The Syracuse Planning Commission held a regular meeting on April 27, 2026, beginning at approximately 7:55 PM. The meeting included approval of previous minutes, multiple public hearings on land use applications, and significant discussion on a proposed event center. The commission approved several resubdivisions, special use permits, and site plan reviews. All votes were unanimous unless noted.
All decisions were unanimous unless otherwise noted.
And welcome to this meeting of the Syracuse Planning Commission. We will begin our public hearings in just a moment. Before we do that, however, we will take care of take action on the minutes of our previous meeting. Those minutes have been distributed in advance to the commission members. And it would be appropriate at this time if there's a motion for action on those minutes for such a motion. I make a motion to approve the minutes of the last meeting with no corrections. Thank you. Discussion on the motion. If not, all in favor of that motion, please indicate by saying aye. Aye. Those opposed, say nay. Any abstentions? The minutes from our April sixth meeting are approved. We will I will turn this over in just a moment, but I want to say something about our process in terms of the public hearings this evening for those who might be unfamiliar with our procedure. As each application is announced by a member of the staff, we ask that the applicant or the representative come to the podium in the center of the room, provide your name and address for the record, and then a brief summary of the application involved. Yes, there are a couple. That one is postponed until the next meeting. And also major site plan review MASPR-2026-10 at 109 Phillips Road. Same owner also through Lemoyne College is also postponed. We expect those to be on the next meeting. In addition, in line with what Commissioner Coolick mentioned, the first two projects under old business, we're we're actually going to hold those until the end of the meeting and get through the other items that we think will be a little bit quicker to get through. So bear with us. So with that, the first uh public hearing tonight under old business is the Syracuse Utility Thermal Energy Network project at 751 Van Rensselaer in North Geddish Street. Applicant is uh Niagara Mohawk Power Corp doing business as national grid, represented by Bon Shenik and King. This is in the MX4 zone district. Good evening. Um my name is Will Hackett. I'm a project manager with National Grid here in Syracuse 300 Erie Boulevard West. Um, and I'm joined by uh our consultant and uh legal representation tonight. And we're here to talk about the energy center property. This is a component of the utility thermal energy network project in Syracuse. So I know last time we went into some abbreviated background. Do you want me to just pick up where we left off or run through that quickly again? Okay. So the purpose of this property is to facilitate the operation of this thermal energy network. And this is necessitated by the utility Thermal Energy Network and Jobs Act, which was passed by New York State in 2022. And what that did is it required the seven largest utilities in the state to develop these pilot projects for thermal energy networks. And the reason behind that was in support of the state's broader climate goals and the push for electrification of buildings. And the thought was the utilities are well accustomed to operating thermal energy energy networks, or I'm sorry, energy networks, where you have multiple properties connected together, in this case by one thermal resource. So in the case of the Syracuse project specifically, what we've proposed to do with the Public Service Commission is to capture waste heat from the treated effluent at the Metropolitan Wastewater Treatment Plant owned by Onadoga County on Hiawatha Boulevard. So the way that works is we build a pump station at that facility. We divert a portion of the treated effluent just before it's discharged to Onadoga Lake, and we convey that off-site a couple of blocks to this property, which is currently a vacant lot near the corner of Gettys and Van Rensselaer streets. At that location, we'd have this new construction building, which is largely a mechanical space. Um within that are heat exchangers. And the heat exchangers allow the wastewater to pass through on one side and a closed loop distribution to go on the other side. So you're not intermingling any water, you're just transferring heat across that boundary. The treated wastewater then goes back to where it came from at the treatment plant and is reintroduced to the uh outfall just a few feet further down the pipe from where it left. Meanwhile, on the other side of the heat exchanger within this facility, uh you have that closed loop system, and that involves constant circulation of water that is connected to customer buildings. And those customer buildings, much like how you connect to electric or gas, uh that supply water comes into the building and provides the thermal energy to that, and it's concentrated using a water source heat pump. So this is similar if you're familiar with geothermal heating and cooling, where residential property might have one or two wells, something of this scale would require hundreds and hundreds of wells.