Massena's town board had a chance to pause data-center development this week. It voted the moratorium down instead.

The vote, reported by WWNY on September 16 and again in a follow-up September 17, keeps the town of Massena — St. Lawrence County, on the Canadian border, home to some of the cheapest power in New York State thanks to the Moses-Saunders hydroelectric dam — open for data-center proposals while neighboring towns across the state are moving the other direction. That matters here because Massena's cheap power is exactly what makes it a target: developers chasing New York sites for AI and cloud computing go where the megawatts are cheap and the zoning is friendly, and st. Lawrence County has been fielding interest for exactly that reason.

This is a local vote, not a state one, and it sits completely outside Executive Order 62 — the governor's July 14 pause on new data centers of 50 megawatts or more while the Department of Public Service finishes its environmental review. EO 62 freezes state approval of the big ones; it says nothing about what a town board does with its own zoning and site-plan authority, and Massena just showed a board can keep local doors open even while the state process sits paused. A project under 50 megawatts, or one that clears its DEC application before the freeze took hold, could move through Massena's process without ever touching the state's pause button.

For a contractor watching where actual dirt gets turned, the read is this: local approval is the wildcard the state moratorium doesn't reach, and boards like Massena's that vote to stay open are worth tracking module by module. St. Lawrence County doesn't have the transmission capacity of Utica or the Hudson Valley, so any project chasing this power will need substation and interconnection work built alongside it — that's transmission, sitework, and heavy electrical scope for whoever's positioned upstate when a specific proposal actually files.

Nothing has been proposed publicly at a named site in Massena yet — this vote is permission, not a project. Contractors with upstate crews should watch the town's planning board agenda for the actual filing; that's the next document that will name a developer, a megawattage, and a site.