Niagara Falls Redevelopment (NFR) announced Thursday that it has filed an application with Niagara Falls city planners to establish a Negotiated Planned Development District, also known as a Planned Unit District (PUD) for the purpose of developing a proposed $1.5 billion data center campus in the South End.
NFR has dubbed the proposed new development district “Data Center at Niagara Digital Campus PUD.”
The proposed location of what would be the first stage of the PUD is the same parcel of 12 to 15 acres of South End land that the city has proposed to use for its Centennial Park project.
NFR has said its data center campus project “is anticipated to bring 5,600 jobs to Niagara Falls during construction, as well as more than 550 permanent jobs when all phases of the data center are up and running.”
The almost 500-page NFR submission was filed with the city on Monday. NFR Executive Vice President Roger Trevino said the South End land owner has “been working tirelessly on assembling all of the elements to submit this PUD application to the City of Niagara Falls, despite the considerable obstacles we’ve faced along the way.”
NFR’s PUD application calls for the Data Center at Niagara Digital Campus to be developed in five phases. It would include eight two-story buildings and one one-story building, for a total of 1,232,715 square feet of space.
The full development is projected to cover approximately 53 acres of what NFR calls “mostly vacant land.”
The property would be bounded by John B. Daly Boulevard, Falls St., 15th Street, and Buffalo Avenue.
“It is important to remember that our application is for a negotiated PUD,” Trevino added, “so we look forward to sitting down with city officials at the earliest opportunity to finalize the details of this exciting economic development project and move forward.”
NFR’s filing comes just over a month after New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals rejected a second appeal by NFR, and an affiliated company, Blue Apple Properties Inc., seeking to have its justices weigh in on the legality of the use of eminent domain to take NFR’s land, described as 907 Falls St. and an adjacent portion of property along John Daly Memorial Parkway, for the proposed Centennial Park project.
After the appeals court ruling, Falls Mayor Robert Restaino said the city would move forward with “a valuation and acquisition” of the property where NFR wants to build its first proposed data center.
NFR has said it will build the Niagara Digital Campus in partnership with Toronto-based builder Urbacon Data Centre Solutions.
An NFR spokesman said Urbacon and NFR first approached the city in early 2021 to discuss the project. NFR claims it has spent more than $4 million on the preliminary work required to file its PUD application.
Included in the nearly 500-page PUD application submitted by NFR to the City of Niagara Falls are a rezoning application and requisite fee, traffic and noise studies, an environmental and energy impact plan, a full environment assessment form, verified ownership petition, a survey and legal description, a historical property assessment, and aerial maps showing the placement of the Data Center at Niagara Digital Campus and various other key elements of the plan.
Importantly, NFR representatives said, the traffic study prepared by C&S Engineers, Inc. showed that there would be no adverse impact on local traffic, while a Noise Feasibility Study prepared by Arcadis Canada Inc. of Ontario, determined that the project is feasible and, with modest mitigation measures, will not exceed local noise ordinances.
As a facility operating on a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week basis, 365 days a year, employees would enter and exit on a staggered basis according to shifts – resulting in limited additional car traffic during peak periods.