Governor Shapiro came face-to-face with some Archbald residents who turned out to share their concerns about the many data centers planned for their community.

BLAKELY, Pa. — It’s a battle that’s been fought for over a year at zoning hearings and Archbald Borough Council meetings. The battle to stop data center development.

On Wednesday, Governor Josh Shapiro got to hear from those who’ve been fighting it at State Representative Kyle Mullins’s office in Blakely.

Governor Shapiro says, “I asked him if I could come here to his district and have the opportunity to visit with some of the folks who’ve been on the frontlines of this really heated conversation.”



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One concern was the impact that dozens of data centers built in just one borough could have on residents.

“One of our main concerns was the cumulative effects, and he did understand where we were coming from as well as the zoning and land use, how they’re next to homes, parks, and schools, and not in an I-2 industrial zone,” Archbald Resident Mike Pilch says. 

Currently, the state Department of Environmental Protection evaluates a project’s impact on an individual basis.

“One of the things Sam Robinson, my deputy chief of staff who’s here with me today, and I are going to do when we get back, is figure out how we can legally look at these in the totality of their impact as opposed to one building there, one building there, one building there,” says Shapiro. 

Shapiro also talked about the grid, which stands for the governor’s responsible infrastructure development standards. It’s a set of stricter requirements that data center developers must meet, such as producing and paying for their own energy, creating a certain number of jobs, and increasing project transparency. 

Ignoring grid standards comes with a penalty.

“You won’t get your permits processed in any kind of timely manner. So that is going to make it a near impossibility for these developers to develop their projects here,” says Shapiro. 

Last year, Shapiro announced a 20 billion dollar deal with Amazon to build two data center campuses in Pennsylvania, one of them near Berwick. Shapiro says there’s a difference between Amazon’s data centers and the ones proposed in Archbald and Lackawanna County at large.

“They’re being built in areas where the local community representatives zone them to be built. What’s being proposed here is, I think, completely different, trying to build these facilities in the midst of residential communities,” Shapiro says.