Rome planning board approves revised Chobani site plan after questions on noise, traffic and water

The Rome Planning Board voted unanimously on Nov. 18 to approve a revised site plan for Chobani LLC’s dairy-processing facility at 150 Perimeter Road West, accepting technical studies and mitigation measures after more than two hours of presentation and public comment.

Kevin McAuliffe, an attorney for Chobani, told the board the amended plan moves some functions onto a leased portion of the county golf course to create “more of a campus feeling” and to resolve FAA sight-line constraints. “We’ve negotiated with the county to lease a portion of the golf course,” McAuliffe said during his presentation, describing two buildings connected by a pedestrian ‘‘connective corridor’’ and a separate fruit-processing building.

The revised layout increases the facility’s footprint from roughly 1.8 million square feet under the June approval to about 2.1 million square feet and adds a non-manufacturing gateway center that McAuliffe said could contain a daycare, cafeteria and visitor space. He said the plan does not increase manufacturing capacity over what was previously approved.

County and project engineers presented three mitigation packages: an earthen berm along the roadway (described by the team as 15 feet tall at the roadway edge) plus a second vegetated berm about 10 feet tall, a noise study showing estimated property-line levels near 49 decibels with the berm in place (the board cited a local nighttime property-line threshold of 55 dBA), and a dark-sky lighting plan that County staff said will keep illumination below 1 foot-candle at property boundaries. The petitioner also provided an odor analysis and said fermentation tanks would vent internally so that any odors would dissipate inside the building before reaching the exterior.

Rod Ives, the project’s civil/sound consultant, said the noise analysis used published sources for source levels (he cited roughly 88 dBA for a passing truck) and applied distance and berm attenuation; he said multiple trucks add only modest increments to measured levels (about 3 dB for two identical concurrent sources) and that snowplow operations were not specifically modeled because verifiable published dBA references for scraping were not used in the analysis.

Project staff said the operation was defined as a maximum of 500 truck trips per day (counting both inbound and outbound movements), with roughly half of those trips expected to serve the receiving building and the other half the warehouse. McAuliffe and county staff said buildout of production lines would be staged over several years rather than opened all at once.

County representatives told the board that Perimeter Road through the former golf course is county-owned private property today but that the portion of Perimeter Road between the planned roundabout at Route 825 and the Chobani access will be reconstructed and conveyed to the city as a public right of way with a 10-foot multiuse path; the county said the roundabout construction and a roughly 1,000-foot sound barrier near the Bell Road South neighborhood may cause temporary trail disruptions during spring construction but that connections will be restored.

Several residents raised concerns during the public-comment period. Kathy Stevens, who lives near Bell Road, asked whether an environmental impact study had been completed and said she had seen a figure that the plant would produce “300,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year,” noting limits of tree-planting as mitigation. "I do care about the environment," Stevens said. Another nearby resident, Richard Carmen, asked why the buildings were arranged in a semicircle rather than back-to-back, raised concerns about Jake-brake noise and queuing for truck drivers who must comply with federal hours-of-service rules.

County staff and Chobani representatives responded that the Oneida County Board of Legislators acted as lead agency for environmental review, issued SEQR negative declarations for the project in 2025, and that the FAA completed NEPA review and issued a Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) as part of its review. Garrett Wyckoff and other staff summarized the county’s SEQR/NEPA timeline and the materials submitted (noise, odor, lighting, traffic and water usage information).

A board member moved to approve the site plan "as presented," the motion was seconded and the board voted unanimously in favor. The planning board chair closed the meeting after the vote.

The approval allows the project to proceed to the permitting and construction phases, subject to all federal, state and local permits and continued compliance with the mitigation measures and monitoring the board discussed.