Archbald council member Erin Owen refused to sit during a packed Nov. 24 borough meeting.
DATA CENTERS:
DEAL OR DILEMMA?
This three-day WVIA News series focuses on data center developments in Northeast Pennsylvania and how they could affect area communities.
● WEDNESDAY: What are data centers? Potential impacts on water supplies.
● THURSDAY: How data centers will affect energy grid, prices.
● TODAY: How communities are reacting, from protests to zoning regulations.
She chose to stand in solidarity with the many residents opposed to new zoning laws for data centers who sat on the floor, stood in the vestibule and live streamed the meeting in the cold outside of the borough building.
"The amendment in front of you today was dictated by private landowners and developers, not by the residents of Archbald,” borough resident Kayleigh Cornell said during the meeting.
Owen first heard about data centers only 11 months previously.
"At that time I wasn't concerned … They didn't come in and explain how large they were going to be and the impact it would have on the environment and the residents,” she said.
Brooklyn-based Cornell Realty Management was the first data center developer to answer questions during a public meeting on Jan. 8, 2025, according to borough meeting minutes. By May, residents were turning up to planning commission meetings to ask questions and express their concerns about data centers. Now, Cornell plans to build a data center campus on over 500 acres in Archbald, including at least 14 two-story buildings with 41 diesel generators each.
By November, Owen was one of two council members to vote against adding zoning overlay to properties that developers want to turn into large scale data center campuses with multiple buildings and generators and connect to public water sources.
A council vote on the overlay, which designated districts all over the borough for data centers, had failed the month before.
"I put a lot of time into this, educating myself, interviews, asking questions, listening to the public,” Owen said in the weeks after the meeting. “It took a lot of time, even disrupted my personal life as well.”
Council President Dave Moran and members Marie Andreoli and Richard Guman voted yes. Then-member Francis Burke also voted yes. John Shnipes III, who is now also off council, abstained. His family's property is involved in one of the data center developments, according to documents filed by Archbald I LLC.
Laura Lewis joined Owen in voting against the overlay.
Guman said recently that his yes vote was to put guardrails on the industry. Efforts to speak with the other members who voted in favor were not successful.
Archbald: Front and center but not alone
The borough in Lackawanna County is at the forefront of a battle between residents and developers who want to build five data center campuses in the 17-square-mile municipality.
Archbald has the most proposed data centers in one municipality in all of Pennsylvania. With a population of over 7,500 people in the Lackawanna River valley, Archbald is a mostly residential area that still bears scars from the coal mining industry.
But it's not just Archbald’s borough council that is faced with the issue.
Across the region, elected and appointed officials on planning commissions and zoning boards are typically first to hear about data center developments, consulting the law as they prepare to make decisions.
They’re also the front line to face upset residents from across the political spectrum who demand to know more about how the data center developments will impact their lives, while property owners — many with sale agreements — and the developers send hired lawyers to meetings with few answers.
Since early 2025, at least 67 meetings and/or hearings regarding data centers have been held in Northeast and Northcentral Pennsylvania by municipal bodies and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, according to Pennsylvania Public Notices. More meetings are scheduled this month and in March.
Most local government meetings that mention “data centers” in public notices or on municipal websites end up packed with residents.
One after another in Lackawanna, Luzerne, Monroe, Schuylkill and Carbon counties, as in other areas across the state and the country, residents line up during public comment to express their concerns about having the energy-intensive industry in their backyards.
Meanwhile, the federal government is pushing for investment in artificial intelligence and data center development.
"Data is sort of the new currency. It's the underlying thing that one needs to drive innovation in the world of artificial intelligence; having data is a strategic asset. It's like what oil used to be in terms of geopolitics, data is the new strategic currency,” U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick (R-Pa.) said at Lehigh University in December.
Pennsylvania is positioning itself as a state leader in the industry while state legislators grapple with regulating, or in some cases, deregulating, data center developments.
Gov. Josh Shapiro announced new standards to regulate the industry during his budget address on Tuesday.
Zoning plays a ‘significant role’
“Zoning controls the location of different land uses in a community, and may be used to restrict the types of uses to which land may be put and the intensity of the development,” according to PennState Extension. “Zoning can play a significant role in protecting critical features in a community, such as farms, rural villages, fragile environmental areas, or historic areas.”
