Is a Data Center the Right Fit for Tonawanda Coke?

When a shuttered industrial site sits idle, communities want answers fast. Jobs, tax revenue, environmental remediation — the pressure to find a "next use" is real, and it's often what drives developers to propose projects before neighborhoods have a chance to process what's actually being asked of them. That's exactly where things stand at the former Tonawanda Coke site in western New York and at industrial parks like the one drawing scrutiny in Childersburg, Alabama. Data centers keep showing up as the answer. Whether they're actually the right answer is a different question entirely.

Why Industrial Sites Keep Attracting Data Centers

The logic isn't hard to follow. Former industrial properties — coke plants, steel mills, refineries — often sit on large parcels with existing electrical infrastructure, heavy-duty road access, and zoning that already tolerates industrial-scale activity. For data center developers, that's a checklist that's expensive and time-consuming to replicate from scratch. Brownfield redevelopment also comes with potential tax incentives and the goodwill of local governments desperate to see something happen on land that's been generating nothing but liability.

Data center developers aren't being charitable when they target former industrial sites — they're being efficient.

Nationally, data center demand has accelerated well beyond what anyone predicted five years ago. The explosion of AI workloads, cloud computing expansion, and enterprise digitization has created a capacity crunch. Developers are looking anywhere they can get power fast, and industrial brownfields often offer exactly that. Sites that once drew hundreds of megawatts for manufacturing operations have the substation infrastructure to support hyperscale facilities — that's not a coincidence; it's the pitch.

What Communities Are Actually Worried About

The concerns showing up in Tonawanda and Childersburg aren't unique to those towns, but they deserve to be taken seriously rather than dismissed as reflexive NIMBYism.

Start with jobs. This is always the first thing promised and the first thing that disappoints. A modern data center — even a large one — might employ 30 to 50 full-time workers once it's operational. Compare that to the hundreds or thousands of jobs a manufacturing plant once supported, and the math is brutal. Construction brings temporary employment spikes, but communities anchored to industrial heritage have seen that movie before. They know the difference between a ribbon-cutting and a payroll.

Then there's the environmental dimension, which is particularly loaded at a site like Tonawanda Coke. The former coke plant carries a serious environmental legacy — it was the subject of significant air quality violations before its closure. Residents who lived through that don't take assurances about clean new industry at face value. When a community has already absorbed one generation of industrial harm, "trust us, this is different" isn't a strategy — it's an insult.

Data centers aren't smokestacks, but they're not environmentally neutral either. Large facilities consume enormous amounts of water for cooling — a hyperscale campus can use millions of gallons per day. They require significant power draw, which puts pressure on local grids and, depending on the region's energy mix, can translate into meaningful carbon emissions upstream. Noise from cooling systems and backup generators is a legitimate quality-of-life concern for nearby residents. None of these are dealbreakers on their own, but communities have every right to demand specific answers before ground breaks.

The Economic Case, Honestly Assessed

Here's where nuance matters more than cheerleading. Data centers do generate economic value — the question is for whom, and at what cost.

Property tax revenue is real and often substantial. A large data center facility can generate millions of dollars annually in local tax contributions, which matters enormously for school districts and municipal services. In rural or post-industrial communities where the tax base has eroded, that's not nothing. Data center operators also tend to be stable long-term tenants — they don't pick up and relocate the way light manufacturing sometimes does.

The supply chain and vendor spending argument is also legitimate, if more modest than developers typically present. Facilities need ongoing maintenance, security, logistics support, and specialty contractors. That creates some local economic activity, even if it doesn't look like a traditional employment anchor.

But communities should push back hard on inflated multiplier effects and vague promises about "tech ecosystem development." A data center is a utility-scale infrastructure asset, not a tech campus that seeds startups. The economic model is fundamentally different from what most local economic development frameworks are built around, and pretending otherwise sets communities up for disappointment.

The honest version of the economic pitch is narrower but real: stable tax revenue, modest permanent employment, and long-term land use stability. That might actually be enough — but it needs to be evaluated on those terms.

Zoning, Infrastructure, and the Planning Questions Nobody's Asking Yet

Land use planning for data centers at industrial sites is still catching up to the pace of development. Most zoning codes weren't written with hyperscale compute facilities in mind, and industrial zoning classifications that permit data centers were designed for very different uses.

The infrastructure questions go deeper than whether the power is available. Grid interconnection is increasingly complex, and large new loads can require utility upgrades that take years and cost ratepayers money. Water rights and withdrawal permits matter enormously in communities with existing water stress. Fiber connectivity is non-negotiable for operations but isn't always present in legacy industrial corridors. Developers may promise to handle all of this, but local governments need independent engineers reviewing those commitments — not just the developer's own feasibility studies.

There's also a remediation question specific to brownfield sites like Tonawanda Coke. Environmental cleanup is expensive, and the deal structure matters enormously. Is the developer taking on remediation liability, or is that being backstopped by public funds? What environmental standards govern the cleanup, and who's doing the monitoring? Communities that don't nail down these answers before the permitting process begins often find themselves negotiating from a much weaker position later.

Childersburg's concerns about the industrial park proposal reflect a similar dynamic — residents want to know what's actually being built, what the operational footprint looks like, and who's accountable when questions arise. Those aren't obstructionist demands. They're the baseline due diligence any community should expect.

Getting This Decision Right

Neither reflexive rejection nor uncritical acceptance serves these communities well. The real work is in the specifics.

Local officials and residents in Tonawanda and Childersburg should be demanding binding commitments on remediation standards, water use, noise mitigation, and grid impact before any permits move forward. They should be negotiating community benefit agreements that lock in local hiring requirements for construction, apprenticeship pipelines for permanent positions, and mechanisms for ongoing community oversight — not just a one-time public comment period.

Developers who are serious about these sites will accept that scrutiny. The ones who push for speed and resist detailed public review are often the ones trying to lock in approvals before communities understand what they've agreed to.

Data centers at industrial sites can be legitimate, productive reuses of land that might otherwise sit contaminated and dormant for decades. But the Tonawanda Coke story — and the Childersburg situation — are reminders that "better than nothing" is a low bar. These communities deserve a deal structured around their actual needs, not just the developer's timeline.

The data center industry is moving fast and has real power in these conversations. Local communities that do their homework early, ask the hard questions before the ink dries, and hold out for enforceable commitments — not just promises — are the ones who end up with projects that actually work for them. The ones who don't often spend a decade learning why they should have.

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