History is riddled with the bitter ends of heedless leaders who rode into battle against insurmountable odds and got cut down by overwhelming opposition.
Custer at Little Big Horn.
Napoleon at Waterloo.
Dave Moran at Valley View High School.
Tuesday’s hearing on a wildly unpopular, obscenely invasive data center development almost certainly marked the end of the Archbald Borough Council president’s meager political career.
Let history record it as the “Wildcat Ridge Massacre.”
Moran’s mortal wound was self-inflicted. In an ill-fated attempt to quiet the rowdy, disruptive crowd packed into the school auditorium, he said the following, which I swear I am not making up:
“I thought Archbald was better than this.”
The collective gasp that filled the room was predictably followed by righteous rage from citizens who naturally bristled at being insulted by an official elected to represent them.
A crew from “CBS Sunday Morning” documented the moment. Some Sunday soon, Moran may be nationally infamous for his electoral last words.
For Moran and the developers, it was all downhill from there. The council president seemed destined to go down as the hearing’s star villain when Tom Shepstone, a consultant for Brooklyn-based Cornell Realty Management LLC, essentially said, “Hold my report.”
The report — which for some reason Shepstone neglected to sign — is the least believable thing I’ve sat through since a Trump stump speech. To hear Shepstone tell it, the Wildcat Ridge project is the best civic advancement since penicillin. It will create hundreds of high-paying jobs and new businesses, generate tens of millions in tax revenue, lure scores of young families to move into the borough and produce armies of new children to save the school district from costly declines in student enrollment.
Shepstone’s presentation was chock-full of numbers, all of them speculative and suspiciously spectacular. I’ve seen more convincing math scribbled on betting slips. The sources Shepstone bothered to cite were of equally dubious value. One was an AI search engine called “Perplexity.” I am not making that up, either.
Even if his sources were more trustworthy, Shepstone offered no details about the methodology (Alchemy? A seance? A dart board?) he used to conjure the fantastical projections he presented as practically guaranteed.
Shepstone’s tax-revenue projections were apparently derived by superimposing Virginia’s wildly progressive tax structure over Pennsylvania’s pro-exploiter system, which is like comparing Wagyu beef filet mignon to discount ground chuck. Virginia taxes every nut and bolt of a data center. Pennsylvania’s tax code is built to benefit developers, which is why they’re so hot to pave over the state.
Among the most valuable assets veteran local journalists acquire over time is “institutional knowledge,” which translates to long memories enriched by experience. We know where the “bodies” are buried. In many cases, we shoveled the dirt.
Shepstone and I go way back to the dawn of the fracking “boom” that was “guaranteed” to rain an eternal golden geyser of jobs and prosperity on poor old Pennsylvania. Shepstone is a longtime shill for the natural gas industry. He led the charge for fracking and used his blog to propagandize against skeptics who raised legitimate questions and concerns, including this newspaper.
More recently, Shepstone was an ardent cheerleader for the Lackawanna Energy Center, which is sited in Jessup but an inescapable eyesore and environmental irritant to most of the Midvalley. He said the LEC would generate scores of jobs, mountains of tax revenue and cheaper utility costs. Whatever the plant’s realized benefits to some, I’ve yet to meet a neighbor who’s happy it’s there.
Call me a cynic (I’m used to it), but I see an obvious conflict of interest in Shepstone working as a paid planner for a municipality and a paid consultant for a developer in the space of 2½ miles.
As Dickson City borough planner, Shepstone helped write the data center zoning ordinance amendment that essentially froze out his data center client’s competition. In his work for the borough, Shepstone judged Bell Mountain unsuitable for building data centers.
“What we’ve come up with here is an ordinance that we think is practical and defensible,” Shepstone said in February. “It may not please some of the developers, but it’s something we feel is going to accomplish the objectives of the borough council, which are to protect the interests of the community.”
In his work for Cornell Realty Management, Shepstone judged the Wildcat Ridge site — 2½ miles up the same mountain range — as the perfect home for a “campus” of 14 buildings each the size of a Walmart Supercenter.
Who’s side is Shepstone on? That’s debatable, but he is certainly not on the side of the community his developer bosses are here to exploit. The 400-plus citizens who swamped the hearing know this in their bones. The opposition is unlike any I’ve ever seen over 30-plus years in local journalism. It is bipartisan, united and too educated on the sordid realities of the data center scourge emerging elsewhere to buy the bunk Shepstone was selling.
The opposition knows the paltry number of permanent jobs data centers actually create, that property values will surely sink while utility bills soar, that quality of life and health outcomes will be irreparably damaged and that no sane family would choose to move into a borough and school district with all the curb appeal of a haunted mausoleum.
The opposition is powered by people who see through the cartoonishly speculative “rewards” promised by developers and a pitchman working both sides of the mountain. They live downhill from there.
In spite of himself (and his constituents), Dave Moran inadvertently articulated the gospel truth that animates the opposition to the Wildcat Ridge project and invasive data center development anywhere in our valley.
Archbald is better than this. Moran and his council colleagues have a duty to live up to that.
CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist, believes every community in our valley is better than this. Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook; and @chriskellyink on Bluesky.