Lackawanna County Commissioner Bill Gaughan wants to know if the county could receive impact fees from the many proposed data centers in the area.
"If data centers place unique burdens on infrastructure, which I believe they will [on] utilities, emergency services, or [the] housing market, environmental systems, among many others, then it's entirely reasonable for the commonwealth to consider legislation that allows host counties to recover some of these costs,” he said.
Gaughan asked Lackawanna County Solicitor Paul James Walker to research whether state legislation is needed near the end of a commissioners meeting Wednesday.
"Which I believe, based on my initial review, it is, and what models exist in other states that would benefit counties,” he said.
Impact fees can be charged by government agencies to new or proposed developments. For example, the state established impact fees for the gas industry in 2012. The fees go to local governments.
Data centers across the region
In early 2025, proposed data center developments began to come before local borough and township officials. The industry is fast growing and fast moving and many municipalities did not have zoning laws regulating data centers. Developers are often from out of town, but the property owners and some of the lawyers are local.
Residents have taken up the cause to stop the developments from coming to their neighborhoods. They worry how the energy-intensive industry — which runs on tons of electricity and could use gallons of water to cool rows of servers — will impact the environment, their real estate values and their quality of life.
"This is something that we're hearing about now from almost every single person that I run into on the street. Everybody has some question or some concern about data centers,” Gaughan said.
Welby and Chermak weigh in
Lackawanna County Commissioner Thom Welby agreed.
“Everybody's concerned about the things that ... that we're reading about them," he said. “About them, being too close to a neighborhood, about their consumption of water, and about how it might affect our electricity costs in the future.”
Developers argue that data centers, often very large nondescript warehouse-like buildings, will bring jobs and tax revenue into communities. The centers need to be placed in areas that are close to power lines and internet infrastructure.
Commissioner Chris Chermak said he thinks about the economic development and growth that data centers could bring to the region.
"That I'm in favor of. There's a lot of money, tax money, to be gathered up by the county and by the municipalities, and the school districts,” he said.
Proposals around the county
There are four proposed data center campuses in Archbald, the most in all of Lackawanna County. Clifton and Covington townships are in the midst of legal issues with Doylestown-developer 1778 Rich Pike LLC. And stone quarry owner, Scranton Materials LLC, suffered a setback Tuesday after their application for a data center zoning overlay was denied by Ransom Twp. Supervisors.
Other campuses are proposed in Jessup and Dickson City in Lackawanna County, as well as in Carbon, Luzerne, Monroe, Montour, Schuylkill and Carbon counties.
"We stand today at one of those moments here in Lackawanna County, across this county, across Northeastern Pennsylvania and the entire state, we are being told that the future has arrived in the form of data centers, vast windowless buildings filled with servers, cables, cooling systems and generators,” Gaughan said. “We are told that they represent innovation, opportunity and prosperity, and I certainly understand the appeal, but our responsibility should be not to chase every trend that comes along, but to ask a more difficult question: progress for whom and at what cost?”
Chermak: ‘No legal right’ to stop developments
Chermak said other than providing an opinion, commissioners don’t have any legal right to stop data center developments in Lackawanna County. Each of the 40 municipalities have their own zoning laws.
“The county commissioners have zero authority over the municipality … we can't tell them they can't do this, or they can't do that if they follow the law within their zoning," he said.
Welby added that the Lackawanna County Regional Planning Commission can only make recommendations.
“The municipalities and zoning boards come to the planning commission to review the plans that they have for land use or development,” he said. “But all that the commission can do is make recommendations, and make recommendations with with huge emphasis on that they should not do this for 'x' reasons, and the municipality, any committee, whomever it is that comes to them, has the right legally, to just thumb their nose and say ‘well, okay, thanks, bye, bye’ and ‘we're doing it,’ It has no teeth.”
Welby, a former state representative, said that for the county to garner any financial benefit from the data centers other than taxes, new legislation would have to be passed at the state level.
No data centers in neighborhoods
Chermak said he is not for or against data centers.
“My main thing is, I don't want them next to a neighborhood,” he said. “I don't want a landfill next to a neighborhood, I don't want a trucking company next to a neighborhood.”
His great-grandfather and grandfather previously operated the stone quarry in Ransom Twp. where Scranton Materials LLC plans to build a six-building data center campus. Chermak's family no longer owns it.
“To me, that's not a good spot … I can't even see how you could do that there,” he said.
Chermak said there are spots in Lackawanna County for data centers, including near the Casey Highway where there are already warehouses.
Welby agreed with that location.
“But what effect will they have on our water and what effect might they have on our utility usage?” he asked.
Facilities that ‘few people will enter’
Gaughan offered his thoughts on the data center industry during the commissioners’ meeting.
He said that people in Lackawanna County, like many areas in Pennsylvania, are struggling with housing affordability.
“We're a county, like many others, trying to keep young families here. A county investing in parks, trails, neighborhoods and quality of life, and now we are being asked to devote large tracts of land, enormous amounts of water and massive electrical capacity to facilities that few people will ever enter, that employ relatively few permanent workers and that exist almost entirely to serve people and corporations someplace else.”
He said the data centers do not build neighborhoods, create downtowns or send children to schools.
“They hum, they consume, they extract, and then they lock the doors. This is not an argument against technology. It's an argument for balance, because a community cannot live in the cloud,” Gaughan said. “You can't raise a family in a server rack. You can't build a neighborhood out of backup generators. You can't replace a park, a home or a main street with a cooling tower, and call it economic development.”