Shelby A. Linton-Keddie is senior director of government, regulatory and external affairs for PPL Electric Utilities. Before coming to PPL, she worked for the Edison Electric Institute, the electric industry’s national trade organization.
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"Prior to about three years ago, the main place that we knew data centers existed was Northern Virginia," she said. "So I mean, the growth that we are experiencing here, and really in about 14 or 15 other states, is all kind of happening at the same time.”
That growth is catching many municipalities and their zoning laws off guard. Pennsylvania’s Municipal Planning Code, which went into effect in 1969, regulates zoning.
Data center developers usually introduce their plans to municipal planning commissions, then, if needed, request to amend or add zoning in the municipality. Everyone — municipal officials, residents, the press — has had to catch up on the nuances of zoning laws in Pennsylvania.
Archbald, like many municipalities across the region, did not have concise zoning laws to regulate data centers. The borough’s zoning was adopted in 2023. A line in the allowed uses in primary non-residential districts section mentions the facilities: “Data Center, which may include an Internet Server Building.”
Data centers, which store the brains of artificial intelligence and online computing, can be as small as a closet to bigger than a football field. The facilities run all day, every day.
Ransom Twp. recently faced a data center development zoning issue. The township’s zoning laws were written eight years ago.
James Murphy, the chairman of Ransom Township's planning commission, was asked by a lawyer for a business owner hoping to construct a data center campus if he agreed that the township’s current zoning laws do not provide for data centers as a use.
“I'm sure it doesn't, because when this was done in 2018, data centers were [just] a thought,” Murphy replied during a Jan. 20 hearing.
What is zoning? Why does it matter?
Despite winning the Revolutionary War over the British in the 18th century, most of the United States still operates under English Common Law, said Attorney Matthew Creme, president of the Pennsylvania Bar Association. Louisiana is the only exception.
Common Law, in its most basic form, is based on court decisions rather than codes or statutes, according to Thomson Reuters.
"And in English Common Law, a property owner can do whatever he or she wants, wherever he or she wants,” he said.
About 125 years ago, the United States Supreme Court determined that common law rights may be regulated by a reasonable exercise of government's police power, Creme said.
"Consequently, zoning is permitted to regulate that common law right,” he said. “That common law right may be regulated to protect the health, safety and general welfare of the community.”
Zoning ordinances have to provide for every possible use somewhere within a municipality, he said.
CLICK TO VIEW MAP:
Pennsylvania Data Center Proposal Tracker, created by NEPA Native Emilia Doda: https://www.padatacenterproposals.com/
"If you're going to limit data centers to the industrial zoning district, you have to have a fair amount of industrial land available for data centers,” he said. “And the criteria for data centers can't be so onerous that they're impossible to attain.”
And ordinances can be challenged, he pointed out.
“Whoever challenges the ordinance has the burden of establishing that the ordinance is unreasonable,” Creme said.
A recent local case is in Clifton Twp., Lackawanna County, where Doylestown-developer 1778 Rich Pike LLC filed a substantive validity challenge against the township’s zoning ordinance, which, in April, lacked anything to regulate data centers. Then, in May, township supervisors added rules to govern data centers. 1778 Rich Pike still argued that those rules were exclusionary to the industry.
Lawyers for the developer called expert witnesses to testify during four zoning hearings that the ordinance excluded data centers and the industry’s uses. The township solicitor, zoning hearing board members and residents granted party status were able to cross-examine the witnesses.
In November, Clifton Twp.'s Zoning Hearing Board ruled that its zoning laws were not exclusionary to data centers. 1778 Rich Pike appealed that ruling. The developer then settled the zoning issue with township supervisors on Jan. 2. Lackawanna County Judge Mark Powell signed the settlement on Jan. 5. Later in the month, the settlement was challenged in court by the zoning board, Penn Future, on behalf of the Trust for Public Land and Covington Twp., which later dropped a petition to intervene.
On Friday, Jan. 30, Powell rescinded his approval. Next steps for the zoning issue are unclear.
In January, Ransom Twp. Supervisors voted 2-1 to deny Scranton Materials LLC’s request for a zoning overlay amendment to their property to allow for the development of a data center campus.
