Shutesbury Planning Board advances data center bylaw draft toward March public hearing

Planning Board · Meeting of January 15, 2026

Shutesbury's Planning Board moved its draft data center zoning bylaw closer to a public hearing, targeting March after a legal review by town attorney Donna. The January 15 meeting was dominated by a debate over lithium-ion battery storage requirements, with member Jeff Weston — citing the town's roughly $700,000 PFAS aquifer remediation effort — insisting on physical separation of batteries from buildings to prevent water-suppression runoff from reaching drinking water; member Keith Hastie countered with research showing groundwater PFAS contamination historically traces to repeated training-site applications of firefighting foam, not emergency responses, and relayed secondhand comments from Fire Chief Zawanka that his standing orders for a battery fire would be to let it burn. The board dropped a mandatory-external-placement rule in favor of requiring batteries to be housed in a contained, sealed room and adding a provision allowing fire-suppression conditions to be imposed through the special permit process.

Members also debated the tiered size definitions — micro (150 square feet or less), small (up to 5,000 square feet) — replacing "gross building area" with the bylaw's defined term "floor area" throughout. Chair Nathan Murphy voted 6-0 with the board to approve December 8, 2025 minutes before the board adjourned unanimously.

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Source: the Planning Board meeting of January 15, 2026, reported from the official video recording and transcript.