A local planning board has approved a construction company's plan to build a large data center in Clifton, N.J., NorthJersey.com reported. The approval is tied to a set of conditions the board has imposed, that include mitigation of possible traffic congestion created by construction.

The Passaic County Planning Board required Russo Development (the construction company) to submit a plan for preventing congestion during the build-out of its 284,342-square-foot data center at Main Avenue and Allwood Road - location of the now-demolished Automatic Data Processing building.

This site is one of about 15 properties Russo owns in New Jersey, including industrial and office space.

One of the company's most notable recent data center deals in the state was announced in April, when managed service company Cervalis leased a 148,191-square-foot property from Russo, which provided about 50,000 square feet of data center space. That facility is located in Totowa.

New Jersey saw strong activity in its data center sector in 2009, according to commercial real estate advisory firm Grubb & Ellis. Besides the Russo projects, major projects in the state include a 400,000-square-foot NYSE Euronext data center in Mahwah, completion of the new 163,000-square-foot Switch and Data facility in North Bergen and resuming of construction by DuPont Fabros of its 85,600-square-foot data center in Piscataway.

Switch and Data was recently acquired by Equinix.