that professional planners practice today.

At its beginning, the STAMP badly failed a “smart growth test” required of state agencies by the State Public Infrastructure Policy Act1. This law ensures that state agencies do not fund development in locations and ways that spawn financial, environmental, and equity problems. In the case of STAMP, the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) flunked this required “smart growth test.”  Yet, ESDC and Genesee County Economic Development Center (GCEDC) ignored the results.

A look at some of the flunked smart growth test criteria reveals how bad STAMP is from land use, development, and community planning perspectives:

Criteria:  Utilize existing infrastructure. STAMP will require extensive, expensive, complicated new water, wastewater, and energy infrastructure that will need maintenance forever.

Criteria:  Locate wholly or partially in an existing municipal center. STAMP is entirely on undeveloped, remote, rural land.

Criteria: Preserve and enhance the state’s agricultural land. STAMP would develop (devour!) hundreds of acres of prime agricultural land.

Criteria: Provide mobility through transportation choices, including improved public transportation and reduced automobile dependency. STAMP’s far-flung location would lock employees and all other users into ridiculously expensive, polluting, dangerous automobile dependency.

Criteria: Comply with local land use and building zones and codes. STAMP’s plans did not comply with the long-time rural/agricultural zoning for the site – so GCEDC got the zoning changed. This change does not suddenly make STAMP suitable: a recent study by SUNY College of Environmental Science determined the site is wholly unsuitable for industrial development.

Criteria: Locate in a developed area or one designated for development.  STAMP failed this criteria too, but the GCEDC convinced the County to add the entire STAMP site to the County’s Smart Growth Plan2 as a “Priority Development Area.” This Plan was passed in 2000 to protect rural, agricultural lands, economies, and character from incompatible development that could hook up to public water pipes coming in. In other words, STAMP is exactly what the Smart Growth Plan was legislated countywide to prevent.

Overall, STAMP is the “poster child” of all that smart growth isn’t. At every level of land use and development planning, STAMP is a deeply inappropriate and inefficient location and site for what is being proposed there.

To learn more about ways you can oppose these boondoggles and bad deals for our region, go to alliesoftsn.weebly.com.

Marcia Bohn

Batavia