The decision came after Attorney Laura Magnotta, representing her mother, argued that the company’s lawyers failed to provide anything other than their zoning application to the elected officials.
"This is a hearing, nothing's been heard. They haven't presented any evidence," she said during the Jan. 20 hearing.
Returning to Archbald, council members there passed the controversial zoning overlay on Nov. 24, which essentially adds, or layers, another “use” onto a property. The borough’s overlay is on top of properties that have been proposed as data center campus sites.
Scranton Materials LLC also sought a zoning overlay for its stone quarry in Ransom Twp.
"An overlay district creates a duality on a property; the underlying zoning remains in place, and on top of that is the overlay zoning,” Creme said.
"By proposing an overlay, what they're doing is they want to have it both ways,” he said. “They're saying … we want to continue operating under the same set of regulations as we've always operated under. We don't want any additional regulations on us. We just want what we've always had. But if somebody shows up and wants to build a data center, we want them to have the benefits of the overlay district as a choice.”
Why NEPA? 'Power, fiber, zoning.'
John Augustine is president/CEO of Penn's Northeast. The nine-county regional economic development organization works with local chambers, utility companies and private companies.
"It's a very simple mission. The goal is to attract quality employers to Northeastern Pennsylvania,” he said.
Augustine said the organization has been “bullish” about data centers.
"We believe that there's great potential, just like with the Marcellus Shale, if it's done the right way in the beginning,” he said.
In December, he said they had signed eight nondisclosure agreements with data center developers. He believes that only about a third of the more than 20 projects that are proposed will actually happen.
Augustine said there are many things that make Northeast Pennsylvania attractive to data center developers.
"The fact that we have a nuclear power plant is one of the absolute top reasons that people companies are looking at Northeastern Pennsylvania,” he said. “There is a tremendous amount of infrastructure already existing to be able to carry that electricity throughout the region, intrastate and interstate.”
He said the region’s temperature is also attractive to developers.
"A lot of money is being spent on cooling … our ambient temperature is, you know, 20 degrees less than Texas. It's even 10 degrees less than Loudoun County [Virginia]. So in theory, conceivably from October to March, the building can literally open the windows and cool.”
Augustine said the region also has a good, reliable workforce. Institutions like Luzerne County Community College and Lackawanna College are also investing in tech careers to provide students with skills to build and/or work in data centers.
David Tolson is president and CEO of Washington, D.C.-based DBT-DATA. The Wayne County native has been developing data centers since 2007. WVIA News met him during a Dec. 10 trip to Loudoun County, Virginia with the Greater Scranton Chamber of Commerce.
"Essentially, we all have a supercomputer in our pocket, and that supercomputer uses a ton of electricity. And so there's a shortage of electricity nationwide, globally, and Northeastern Pennsylvania does have excess power on the grid,” he said.
Tolson, who has two letters of intent in Lackawanna County, said when researching areas to place a data center, they look for “power, fiber and zoning.”
"And so historically, even three years ago, a data center in Northeastern Pennsylvania just never would have hit anybody's radar screen in the entire industry,” he said. “But now the data centers, the users, the cloud providers, they're going wherever they can find power.”
Dan Diorio is a Poconos native and vice president of state policy for the Data Center Coalition, an industry trade group.
He said Pennsylvania is emerging as a strong competitive marketplace for data center development, which is a fast moving industry.
The state has a good tax and regulatory climate conducive to development, he said.
"You have available power, you have available fiber infrastructure, you have available water infrastructure, if necessary, land, [and] importantly, a strong workforce, especially on the construction and skilled trade side,” he said, “and then a burgeoning tech economy as well.”
Diorio said every company is different.
"Each company will approach it differently, but certainly working with local leaders to ensure that the project will fit their economic development needs and also fit the needs of the community in terms of, you know, revenue generated, in terms of jobs generated, you know, that's really the key,” he said. “And the key, I think again, is just broad stakeholder engagement to ensure that questions can be answered and the project can be fully understood.”
Are data centers an economic boost for NEPA?
Augustine said simply put, data centers can bring jobs and tax revenue to Northeast Pennsylvania.
"It's not going away. And if not us, then who?” he said.
