Wallington officials say they are scrapping language that would have allowed a data center on the site of the borough’s old Farmland Dairies plant, reversing course after residents packed meetings for weeks demanding answers about traffic, noise and utility strain. The about-face comes after a proposed ordinance that would have let a developer seek approval for a data center on 33 acres along Main Avenue drew sustained pushback from neighbors near the town’s entrance.
Mayor Melissa Dabal said the vote on the proposed amendment was never meant to approve data-center construction, and that the real goal was adding an additional warehouse while reducing overall square footage compared with the current plan, according to NJ.com. She has denied that the borough was changing its zoning to make way for data centers, insisting the plan before officials was for four permitted-use warehouses with no proposal before the planning board or the mayor and council to convert those warehouses into data centers.
The site at 460-520 Main Avenue sits near homes and the border with Wood-Ridge, with the NJ Transit Pascack Valley line running along its eastern edge separating it from the neighboring borough. Wallington designated the former dairy plant an area in need of redevelopment back in January 2023 and adopted a redevelopment plan for it in October 2024. The dairy plant itself processed milk until 2014, according to borough documents, before it was later demolished.
A Scrapped Amendment and a Postponed Hearing
The proposed amendment that triggered the uproar was dated August 4, prepared by borough planning consultants at the direction of the mayor and council. It would have set rules for data-center building heights, utility capacity, cooling equipment, emergency generators and noise, and defined data centers broadly to include cloud-computing facilities and server farms. Notably, the amendment named no operator or AI tenant for a potential facility and specified no expected power or water requirements, according to NJ.com’s reporting…