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Berkeley Heights Wants to Ban Data Centers Everywhere in Town. Does That Square With the Master Plan?

Ordinance 2026-13 would prohibit data centers in every zone in Berkeley Heights. On Wednesday, July 15, the Planning Board must say whether the ban is consistent with the 2022 Master Plan. We read the ordinance, the Master Plan, the zoning code, and the meeting record. Here is what the review is likely to find, and the questions residents should still ask.

By BerkeleyHeights.news
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On Wednesday, July 15, the Berkeley Heights Planning Board takes up a single big question: is the Township Council's proposed ban on data centers consistent with the town's Master Plan?

The answer matters because state law makes it matter. Before the Council can hold its final adoption vote on July 21, the Planning Board must review Ordinance 2026-13 and report any provisions that are inconsistent with the Master Plan. The town planner is expected to present that consistency analysis Wednesday night, and the Board plans to memorialize its position by resolution the same evening.

BerkeleyHeights.news read the full ordinance, the 2022 Master Plan (both volumes), the April 2020 Master Plan Reexamination Report, the current zoning code, and the video record of the June 9 and June 30 Council meetings. Our conclusion up front: the ban is very likely to be found consistent with the Master Plan — the strongest reading is that it locks in a prohibition that already exists implicitly in the zoning code — but there is a real tension with the Plan's economic development goals that residents should hear addressed on the record, and the ordinance has drafting defects the Board should flag before July 21.

How we got here

The push started with market interest, not abstract worry. Introducing the proposal at the Council's June 9 conference session, Councilwoman Susan Poage said there had been "rumblings" of data center interest in "large properties in our town," and that the word "revenue" prompted her to research the industry's impacts before any application landed. Council members Alvaro Medeiros and Andrew Moran spoke in support the same night; Moran framed it as ensuring "future development is consistent with our master plan and our vision." Public comment ran heavily supportive, with residents near the Murray Hill campus raising noise and water concerns.

The timeline so far:

  • June 9, 2026 — Conference session presentation: "Proposed Ordinance – Banning Data Centers."
  • June 30, 2026 — Council introduces Ordinance 2026-13 on first reading, along with a companion measure, Ordinance 2026-16, tightening how the code treats permitted and accessory uses and violations.
  • July 15, 2026 — Planning Board consistency review (7:30 PM, in person, Municipal Complex). Under N.J.S.A. 40:55D-26(a), the Board has 35 days from referral to send the Council a report identifying any inconsistencies with the Master Plan.
  • July 21, 2026 — Public hearing and final adoption vote scheduled before the Township Council.

What Ordinance 2026-13 actually does

The ordinance adds data centers to Section 6.4.1 of the zoning code — the list of "Uses Prohibited to All Zones" that already includes cannabis businesses, vape shops, and sexually oriented businesses. The new item defines a data center as "any facility, or portion thereof, primarily used for housing, operating, and maintaining computer servers and associated power distribution and cooling infrastructure, for the purpose of storing, processing, or transmitting digital data for third parties," and states that the term "includes co-location, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence training or inference facilities."

Ordinary server rooms that are "incidental and subordinate to a primary permitted use on the same lot" — the computer closet at an office, in plain terms — stay legal.

The findings section leans hard on environmental and cost impacts: Governor Sherrill's Executive Order No. 2 on electricity prices (average residential rates in New Jersey rose more than 33 percent from June 2023 to June 2025), legislative testimony that a large data center can draw 3 to 5 million gallons of water a day between cooling and power generation, plus noise, air pollution, tree loss, and aquifer depletion. It notes there were 5,381 data centers in the United States as of March 2024, 73 of them in New Jersey.

What Wednesday's review is — and is not

Two provisions of New Jersey's Municipal Land Use Law drive this week's process.

N.J.S.A. 40:55D-26(a) requires the Planning Board, before the Council adopts any development regulation, to report within 35 days on "any provisions in the proposed development regulation... which are inconsistent with the master plan." The Council can override the Board's recommendation, but only by a vote of a majority of its full membership, with reasons recorded.

