University of Scranton Professor Will Cohen and activist Tamara Misewicz-Healey handed a mic back and forth to each other while riding in the front of a yellow school bus from Scranton to Archbald.
Riders wore headphones, typically used for silent discos, and listened while Cohen offered insight into Pope Leo XIV’s thoughts on Artificial Intelligence. He read from the pope’s Encyclical Letter “Magnifica Humanitas” about safeguarding the human person in the era of Artificial Intelligence.
Misewicz-Healey, who cofounded the Stop Archbald Data Centers group, pointed out the widow of the packed bus. She directed the riders to look at leveled trees on mountains where data center campuses are planned — but not yet approved — throughout Lackawanna County’s Mid Valley.
"We can change rules. We can change legislation. We can pressure legislators,” she said. “So it's really important to start kind of paying attention and seeing what rules aren't that great, or that protected, or could be improved, and raising awareness around it.”
Cohen, a theology professor, is co-founder of Christians for the Common Good, a reading and discussion group at the Jesuit university. The group ran the bus trip alongside other religious and academic groups to see some of the land already being prepared for data center construction.
The trip was open to the public and university students to learn about the proliferation of data center campus proposals in Archbald and how community memebrs are fighting back against the plans they believe will impact the environment, their health and quality of life.
"There's a whole notion of discernment in Jesuit education … but it has to do with really being contemplative and taking in all the information that we can in order to make a reasoned and faithful decision, faithful to the common good, to our neighbors whom we're called to love," Cohen said.
Across Pennsylvania, and the country, developers including tech giants like Amazon and Meta, are building or developing data centers for a variety of reasons, including storing the brains of artificial intelligence.
Cohen asked the riders to think about AI’s real-life implications.
"The impacts have been really pretty extraordinary already in terms of how much our neighbors in the community have had to stretch themselves, sometimes maybe near to the point of exhaustion,” he said.
Developments outside of Archbald
As the bus made its way northeast off Interstate 81 and onto Route 6, wrapping around the Keystone Sanitary Landfill, before exiting onto Marshwood Road, Cohen promised the group would learn more from Misewicz-Healey than the Pope’s letter.
"Pope Leo would want that because Tamara has very concrete information on the ground,” he said.
The bus moved up Moosic Mountain. Misewicz-Healey pointed to acres of clear-cut land for a proposed data center site in Olyphant.
It turned onto Moosic Lake Road and headed towards the Valley View Business Park in Jessup, which is owned by the Scranton Lackawanna Industrial Business Company (SLIBCO).
SLIBCO sold almost 81 acres of industrial land to PNK Group, through its DC VV LLC, for a data center campus.
The trip made its way back on Route 6 and past the Lackawanna Energy Center natural gas power plant, also in Jessup.
"This is one of the largest natural gas power plants in the state. It produces 1,400 megawatts of power,” Misewicz-Healey said.
The Lackawanna Energy Center does not produce enough power to run the proposed Wildcat Ridge Data Center Campus in Archbald, she said, which would need 1,600 megawatts to power its 14-building campus.
The bus then headed past the tour’s first proposed data center location in Archbald, the seven-building L-shaped Project Green Mountain Data Center.
"Now we're happier with that project that it's located out of the community,” she said. Green Mountain is mostly in the borough's industrial zone and away from homes, businesses and schools.
Misewicz-Healey said there are still major concerns. Part of the property for that data center campus is on resource conservation land. There’s also active mining in the area.
Confronting limits
Down into the valley, Misewicz-Healey pointed out Valley View Estates, a mobile park home with an uncertain future because of the proposed Project Gravity Data Center Campus.
Closer to the park, a former junkyard is leveled out for Project Boson, a one-building data center campus. The land is considered a brownfield site because of its past.
"Both sides of this road are going to be fully, fully developed with hyperscale data centers if they get approved," Misewicz-Healey said.