Augustine said as an economic developer, he does not want to miss out on what he calls a generational opportunity.
"We need to be ready as economic developers to take advantage of any opportunity that we see. We again, we got to make sure that it's done right," he said. "We also may want to make sure that we don't out-zone ourselves, meaning we don't create legislation or regular regulations that are so difficult that we push perspective and future development away from us, like other states have.”
Bob Durkin is president/CEO of the Greater Scranton Chamber of Commerce. He's been on calls with chamber representatives across the country who also have data center proposals in their communities.
He said the market dictates what is hot.
“The reason data centers are hot here and every place else, is not only because of the continuous growth of technology in the world, but it's AI, right? Once AI doors opened in the last several years, that's where the incredibly rapid exponential need for cloud computing and data centers,” he said. “We're reacting just like everybody else, where the industry is coming to us."
Residents and others raise concerns, seek more information
Residents, however, are more concerned about the environment and their quality of life than the revenue from data centers.
“The proposed data center campus would upend this quiet community,” Louise Troutman, executive director of Pocono Heritage Land Trust, said in September during a Clifton Twp. meeting, where a data center is planned. “It would destroy the rural character of our area, degrade the environment, cause light and noise pollution, increase everyone's electric bills and decimate property values.”
"Can you live with yourself down the road, if you hear of even one child's diagnosis of an illness that is a known concern with these data centers, can you live with this knowing you have made even one child's life worse, a child you have a moral obligation to protect?” Janessa Bednash asked Archbald council in November.
“As a member of this town council, I can assure you, whatever justification you are using to vote yes, and whatever you've been telling yourself so you can sleep at night leading up to this vote, will not carry you through your days and nights," Bednash said. "There is no moral or ethical justification that can be given to defend this voluntary negligence. There is no amount of money that is worth this voluntary negligence.”
No one responded to Bednash's remarks.
Residents are not the only people frustrated when concerns go unanswered.
Augustine said even Penn’s Northeast has issues with transparency from developers.
"One of the disappointments we've had with a lot of the data centers is that they haven't really been forthcoming in details. There's NDAs all over the place," he said. We dealt with a company two years ago who has proposed a data center in Northeastern Pennsylvania. We were dealing with two different consultants from two different companies, two different NDAs. After three months, I realized they were both working for the same company.”
Shapiro discussed industry transparency during his budget address on Tuesday.
“Too many of these projects have been shrouded in secrecy, with local communities left in the dark about who is coming in and what they’re building,” the governor said. “That needs to change.”
Shapiro proposed that developers commit to strict transparency standards and direct community engagement.
Old Dominion’s lore in the Keystone State
Residents of the Mid Valley and southern Luzerne County fear their communities will be turned into another Data Center Alley, like in Loudoun County, Virginia. The first data center was built there in 2008.
In early December, the Greater Scranton Chamber of Commerce organized a bus trip to Data Center Alley — about 231 miles south of Scranton, down Interstate 81.
Members of Jessup and Archbald borough councils, chamber employees, including Durkin, representatives from Lackawanna County and utilities, as well as local press, took the trip to Virginia for the day. Tolson hosted the group.
Loudoun has the highest concentration of data centers in the world, with about 200 in operation, with around 70 either in the advanced planning permitting or under construction stage, said Caleb Kershner, one of nine members of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors.
One of the main concerns of residents, especially in Archbald, is the close proximity of the data center campuses to their homes. They question how loud data centers, which need to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, hum and how that will impact their quality of life.
Buddy Rizer, the executive director for economic development in the county, is known as the “godfather of Data Center Alley."
He said that if they have to be near homes, the centers should be set back 500 to 1,000 feet from residences.
Augustine shares a similar sentiment.
"Being next to a neighborhood is not the right place for a data center to be, just like I wouldn't want a large manufacturing facility next to my house. That's the whole reason why we have industrial parks,” he said.
However, Durkin said that when data centers started building in Loudoun County, it was mostly rural or agricultural space. The homes moved around the industry.
“It's the reverse in Lackawanna County, the residential areas are here now, and now you're looking to build,” he said. “And so, when they said, 'don't build them near residential areas,' that's great, but it's a different situation [here].”
