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.