NY-17: The third in a series on the environmental stakes behind one of the nation’s most fiercely contested congressional races.

At 8, on her walk home from elementary school, Sylke Jackson would drop sticks, leaves and nut shells in Nyack Brook. They would soften and float along beside her, as if companions.

At 10, as Nyack Plaza was built to provide low-income housing, she remembers how the stream disappeared into a pipe. Her companions were replaced by the acetone fumes out of a budget cosmetics factory nearby. So, as a child, did she watch development force a change to her local landscape. 

Today, at 56, she said years of large development projects, benefiting from tax exemptions while impacting the local environment, have fatigued residents and bred mistrust. 

Now, in the closely watched U.S. House race in New York’s 17th Congressional District, which includes all of Rockland and Putnam counties and parts of Westchester and Dutchess counties, data center development has become a political flashpoint between U.S. Rep. Mike Lawler, Rockland’s Republican native son and a former New York state GOP leader, and his Democratic challenger Cait Conley, a decorated Army combat veteran who served on the National Security Council during the Biden administration. 

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