During a town hall on Tuesday night, residents of Denver's Globeville and Elyria-Swansea neighborhoods demanded answers from city leaders, state officials, and business representatives about the impacts of a new data center bein g built in the area.CoreSite, the company building the data center, did not attend the town hall and cited safety concerns as the reason it refrained from participating. A spokesperson for CoreSite told Denver7 its leadership team was concerned after seeing social media conversations about the community event, but did not elaborate further.The company is currently constructing a 170,000-square-foot data center at Race Street and E. 49th Avenue in Denver, which will be one of three buildings as part of CoreSite's campus expansion in the city. However, many neighbors continue to have concerns about the data center's effects on pollution, utility bills, and water usage.During Tuesday's town hall, residents gathered expecting to get answers from CoreSite, but the company's absence left many neighbors frustrated."Honestly, it's frustrating, you know, because that's why people are here tonight," said Globeville resident Amber Vanmatre. "My main concern is, not only do you know the pollution from the data center, but also you know how it affects resources for the community, like how it is going to affect our bills when it comes to electricity and water?"Alfonso Espiro, a lifelong Globeville resident and organizer of the Globeville ElyriaSwansea (GES) Coalition, said this community meeting took months to set up."We had a very long back and forth with the company CoreSite to get them to commit to a public meeting," said Espiro. "But we learned today that they were not going to show up to this public meeting that was set up to have them be here. So we're extremely disappointed with that." WATCH IN THE PLAYER BELOW | Maggie Bryan covers Globeville town hall Data center developer skips out on town hall amid Globeville community concernsTownhall panelists included Denver City Councilmember Darrell Watson, an Xcel Energy representative, Denver Water, and state health and environment officials. In response to community questions, the state health department said it does not know all the health and environmental impacts of data centers something the department is studying as the city of Denver pauses new data center construction.On Monday, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston announced a moratorium on new data center construction in the city. The moratorium is intended to allow city leaders to establish proper guardrails and protections for neighborhoods, but it does not stop construction of CoreSite's data center in Globeville.Steve Beaty, a computer science professor at MSU Denver, said data centers are warehouses full of computers that store and process data, powering everyday technology such as GPS in cars and voice-to-text on phones."Anytime we say 'the cloud,' we're talking about a data center somewhere," said Beaty. "In order to have these intelligent apps, etc., that we're interacting with, they have to be trained. And the training part is like training a human being. You have to give it data and tell it what is right, tell it what is wrong, and so forth."Beaty said location matters to data center developers, such as CoreSite, which generally want to build infrastructure in urban areas where more electricity is available. He said data centers are nothing new, despite increased conversation and concern surrounding them."We've had those around for a long time, and in general, too, we always have had data centers. You have a lot of computers, you have a lot of needs, and a lot of it is simply electricity in and cooling in. And therefore, since the dawn of computer time, we've had these things," said Beaty. ...read more read less