Dryden

That's Yvonne Taylor of Seneca Lake Guardian, an organization working to block new data centers in the Finger Lakes.

The town of Dryden near Cayuga Lake recently approved a ban on data centers.

Dryden supervisor Jason Leifer says one proposed facility would have only created a couple dozen jobs.

He's pursuing different kinds of employers.

Do you want more manufacturing or do you want more, you know, AI girlfriends is really [laughs] is really where we're coming at here.

Uh, thanks for having me, Evan.

Jason Leifer is the Dryden town supervisor.

Now, this is not the town where the Seneca Lake proposal is, but Jason recently wrote a piece for Tompkins Weekly about why his town decided on a moratorium for data centers.

Jason, welcome.

He appreciates their concerns, but he says that sometimes their concerns are based on incorrect information.

He says the, the supervisor says he doesn't know that the vocal opposition is necessarily reflective of the views of the town as a whole.

So, um, he- it's more of a kind of a middle-of-the-road picture that says he doesn't think anything is imminent, they're willing to listen, but they're not, uh, for a number of reasons, they're not pursuing the moratorium in the way that Dryden did.

So n- now that we kinda set the scene a little bit there, I wanna ask all three of our guests for some opening thoughts, and then we're gonna get some very specific questions about what we know about data centers and where all of this is going.

What is going on up at Cornell University, Ithaca? And I know a thing or two about Cornell because I went to school about 30 minutes away in Cortland, New York, and I started in broadcasting at the college station at Cornell University.

And so I'd go to school by daytime in Cortland and then drive along Route 13 through Dryden, which is Tompkins County, which is the district attorney in this case, and then on to Cornell.

And so what we're referring to, and you're going to hear a lot about this, is already all over the national news.

An alleged gang rape that happened approximately two years ago.