By Nick Del Vecchio
Niagara Falls Redevelopment’s proposed $1.5 billion data center adjacent to downtown Niagara Falls has been temporarily derailed by Mayor Robert Restaino’s administration. The mayor and his attorneys have invoked eminent domain in order to claim NFR’s property planned for its Niagara Digital Campus.
Restaino has other plans for the property and is determined to prevent NFR’s project from becoming a reality.
NFR’s planned 1.2 million square foot data center will house tens of thousands of servers and is a project suited to support the booming era of Artificial Intelligence. NFR anticipates 5600 construction jobs will be created, by their project, and 550 permanent positions, not to mention $414 million projected in tax revenue over twenty years and another $$150 million more in energy taxes.
NFR owners Howard and Edward Milstein plan to use private funds to make it happen.
Restaino and the city want to use a 10-acre parcel carved out of the land owned by NFR to develop “Centennial Park,” a public complex including a planned 7000-seat arena, skating rink, rope climbing, a parking ramp etc. Centennial Park would be publicly funded and is estimated to cost taxpayers between $150,000-$300,000 million. The price tag for the property will cost taxpayers another estimated $20 -$40 million or more.
Despite NFR dedicating some 60 acres for the proposed data center, the city is claiming only the 10-acre entranceway to NFR’s project, essential for the completion of its data center project. Parcel 0, as it is known on planning maps, stands thus as a queen on a chessboard, and its forced acquisition will allow Restaino to declare checkmate in his political power play to stop the data center.
Niagara Falls Redevelopment believes politics is the mayor’s main motivation and have said so in no uncertain terms in a brief filed before the court in 2023.
From a brief filed by NFR’s attorneys:
“The City’s object …has little to do with a park, an event center, tourism, or anything of the like. What the City wants is to eject a commercial developer from property it owns in downtown Niagara Falls. After that, maybe funding materializes, maybe it doesn’t. But the City and its Mayor will be in control …Today’s Centennial Park proponents — led most visibly and vocally by Mayor Restaino — could not care less about market studies, economic impacts, or the inevitable crippling debt with which the people of Niagara Falls will be saddled.”
The brief also cited comments made by Restaino to expose his real intentions.
“If you have the site and you don’t get the money, you still have the site and then you are looking at development…the first step is getting the property,” said Restaino according to the brief. “With the property, we now control a critical corner in the downtown.”
NFR’s attorneys are clearly implying that Restaino is using the proposed Centennial Park as an excuse to take the land and he likely has no intention to follow through on his project.
It’s difficult to understand how killing the Niagara Digital Campus helps Restaino politically.
That is unless one chooses to ignore the decades of missed opportunities made by administration after administration, regardless of political affiliation, that have made downtown Niagara Falls an embarrassing laughingstock compared to its Canadian neighbors across the river.
Since the demise of prosperous industrial plants that once provided well-paying jobs, residents of Niagara Falls have witnessed a steadily consistent decline in livability.
Even once-thriving Pine Avenue has become a section of town to be avoided by tourists, locals, and police officers, and one of the most visible signs of entrepreneurship are brazen criminals attempting to fence jewelry to those waiting in McDonald’s drive thru.
So, what happens when billionaire businessmen offer to give Niagara Falls an urgently-needed shot in the arm by building a state-of-the-art facility guaranteed to make the city millions of dollars?
The mayor and his cronies inexplicably say, “No thank you,” and hire the best lawyers money can buy to make them go away.
NFR says he is overplaying a bad hand with his legal maneuverings but it looks more like the mayor is playing with marked cards and dealing off the bottom of the deck all at the same time. Killing Niagara Falls Redevelopment’s $1.5 billion data center doesn’t just squander an opportunity for the city to get back on its feet, it sends a message to all potential investors that they and their money aren’t welcome here.