As the tour headed to Ed Staback Park in Archbald, Cohen offered one more insight from Pope Leo.
The pope says that everything “with a limit is seen as a defect that needs to be corrected.”
"This notion that there are no limits — we'll take whatever water we need, we'll you know, power up however many plants we need to power up, there are no limits — is something that we're really trying to confront today,” Cohen said.
The Wildcat
The bus turned into the park, which Misewicz-Healey called the "epicenter" of the buildout for hyperscale data centers in Archbald.
"If you look up there, that mountain right there, that beautiful mountain, you can see the power lines on it. That's the Wildcat Ridge Mountain, and they want to clear that entire ridge and put a 14-building hyperscale data center on the mountain,” she said.
The group groaned.
Off the bus, Misewicz-Healey answered questions from the group in a parking lot. They wondered “why Archbald?”
The borough has the most data center campus proposals of any other municipality in the state.
"They look for the power infrastructure. If it's already in place, that is phenomenal," she said. "I can't look at high-powered lines now, and not literally get a pit in my stomach.”
High-voltage power lines cut across the borough.
She said developers also seek areas with cooler temperatures and lots of water.
"They look at Pennsylvania as having a good source of fresh water available for them. They also want the land availability, cheap land, and last but not least, tax structure that benefits them," she said.
Before the group got back on the bus to continue the tour, Misewicz-Healey had one last thought from the park. She pointed to a baseball field.
"The Archbald I Data Center actually overlaps onto the field. We have no idea how that happened, but basically I guess they own some of that land, and if they build it out exactly, it could come onto that field. That's how close it is to all of this," she said.
'Dictatorship of hidden interests'
Trees on Project Gravity’s land along Business Route 6 are cut down to their stumps. The property bumps up against borough homes.
While they passed the site, Cohen asked Misewicz-Healey to explain how Archbald’s zoning allows for the developments.
"So there was incredible frustration in Archbald between the community and our local government,” she said.
She said the developers had a hand in crafting the data center zoning ordinance, which a split board approved in November.
"The very local laws that are supposed to be put in place to protect us, to serve us, to ensure the integrity of our town was being written by the industry itself," Misewicz-Healey said.
Cohen said Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pope, had a phrase for this.
“He called it the dictatorship of hidden interests,” he said.
The makeup of Archbald Borough Council has now changed.
"Now they're asking tough questions. They're not just catering to the industry anymore.” Misewicz-Healey said.
At church
The bus’ last stop was at St. Mary of Czestochowa parish hall. The group got off for pizza and to meet and chat with some other members of the Archbald community who are fighting the developments.
Janessa Bednash, who lives in Jermyn close to the proposed data center campuses, stood in front of a cardboard project board that she made. The board is full of information on the six data center campus proposals.
"I know more about town code and ingresses and egresses than I ever intended on knowing," she said. "I miss my little naive bubble that I used to live in that everything was just okay, but it's really opened up my eyes to be much more vigilant as far as the local level.”
A person in the group asked if the data centers are all “done deals.”
Bednash said that is one of their group's favorite questions.
"I am more than happy to say that not a single one of these is, and I genuinely think that we could stop these projects and have them just on the other side of the Casey in the heavy industrial area,” she said.
The community asked for the data centers to be allowed only in the borough’s industrial zone, where Project Green Mountain is planned, Bednash said.
"A lot of people think that we're anti-progress and we're like anti-AI completely. That's not the case," she said. "We just don't want them next to our homes, schools and parks. And I don't think that's an unreasonable thing to ask for. So I love that you asked that question.”
Pope Leo says in his letter “what is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating, and of protecting the opportunities for communities still to be able to participate and ask questions.”
Before the group boarded the bus and headed back to Scranton, the residents from Archbald and surrounding communities encouraged them to show up at meetings and hearings in all communities wrestling with plans for data centers.
"Having people show up, real people, again and again … is incredibly powerful,” Misewicz-Healey said.