In Virginia, Rizer warned officials of the “land speculator.”
“You can pick up newspapers every day, and somebody else is announcing the gigawatt campus here, a gigawatt campus there, 50% of them will never get built,” he said. “Just because somebody has a farm, and somebody comes in, and they say ‘look, this could be a data center,’ just beware of the speculators, because that can be a challenge.”
Augustine said people have a right to be skeptical about a new industry, especially after how the coal mining industry left the region. Communities still deal with coal refuse piles and acid mine drainage in local waterways, such as the Lackawanna River.
"We're complaining about data center usage, and half the people that are complaining are using Facebook to do it. So there's irony there … it comes down to a balancing act and anything extreme is not good, right? Whether it's politics, whether it's religion, it's kind of, let's take it and do it the right way,” he said. “But I can see residents' concerns going you know, look at my backyard, look at this coal pile that I'm looking at that's been sitting here for 60 years. You know, what is this going to do to the environment? What is it going to do to the landscape? And so, yeah … it should be in everybody's, in the back of their mind, because we don't want to repeat the sins of the past. We don't want to just take, take and take and not give back.”
Residents left to wonder
Archbald residents recognize that the impact of data centers will be substantial and likely long-term in nature.
"A zoning overlay is not just land use language. It determines whether we protect neighborhoods, schools and families, or whether we open the door to industrial-scale development beside the places where people live and raise their children, and once an overlay is passed, you cannot undo it without a legal battle," Justin Healey said to borough council. He runs the Stop Archbald Data Centers group.
"Once a data center campus is built, it's permanent, 24/7 noise generator emissions, water, draw, grid strain, truck, traffic and emergency service impacts. This is not a small decision. Your highest duty is, and always has been, the health, safety and welfare of this community,” he said.
They also worried about obsolescence, including what happens when hyper-scale data centers are no longer needed on such a grand scale.
Amy Swingle asked about the future of the data center buildings during the November meeting.
The original computer occupied 1,800 square feet of floor space, was eight feet tall, 100 feet long and weighed 27 tons, she said.
“The modern equivalent of the original room-sized computer would now be smaller than a grain of rice, with some saying it would be barely visible,” she said. "We can only assume the data center, as massive as they are now, will soon become obsolete. What will become of these giant, concrete behemoths? What will we leave for our children and our grandchildren?”
In Virginia, Durkin said he learned that there is scrap value in the buildings.
"They're [developers] going to take all that's in those buildings and they're going to make money off that," he said. "You're left with shell buildings. Shell buildings are marketable and they will be marketable for whatever's next."
A part of Archbald's history
Healey and other residents proposed their own zoning ordinance amendment, which would move data centers away from homes and into the borough’s industrial district east of the Casey Highway.
The full council did not consider that amendment.
"Why wouldn't council discuss the amendment with more restrictions submitted by the residents?” resident Madonna Munley asked in November. “Without answers to any of these and other questions, residents have to wonder if council members are elected to represent the citizens of Archbald, and [if] they are not responding to the wishes of those citizens, who do they represent?”
According to the Pennsylvania Municipal Code, municipalities have 60 days from the date of a zoning application to conduct a hearing. If a hearing is not conducted within 60 days or an agreement is made to extend the timeframe, the application is deemed approved.
“Residents came in and did their due diligence. They worked so hard, gathering information, coming up with different zoning where to put its ideas,” Owen later said.
Data centers have caused tension not only between elected officials and residents but also on council, she said.
"I understood where they were coming from, why they wanted to go that route, because conditional use and having less data centers, I understood that part,” Owen said. “For me, I wanted to take a pause for months, what would be the rush and do an amendment to the zoning, at least give the opportunity that we exhausted every avenue to do so, and council didn't want to go that route.”
But like a united front in any fight, it has brought people in Archbald together.
"It was so refreshing to have so many people, residents, taxpayers, at our meetings. Some I had never seen their faces, I didn't know their names that live in my community, and the residents who worked together got a gift,” Owen said. “People they passed by or never met, they made friends along the way … People came out of their comfort zone who were not vocal. I was shocked to see them. They spoke so eloquently. They didn't fight, yell, scream. They were so professional."
"This will go down in the borough history," she said. "This will be recognized.”