N.J.S.A. 40:55D-62(a) requires that zoning ordinances be "substantially consistent with the land use plan element and the housing plan element" of the Master Plan. Even an inconsistent ordinance can still be adopted — by affirmative vote of a majority of the full Council, with the reasons set out in a separate resolution. With six council members publicly supportive and the ordinance introduced without dissent, that procedural bar would be easy to clear either way.

The New Jersey Supreme Court set the standard in Manalapan Realty v. Manalapan Township Committee (1995): "substantially consistent" tolerates some inconsistency, so long as the ordinance does not materially undermine the Master Plan's basic provisions and objectives. And an inconsistency finding is not a veto — planning boards elsewhere in New Jersey have found ordinances inconsistent and recommended adoption anyway.

So Wednesday is not an up-or-down vote on data centers. It is a professional planning judgment that shapes the record — and the record is what matters if a landowner ever sues.

The case that the ban is consistent

Four points make the consistency finding likely.

1. The Master Plan never mentions data centers. We ran a full-text search of both volumes of the 2022 Master Plan, adopted by the Planning Board on May 4, 2022. The phrase "data center" appears nowhere. A plan that never contemplated the use has no provision for a ban to "materially undermine." The 2020 Reexamination Report tells the same story: when it recommended the new MU zone for Connell Park, its list of contemplated uses — offices, research and development, housing, retail, hotels, entertainment — did not include data centers.

2. The ban changes almost nothing on the ground. Berkeley Heights zoning already works on a permission basis: Section 6.4.1.H prohibits, in every zone, "any uses not specifically permitted in Article 6.3." No zone lists data centers as a permitted use. The ordinance converts an implicit exclusion into an explicit one — the same belt-and-suspenders approach the Township took with cannabis businesses in 2021. An ordinance that preserves the status quo is consistent with a Master Plan that endorses the status quo.

3. The Master Plan explicitly endorses that status quo for the properties that matter. The land at stake is no mystery. The Plan's Land Use Element addresses the town's three big campuses by name: the roughly 150-acre Nokia Bell Labs property at 600 Mountain Avenue (OR zone), the roughly 150-acre Connell Park (OR-B and MU zones), and the 42-acre Summit Health campus (OR zone). It states: "The Township intends to maintain the existing zoning for all large non-residential/mixed-use properties, including the Nokia and Connell campuses," and warns that changes of use there "could represent major challenges to traffic, aesthetics, economic vitality, and the burden on public services."

4. The ordinance's stated purposes track the Plan's goals almost line by line. The Plan's vision statement makes "the protection of existing natural areas and open spaces... the top priority." Goal #1 promotes development patterns that "complement the existing character of the Township" and ties development to "the capacity of community facilities and services" — exactly the electricity, water, and infrastructure concerns the ordinance recites. Goals #3 and #4 cover natural beauty, quality of life, earth stewardship, and resiliency. A planner writing a consistency memo has ample material.

The tension the Board should address anyway

There is an honest counter-argument, and it deserves more than silence Wednesday night.

The same Master Plan sets an economic development goal to "establish a strong and diverse economic base" and to "attract new investment and improvements to underutilized and previously developed properties." Its vision casts Connell Park as "a regional hub for economic activity, anchored by leading institutions and companies in technology." The Nokia campus — whose developers, council members acknowledged on June 9, "have struggled" — is precisely the kind of underutilized property the Plan wants reinvestment in, and data centers are one of the few land uses currently bidding aggressively for large suburban office campuses.

The Plan's own prescription for those campuses was to be "proactive in formulating a land-use policy framework to guide any potential future change of use" — language about guiding reuse, not categorically forbidding a use. A permanent, all-zones ban forecloses one revenue-generating reuse without any site-specific study of whether, say, a small enclosed facility with strict noise and water standards could ever be acceptable.

