ROYALTON — Voters approved of the town adopting a policy that would place a five-year moratorium on the construction of AI and crypto data centers in a show of hands at Tuesday’s Town Meeting.
Now that the article has passed, the Planning Commission will be tasked with writing the policy into the town plan for approval from the Selectboard, Planning Commission Chairman Geo Honigford said during Town Meeting at the White River Valley School’s South Royalton campus.
It will be up to the commission to address concerns such as those highlighted by resident Elizabeth Willhite, who asked if the town had a definition for data centers, because “if we’re (managing) something and we haven’t defined what it is, we could be inadvertently losing commercial development for smaller businesses.”
It is the large-scale data centers that town leaders particularly aim to avoid.
“These centers are massive, they hum, they consume gobs and gobs of power,” Honigford said. “They take tremendous amounts of water to cool, so they’re way out of scale for our environment.”
The Selectboard originally added the article to the warning after Royalton resident Jane Philbrick brought her concerns about such facilities to the town in January.
At the end of Town Meeting, state Sen. Becca White, D-Hartford, whose district includes Royalton, spoke about the moratorium on AI data centers that she’s proposing at the state level.
S. 205 defines an AI data center as “a facility that requires greater than 100 megawatts of new load dedicated to AI inference, training, simulation, or synthetic data generation.”
“That would be larger for energy use than Burlington and Winooski combined in one facility,” White.
“I thank the Selectboard for their consideration of this topic,” she added.
About 7%, or 154, of the town’s registered voters appeared at Town Meeting on Tuesday morning.
In addition to voting in favor of the moratorium, voters also approved a general fund budget of $2.57 million, of which $2.29 million will come from taxes.
Before voters approved the budget, resident Devin Brennan pointed out a $5,000 discrepancy between the general fund budget proposed in the General Fund Revenues and Expenditures section of the 2025 Annual Report, and the proposed budget in the Town Meeting warning.
Voters approved Brennan’s amendment to correct the proposed budget in the warning to match the General Fund Revenues and Expenditures section.
Voters also authorized a highway expenditures budget of $1.6 million, with $1.4 million to be raised by taxes.
Resident Tim Parker proposed an amendment to an article regarding whether the town should raise $180,000 from taxes to resurface Pleasant Street and the paved portion of Oxbow Road.
Under the amended article, which voters approved 62-46, the same sum will go toward grinding and resurfacing Pleasant Street to South Street and replacing the pavement from South Street to Oxbow Bridge with hard pack gravel.
Voters also approved the appropriation of $26,000 to social service agencies including $1,500 to the Family Place, a family services nonprofit that serves communities across the Upper Valley.
The $1,500 request reflects a $1,300 increase from what the Family Place requested from the town last year.
The increase is to account for funding cuts at the state and federal level, Family Place board member Lauren Rhim said at Town Meeting.
Polls were scheduled to be open for ballot voting for officers until 7 p.m. Tuesday. Parker was running a write-in campaign for a three-year seat on the Selectboard, challenging Christopher “Kip” Bergstrom whose name appeared on the ballot.
