Lackawanna County Commissioner Bill Gaughan delivered the first stump speech of his presumed 2027 reelection campaign on Wednesday night in the auditorium of Valley View High School.
One of at least 300 county residents who turned out for a “conditional use” hearing on the proposed Wildcat Ridge Data Center “Campus,” the Democratic commissioner echoed an agitated throng of “civilians” in imploring Archbald Borough Council to reject the application for the mammoth development.
“I’m here because the impacts on water, power and infrastructure, housing and land use from data centers ripple outward across the entire county, and those are the people that I represent,” Gaughan said. “This is not just another hearing. This is not just another development proposal. This is a question, I think, about who we are, and who we are willing to become.”
Gaughan received a unanimous standing ovation, which is remarkable considering some in the crowd no doubt resent him for his role in levying a 33% property tax increase made urgently necessary by the mismanagement of previous misadministrations.
Let Gaughan’s fiery speech and the jubilant cheers it elicited serve as empirical evidence that data centers are even more unpopular than tax hikes.
Democratic state Rep. Kyle Mullins, D-112, Blakely, stepped up next. He acknowledged that data centers are “part of our new world,” but he’d rather see them built in some other part of the world.
Mullins made it abundantly clear he is against data center development near homes, schools and public parks or anywhere else they pose threats to the environment, water and energy supply and quality of life.
“Let me be abundantly clear: This Wildcat Data Center proposal is inappropriate and unacceptable, from its sheer size to its proposed water and power usage, to the deforestation it would involve, to the unknown runoff of stormwater,” Mullins said. “This is why I oppose it and why people feel overwhelmed.”
Mullins didn’t get a standing ovation, but raucous applause said his comments were a welcome relief to his overwhelmed constituents.
Democratic Lackawanna County Controller Gary DiBileo — who is also president of Scranton’s Keyser Valley Neighborhood Association — joined Gaughan and Mullins in publicly denouncing invasive data center development. DiBileo — who was a leader in opposing a rejected but not-dead-yet data center proposal in Ransom Twp. — asked for a show of hands.
“Who here supports data centers?” he asked.
The crowd was silent. Not one of the 600-plus hands in the room was raised.
The Wildcat Ridge proposal includes 14 two-story buildings covering 5.6 million square feet above Archbald’s Sturges and Eynon sections. The words in the preceding sentence lack the dizzying experience of seeing drawings of the plan projected on a screen above the auditorium stage.
The more the startling enormity of the development was revealed, the more restless and rankled the crowd became. The more I read the room, the more I identified with the people in it.
The Wildcat Ridge project manager and an attorney representing Brooklyn-based Cornell Realty Management LLC shared details that drew gasps and guffaws from the crowd.
The full nuts and bolts are available in Sunday Times Staff Writer Frank Lesnefsky’s report, but I’ll share some that made me gasp and guffaw.
The project manager testified that designers included features that would minimize the aesthetic impacts of 14 buildings each the size of a Walmart Supercenter. Some of them will have “50-foot vegetative buffers.”
To me (a layman and professional absurdist), that sounds like an oversized salad bar or a community raised-bed garden. We also learned that the up to 41 generators in the project will be housed in “generator courtyards,” which sounds as innocuous and inviting as an ad for a new line of hotels by Marriott.
Water to cool the centers would be drawn from Lake Scranton via infrastructure that doesn’t yet exist, and the massive amount of projected water use may be mitigated by reclaiming mine water. Sounds good, but until someone successfully does it, using mine water to cool data centers is science fiction.
Beneath the sprawling monstrosity on the mountain, the project includes commercial space for “a Trader Joe’s, or something like that.”
I’m all for landing a Trader Joe’s, but not at the expense of paving every open space around it. An occasional day-trip to Quakertown for a couple of bags of frozen chicken-and-cilantro mini wontons is a mildly pricey errand, not a hardship.
The Wildcat Ridge team held up their end of the hearing, which will be reconvened. The process is likely to require multiple hearings. Cornell Realty Management LLC’s representatives are prepared, professional and patient. The contrast between them and the unprepared, amateurish and impatient pikers that got outlawyered in Ransom Twp. couldn’t have been more striking.
If you oppose the Wildcat Ridge Data Center “Campus,” don’t sleep on the team behind it. They’re here to win.
Game respects game. I don’t blame corporations for behaving like corporations. They exist to generate profits, not to “create jobs,” fill tax coffers or be “good neighbors” who are happy to “invest in communities.” The bottom line is always the bottom line.
Likewise, I understand (but don’t endorse) the motivation of landowners willing to sell out their neighbors for personal windfalls. If you’ve been sitting on a mostly worthless property that suddenly becomes prime real estate, it must seem like a winning lottery ticket you’d be a sucker not to redeem. Astronomically raising your bottom line with the stroke of a pen is a temptation most of us can’t comprehend and many would struggle to resist.
I do blame elected officials who play their constituents for suckers and choose to stay silent rather than redeem themselves in the arena. Officials who didn’t turn up for Wednesday’s hearing passed on an opportunity (and an obligation) to stand up for the public interest they swore oaths to serve.
Gaughan, Mullins and DiBileo seized the opportunity and honored their shared obligation. Any elected official who hopes to stay above (or below) the fray on invasive data center development and somehow be reelected may as well pin their hopes to recycled mine water.
Gaughan, Mullins and DiBileo demonstrated on Wednesday that they know their roles and responsibilities to the public interest and are not just willing but eager to fulfill them.
“For generations, this valley powered an industrial nation, and what did this region get in return? Black lung, collapsed mines, polluted water, abandoned land,” Gaughan said. “We know this story. We have lived this story. Outside industries came in, they took what they wanted, they left when they were done, and the people here paid the price.”
In politics, all uses are conditional. The political graveyard is littered with the clipped careers of ousted officials who failed or refused to read the room.
CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist, will see you at the next hearing. Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook; and @chriskellyink on Blue Sky Social.