Eco-Yotta Inc. AI Research Center Project Faces Growing Hurdles
By ERIC SANTOMAURO-STENZEL
ONEONTA
The hill to climb for Eco-Yotta Inc’s proposal for an AI research center paired with hydroponic farming in the Town of Oneonta is growing steeper.
Community opposition has persisted meeting after meeting, the town (and planning) board has appeared exasperated by a lack of clarity in project specifics, and now Hartwick College—which Eco-Yotta had said they were hoping to partner with—has distanced itself from the project.
Over a series of increasingly testy exchanges at the November 12 board meeting, Eco-Yotta officials accused board members of stonewalling while the board in turn questioned the company’s sparse presentation of project specifics.
Married couple Prashanth Gorantala, the chief technology officer, and Tirusha Dave, the chief executive officer, repeatedly pointed to the recent approval of what Gorantala said is “the same exact project” in southern New Jersey, near their full-time home, as a proof of concept.
“I can give you a full tour of that. That’s not a problem,” Gorantala told the board when asked if contact information for local officials there could be shared.
In an interview with AllOtsego, Dave and Gorantala walked that back, saying it was for their safety. They declined to share the name of the municipality where the New Jersey project is located, and said they would no longer tell the town board. Increasingly, the couple has said they feel unsafe as a result of certain comments against the project. One anonymous comment among others the two cited as cause for concern and said they received via their website during the November meeting, was “your presentation is a joke.”
“If I divulge the municipality where this project is being held,” Dave said, “what’s the guarantee, in general, from the public that people aren’t going to start picking up the phone and making, I have no better way of saying this, idiotic statements and phone calls to the municipality there?”
“If you’re not willing to be completely transparent, what makes you think anybody is—I mean, I just can’t even wrap my head around that sort of reasoning,” said a flabbergasted Patricia Jacob, a former town board member who coordinates town sustainability efforts through its Climate Smart Communities Task Force, in an interview. “The people are very welcome. It’s the project that’s not,” she said, observing that there have not been threats against the couple in the many meetings she has attended.
Meanwhile, the opportunities for collaboration with educational institutions Eco-Yotta has said were a key reason for their purchasing the property at 357 County Highway 9 are starting to dry up. Some faculty and staff at SUNY Oneonta have grown concerned by the university’s announcement it had reached a memorandum of understanding to work with Eco-Yotta if the project moves forward, and Hartwick College has balked at the proposal.
“We never reached the stage of an agreement or partnership,” Hartwick College spokesperson Gail Glover said in a statement to AllOtsego.
“While Hartwick is supportive of the kinds of opportunities this project could potentially bring, including internships, research and career pathways for students, we are also mindful of the long-term impact this type of initiative could have on our region’s shared resources,” Glover wrote. “Ultimately, the College determined that the proposed project would not meaningfully advance opportunities for our students or Hartwick at this time. In short, our involvement has not progressed beyond the information-sharing stage,” according to Glover.
The project application lists 3,000,000 kWh as its estimated annual electricity use, the equivalent of nearly 300 homes. Eco-Yotta says that number is a maximum, and the real number would be closer to 584,000 kWh per year, “although this may be lower depending on the hydroponics model we finalize.” They say they are no longer pursuing Phase 1 in the garage, a small number of servers to test heat output, due to delays.
“Power requirements vary significantly by crop type and system design,” Gorantala said. “We will select the most efficient model once we complete our technical discussions and research with educational partners.”
The Planning Board has twice recommended against the project in different iterations. Eco-Yotta says their comments about hydroponics were omitted from July minutes of one such meeting, causing what they say is a misperception that they want to build a large commercial data center. Eco-Yotta’s first two applications, obtained by AllOtsego, described the project as a “data center.”
Eco-Yotta argues it has offered transparency in response to board questions “ad nauseum,” as one of their attorneys, Nathaniel Nichols, put it in the November meeting.
But board members have said that is an inversion of the obligations of the developer.
“I would get down in here and write it up, show us examples,” outgoing town board member Kim Fierke told Eco-Yotta. Not what they did before, which included some diagrams of the technology, but “exactly what are you thinking and trying to do. Help us to understand, so we can support you.”
Some arguments against the project, particularly from the town board, focus on “spot zoning,” a practice of zoning individual parcels for particular projects rather than developing an overarching plan for land use.
“This is a legislative act, and one that has community-wide consequences,” Republican board member Trish Riddell Kent said at a July meeting. “It’s often pursued not because it’s appropriate planning, but because the applicant knows their proposal would not meet the legal thresholds required by the [Zoning Board of Appeals].”
The project’s next test will come at a special meeting on Tuesday, December 9, where the board has requested a full presentation on the project. The next day, December 10, the board will have its last general meeting of the term.
Come January, a 14-point winning candidate who campaigned against data centers and spoke against the Eco-Yotta proposal at multiple town meetings will take office as town supervisor. Democrat Will Rivera told AllOtsego he is personally opposed to “harmful rezoning requests” and that “they’re changing the structures of the neighborhoods, and the community doesn’t want it.”
In parallel to its rezoning request, Eco-Yotta argues most of what they hope to do with the property is already permitted under its residential agriculture zoning as a “home occupation.” That town code designation requires the use be “incidental and secondary to the use of the dwelling for dwelling purposes and does not change the character thereof.”
According to both the town and Eco-Yotta, the town has not responded with its assessment of the “home occupation” issue.
Some have speculated in both public and private that Eco-Yotta’s recent retention of Whiteman Osterman & Hanna LLP, a large Albany-based law firm with some high-profile clients, and some of the arguments they are making for the project and about opposition to it, are evidence the company is preparing to file a lawsuit.
Asked by AllOtsego about that speculation, Dave replied, “I have no comment on that.”
READ MORE details on the project in “Tour with Eco-Yotta Officials Unpacks AI Research Center Proposal,” from our November 6 issue or on AllOtsego.com.
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