Effort to Fast-Track Semiconductor Manufacturing Faces Community Pushback

On a snowy Friday in January, dignitaries from both political parties braved the chill of a central New York winter for the groundbreaking ceremony of Micron Technology’s planned $100 billion manufacturing complex in Clay, a town not far from Syracuse. Over the next 20 years, Micron is promising the region thousands of jobs and the revitalization of a community hard hit by the decline of manufacturing.

Since President Joe Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act in 2022, billions of public dollars have flowed into domestic semiconductor manufacturing as the United States seeks to revitalize an industry that was born in the U.S. before it was largely outsourced to East Asia. Both Democrats and Republicans have argued that domestic chip production is essential to national security, citing the role advanced semiconductors play in military systems as well as in critical infrastructure like financial and telecommunications networks.

In order to expedite the development of up to four fabrication plants in central New York state, Micron may receive as much as $25 billion in public subsidies, including $6.1 billion from the federal CHIPS Act, $5.5 billion from New York state and billions more in refundable manufacturing tax credits.

But some residents and advocates question whether the Micron project, as it’s currently planned, will bring more harm than good. The facility will consume vast amounts of water and energy while producing substantial hazardous waste, according to the company’s environmental impact statement. Emissions and contaminated wastewater and soil from the notoriously dirty semiconductor industry pose potential environmental and health risks for surrounding areas, while exposure to its toxic chemicals has been linked to cancers and reproductive harm. Community members want enforcement measures to ensure the company follows through on promised environmental safeguards and its pledge to create 9,000 jobs.  

“We’re not trying to stop any progress, but we don’t want this just bulldozed into our area,” said Gracia Roulan, a nurse practitioner who has lived in Clay all her life and is part of the local group Neighbors for a Better Micron. Roulan said advocates like her want to ensure the project is “truly better for the community,” and raised concerns about potential pollution of the local water system and the clearing of the “beautiful marshes all around the area,” which provide a home to endangered species. To make way for the new structures, the project will fill more than 200 acres of wetlands. 

For its part, the company touts the project’s benefits to the region, including a promise to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in education, worker training and affordable housing over the next two decades. “Micron is committed to being a great member of the community and a responsible environmental steward,” Anna Newby, a Micron spokesperson, said in an email to Capital & Main. The company has committed to developing new wetlands to offset those that will be destroyed. Newby said the environmental review process Micron undertook for its central New York project was “thorough.” 

Yet just hours before Micron broke ground, Neighbors for a Better Micron, alongside national worker advocacy group Jobs to Move America, filed a lawsuit against the project in New York Supreme Court for Albany County, arguing that the state permitting process was “unnecessarily rushed” and did not adequately consider public input.

The suit names Micron along with state and local agencies, contending that despite the state’s reputation for having some of the strongest environmental laws in the country, the review process fell short, particularly given the size and scope of the project.

“The lawsuit points to the agency’s failure to balance economic benefits and environmental harms,” said Meredith Stewart, litigation director at Jobs to Move America. She said the court should reverse the environmental approval and require agencies to revisit the impact of the project in order to ensure harms are adequately addressed. 

But in New York and elsewhere around the country, proponents of semiconductor projects would like to see less, not more, environmental review. Lawmakers in famously eco-friendly California recently approved legislation allowing semiconductor companies to bypass environmental impact studies.

In 2024, President Biden signed a law exempting most publicly funded semiconductor projects from federal environmental review, a move supporters said would speed construction and help the U.S. compete with China. Micron’s project nonetheless underwent federal — as well as state — scrutiny, with the federal review triggered by its impact on wetlands. Under the new law, the Commerce Department oversaw the federal process, and at Micron’s groundbreaking, Secretary Howard Lutnick praised his agency’s rapid pace.

“See, this groundbreaking only got scheduled at the end of December — because the Trump administration cleared out all of the environmental and other things that tend to get in the way,” Lutnick said.

The lawsuit brought by advocates asserts that community members were given insufficient time — just 32 business days — to review and provide public comment on an environmental impact statement that exceeds 700 pages or roughly 22,000 pages including supportive materials.

“Environmental review is one of the only levers that the public has to learn what the impact [of a project] might be on their community,” said Judith Barish, director of CHIPS Communities United, a coalition of unions and community groups advocating for a safer and more equitable semiconductor industry.

Some residents worry that the project will strain local infrastructure. When the project is completed, the company expects it to use 48 million gallons of water from Lake Ontario each day, enough to supply more than 585,000 homes. The county is developing a new wastewater treatment plant, and upgrading an existing one, to deal with the increase in volume. 

The project also poses risks to resident and worker health, advocates say, as the semiconductor industry has a well-documented history of toxic pollution. In order to transform raw silicon into the advanced components that power nearly all modern devices, chipmaking relies on hundreds of chemicals, many of them harmful.

One of the biggest culprits, according to advocates, is per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), so-called forever chemicals that do not easily break down in the environment and are central to semiconductor manufacturing. Communities near semiconductor manufacturing facilities have faced contamination of soil and groundwater, while workers in chip fabrication plants have reported elevated rates of cancers and reproductive health issues.

Beyond environmental risks, many activists say that Micron’s claims about the project’s benefits are vague or lack the teeth of enforcement. They would like to see the billions of dollars in subsidies awarded to the company conditioned on whether it delivers on its promise to create thousands of jobs. Advocates also want the company to hire from the community and are concerned they may simply import workers into the area.

A 2023 study found that more than a third of projects subsidized by state governments between 2004 and 2015 failed to meet their job creation goals. Researchers said the true figure may be higher because many states have weak disclosure requirements.

Roulan pointed to a history of industrial projects in the region that came with pledges to improve the community but instead left behind pollution, the most famous example being the now defunct Allied Corporation’s contamination of Syracuse’s Onondaga Lake, which contributed to the lake being designated a Superfund site. “We want development, we want to see jobs come here,” Roulan said. “But not at any cost.” 

Last month, a separate coalition of advocacy groups in the Syracuse area, including Jobs to Move America, launched an effort to urge Micron to sign a legally binding community benefits agreement, a contract negotiated between a private company and community stakeholders that outlines benefits and mitigations that the company agrees to provide. The group, Central New York United for Community Benefits, sent a letter to Micron’s CEO just days after the groundbreaking ceremony, requesting a meeting. 

A community benefits agreement, the group said, could help ensure strong wages and benefits for the project’s permanent workforce and protect residents’ access to clean air and water.

Micron has pledged to hire 80% of its initial construction workforce locally and to use a project labor agreement, ensuring unionized construction labor. Newby said in an email that the company had already invested more than $15 million in local organizations and educational institutions as part of its pledge to invest $250 million over 20 years in a state fund aimed at developing the semiconductor manufacturing workforce in central New York state as well as supporting “community needs” such as affordable housing.  

Meanwhile, Roulan is already seeing changes following the groundbreaking — “giant trees going out by the truckful” and “tons of traffic changes” around the area, which she said were signs of major disruption to come.

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