(The Center Square) – It is roughly 700 acres of beautiful, forested land in the Pocono Mountains, and in Rep. Doyle Heffley’s mind it is the last place people would want to see the construction of a data center.
But that is exactly the concept being floated by a developer in Penn Forest Township, Carbon County. To Heffley, it is the sort of proposal that Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro was talking about Tuesday when he signed an executive order seeking safeguards on data center development, and lambasted what he described as speculative troublemakers in the industry.
“It is a huge problem,” said Heffley, a Republican, on Wednesday. “Anybody who is getting a hundred acres of land is saying they will build a data center.”
Lawmakers on Wednesday continued to digest the content and ripple effects of the executive order from Shapiro, a Democrat. He previously was an outspoken supporter of artificial intelligence and the data centers necessary to run it.
The announcement came in the middle of a lengthy legislative break for the Democratic-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate. Nonetheless, lawmakers paid attention to Shapiro’s order, which among other things aimed to put local control at the forefront of decision-making on data centers.
Republican Sen. Rosemary Brown, whose district includes Monroe and parts of Wayne and Lackawanna counties, issued a statement on Wednesday that asked why Shapiro took so long to act.
“While I have been fighting for a year and a half in my district and Harrisburg to protect residents from unchecked data center development, the governor has been rolling out the red carpet across our Commonwealth,” Brown said. She said Shapiro’s executive order should have included a moratorium on data center development.
Democratic Sen. Lisa Boscola of Northampton County, who has voted with Republicans on a number of issues in the past, on Tuesday issued a statement in support of Shapiro’s move. Among the things she especially liked were the governor’s insistence that developers secure local approvals before state permitting advances, and provide detailed reports on energy and water use.
“This executive order is an important and necessary step,” Boscola said. “Now, the General Assembly should work together to codify these protections into law so they are clear, consistent, and durable for Pennsylvania ratepayers and communities.”
Another Democrat, Sen. Maria Collett of Montgomery County, cited community pushback on a data center proposal in her district.
“For over a year, residents in Plymouth Township have organized against a hyperscale data center,” Collett said. “They went to zoning hearings. They collected signatures. They asked hard questions while companies with billions in market value treated their neighborhood as a line item.”
The governor’s executive order, she said, proves “they’re on the right side of this fight.”
Heffley thinks lawmakers will have work to do on the issue when they return to Harrisburg in late September. In particular, he pointed to a bill that got bipartisan support in the House that would allow municipalities to call their own 180-day moratoriums on data center development.
“I wish we would have vetted this stuff through the legislative process, rather than have it through an executive order,” Heffley said. The overall situation, he said, is “a big mess.”
