ALLENTOWN, Pa. – Allentown City Council voted unanimously Wednesday night to amend the data center zoning regulations that were put in place last month.
In late June, council was presented with the option of adopting zoning regulations for data centers to be effective immediately or pursuing a curative amendment process where the zoning ordinance would have been declared deficient and council would have had 180 days to correct the zoning ordinance.
Council opted to pass the zoning regulations for data centers, even though many members of the public called upon the body to take the curative amendment route.
Once the regulations were in place, council President Santo Napoli called a special meeting one week later to begin the process of making amendments to the regulations to make them stronger.
The amendments were part of what was known as Bill 52.
On Wednesday night, that process was completed when council held a legally required public hearing prior to the regular voting meeting.
“We recognize that data centers are an emerging and evolving land use,” Napoli said. “Bill 52 represents another step in refining the city’s regulations, and council expects to continue evaluating these standards as additional information and experience becomes available.”
“Bill 52 proposes several additional safeguards, including. removing data centers as a permitted use in the IG-Industrial General (zoning district) and limiting them to Industrial Manufacturing which is the IM (zoning) district,” he said.
Additional amendments include increasing the setback to 500 feet from residential or other sensitive land uses, establishing decommissioning requirements to ensure sites are properly restored if operation ceases, strengthening noise and vibrations standards, and requiring additional public notice regarding proposed data centers.
Planning Director Jennifer Gomez said a great deal of public feedback wanted to see the setbacks moved to 1,000 feet.
“We measured every possible variation, and we’ve identified every possible sensitive receptor,” Gomez said. “We tried it a few different ways and have learned that 500 feet seems to be the maximum that we can get and still have a legally defensible ordinance.”
Alicia Ruthrauff, a city resident and a speaker on behalf of the community group Lehigh Valley Stands Up, thanked council for the work done on the amendments.
“We really genuinely appreciate this, and all of these amendments are needed in this time where we’re seeing an absolutely unprecedented rise in these data center proposals, especially large and hyperscale proposals,” Ruthrauff said. “We’ve now seen at least seven proposals in the Lehigh Valley, and we know it’s going to keep going up, and our communities, our power grids, our water tables — they’re just they’re not equipped to handle this exponential increase.”
Councilmember Ce-Ce Gerlach said she never saw legislation be moved along so quickly.
“It takes months and months of a bureaucratic process, but this, this moved,” Gerlach said. “And it was because of the people showing up.”