None of this makes the ordinance inconsistent under the Manalapan standard — a ban on one never-contemplated use does not "materially undermine" an economic development goal that names offices, research, retail, and housing as its vehicles. But the consistency report will be a stronger document, and a better litigation shield, if it addresses the economic-base goal head-on instead of ignoring it.

What the ban changes in practice

Because of the zoning code's catch-all, a data center was never simply allowed here. But the current code left cracks an applicant could try to slip through. The OR zone permits "scientific, engineering or research laboratories" — and an operator could argue an "AI research campus" qualifies. The LI light industrial zone permits warehouses and distribution centers, electronics manufacturing, and everything the OR zone allows. Those interpretive fights would have been decided by a zoning officer or the Zoning Board.

The explicit ban ends the ambiguity. After adoption, any data center proposal would need a use variance under N.J.S.A. 40:55D-70(d) — one of the heaviest burdens in New Jersey land use law, requiring proof of special reasons plus proof that the use won't substantially impair the zone plan the Township just deliberately wrote it out of.

The drafting problems the Board should flag

Reading the ordinance closely, two defects stand out — both signs that portions were adapted from another town's model ordinance:

  • Wrong governing body. Several WHEREAS clauses attribute findings to "the Township Committee." Berkeley Heights has no Township Committee; it has a Township Council. A court reviewing a challenge will read the enacting record closely, and sloppy recitals undercut the "carefully considered local findings" the ban's defensibility depends on.
  • The "third parties" ambiguity. The definition covers facilities processing data "for third parties," and then says it "includes" AI training and inference facilities. A company building a server farm to train its own models — first-party use, no customers — could argue it falls outside the definition entirely. The catch-all in Section 6.4.1.H and companion Ordinance 2026-16 would likely still block it, but the cleanest fix is deleting or clarifying the third-party qualifier before final adoption.

Neither defect requires killing the ordinance. Both are the kind of thing a consistency review exists to catch, and the Board can recommend fixes in its report — the Council would need to weigh whether changes are substantial enough to require reintroduction before July 21.

The neighbors are moving too

Berkeley Heights is not acting alone. On July 9 — nine days after Berkeley Heights introduced its ban — Summit's Common Council unanimously introduced its own ordinance prohibiting dedicated data centers. Summit went further on the details: accessory data processing is capped at the lesser of 20 percent of a building's floor area or 1,000 square feet, and AI computing is prohibited even as an accessory use. Summit's final vote is scheduled for July 28.

The comparison cuts both ways. It shows Berkeley Heights inside an emerging Union County consensus rather than out on a limb. It also shows that a tighter, cap-based approach to the accessory carve-out was available — Berkeley Heights' "incidental and subordinate" language is more elastic, which means more discretion for future zoning officers and more room for future arguments.

What residents should ask Wednesday

  • Does the planner's report address the Master Plan's economic development goal and the Connell "regional hub" vision, or only the environmental goals that support the ban?
  • Will the Board recommend fixing the "Township Committee" recitals and the "third parties" ambiguity before the July 21 adoption vote?
  • Was there an actual data center inquiry for the Nokia campus or another property, and if so, what was it? The June 9 "rumblings" deserve a plain factual answer.
  • Does the Township have any estimate of the tax revenue being foregone, so the trade-off is made with open eyes rather than by default?
  • Should the accessory carve-out have a square-footage cap, as Summit chose, instead of the open-ended "incidental and subordinate" standard?

The bottom line

The Planning Board has a straightforward path to finding Ordinance 2026-13 consistent with the 2022 Master Plan: the Plan is silent on data centers, the ban preserves zoning the Plan explicitly says it wants maintained, and the ordinance's environmental purposes mirror the Plan's top-priority goals. If the planner's report says "consistent," that is a defensible professional judgment, not a rubber stamp.

But consistency review is also the last quality check before adoption. A report that engages the economic trade-off honestly, and a Board resolution that flags the drafting defects for repair, would leave Berkeley Heights with an ordinance that is not just popular — the June 9 hearing room was clearly behind it — but durable.

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