All seven of the developers who propose to build hyperscale AI data centers in Archbald should withdraw their applications and pitch their business in places where they won’t ruin neighborhoods, schools and public parks.
Don’t take my word for it. Ask Scranton Mayor and 8th Congressional District candidate Paige Cognetti.
I did.
“The projects that have been proposed in Archbald are already, from the jump, many months ago, almost a year ago in some cases, they’re done,” she said as we chatted over coffee on Thursday.
She had decaf, but didn’t act like it.
“Those (developers) should just leave. They should realize, if it’s not clear by now, and I’m not sure why it’s not clear by now, that these (proposals) aren’t going to work.”
The mayor said local official approvals of any of the Archbald projects would almost certainly be met with court challenges that could stall the process long enough to convince developers it isn’t worth the time and expense to keep pushing them.
“If for some reason they do get through a round of zoning or they get through some phase of some environmental review, there is no way that the people of Archbald, the people of Lackawanna County, the people of this region are going to just allow them to get built,” she said.
“It’s never going to happen.”
Some thought Paige taking a strong, clear stance on the data center invasion was never going to happen, a suspicion that overlooked a statement she made to Sunday Times Staff Writer Jeff Horvath for a story published May 19.
In it, the mayor lamented the region’s long, lopsided history of exploitation by “self-serving politicians and greedy corporations” and rightly tagged the data center invasion as “extraction, not development.”
“We have to figure out a way for small municipalities to hold the line against speculative developers,” she said. “There can be a path forward for some data centers to be built — responsibly, with all interests at the table, with local union labor, and far from homes, schools and recreation areas,” she said.
“But the approach has to be about protecting our way of life, real job growth, public health, and lowering energy costs while building energy capacity — the opposite of what we’ve seen from Rep. Bresnahan as he’s touted billions in nebulous ‘development’ by investment firms and personally profited from trading in data center stocks.”
Incumbent Republican Rep. Rob Bresnahan, R-Credo Technology (Google it), recently introduced the “Local Control Protection Act,” which contains many laudable proposed protections for communities under attack, but is practically meaningless unless and until it becomes law.
Paige pointed out that so far, calls and bills proposing a statewide moratorium have been politically useful to candidates seeking cover or political advantage, but have gone nowhere in the Legislature. Promises are easy. Policy takes real work and perseverance.
Paige attended several conditional use hearings in Archbald and Ransom Twp., including two at which she signed up to testify. The hearings ended without opportunity for public testimony, or her prospective 8th District constituents would have heard from her on data centers months ago.
“There are so many proposals in Archbald,” Paige said. “I wanted to understand more and hear from the residents and hear from this alleged company (Brooklyn-based Cornell Reality Management LLC).
“So I decided to kind of pick one project and follow it in person. I think I’ve been to four of the Wildcat Ridge (Data Center ‘Campus’) meetings. At the first couple, I didn’t sign up to speak. I just wanted to listen and understand what was being said on the dais.”
Paige said the often fantastical, always unbelievable testimony of Cornell’s alleged experts was as frustrating and insulting to her as it was to the residents seated around her.
The proposed mammoth data center development on West Mountain in Ransom Twp. is of particular concern for the mayor. The last thing Scranton’s flood-prone Keyser Valley neighborhood needs is to be downhill from still more impervious surfaces that swell the flow of stormwater.
Paige vowed to fight the Ransom Twp. development until the application is pulled or denied.
“We’re the city of Scranton,” the mayor said. “We will die trying, if we have to, to block data centers from being built on our city line literally on top of a mountain with our residents below where we already have a waterfall.”
Like Stop Archbald Data Centers, Paige is not against all data center development. She is passionately opposed to allowing developers to pave over communities in service to a cartoonishly speculative industry that has yet to prove its value to anyone other than luxury bunker billionaires and local landowners looking to get rich quick.
Paige is a Democrat. Gov. Josh Shapiro, the state’s top Democrat, is rightly taking flak for his early advocacy of widespread hyperscale data center development. My conversation with the mayor was about her stance on what she agreed is the moment’s most urgent practical and political issue.
If he wants to talk, the governor can call me.
It was a good, long chat, only slightly shorter than the average conditional use hearing. This space is too small to fit it all, but here’s a summary of what the mayor had to say about hyperscale data center development:
Data centers should never be built near homes, schools and public parks: “Make sure the site is not in a small town, not on top of a school district or a beloved state park,” she said. “The absurdity of the Archbald stuff is … I drove somebody around and showed them Wildcat Ridge, and they couldn’t believe it (could be considered for a 14-building data center development with 588 diesel generators).”
Data centers should always be built on land suitable for industrial use and away from homes, schools and public parks. Only proven, experienced developers should be considered for approval: “If we are going to have some of these, and I think that is the reality, they need to be in a select few brownfield/nuclear type of sites, and they need to be built by companies that know what they’re doing, that are not going to come in with 588 diesel generators,” she said.
No nondisclosure agreements, total transparency: “NDAs are exactly the original sin of these Archbald projects, and from what I can tell, all of the projects in our whole region,” she said. “In my view, if you can’t say who you are, you shouldn’t even be at the table trying to manipulate these local borough councils …”
No tax breaks for wealthy corporate tenants: “There should be no tax breaks,” she said. “I’ve spoken with a lot of folks about the tax breaks. I understand there is an argument, well, ‘you need carrots and sticks,’ but at this point, with this issue, the carrot would be allowing a project to go through at all in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”
Data centers that are approved should be built with local union labor and supply their own energy resources: “Make sure those jobs are going to go local,” she said. “(Developers should) work to show the people that you are going to produce your own energy, that it’s going to be closed-loop water (cooling) systems, that you are not going to pull from the grid and away from the businesses and people that live there.”
The state Department of Environmental Protection must live up to its name and mission: “DEP has been lackluster in my experience,” she said. “I think it is incumbent upon this state agency to ramp up and be extraordinarily serious about every single aspect of the air, the water, the groundwater quality, the noise, all of those pieces.”
Paige is inspired by the bipartisan resistance to the data center invasion: “It’s been really encouraging to me to be in the auditorium at Valley View with hundreds of people fighting for each other who have left their political stripes at home,” she said. “They are not there because they have any sort of political bent. They’re there because they care about their families and their community and their neighbors.
“So that has given me over these last many months renewed hope that we can do this. We can do this in America. We can work as communities to fight back when we’re being taken advantage of.”
Shortly after I bade good day to Paige, Sunday Times Staff Writer Frank Wilkes Lesnefsky broke the news that a second massive hyperscale data center development has been proposed on Bald Mountain in Ransom Twp.
I didn’t call the mayor with the news. As the invasion intensifies, I’m confident we’ll have plenty of other opportunities to chat.
CHRIS KELLY, The Times-Tribune columnist, is inspired by the resistance, too. Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook; and @chriskellyink on Bluesky.