Multiple firms submitted proposals to conduct a study for Lackawanna County attempting to quantify the potential cumulative health and air quality impacts of proposed data center development here.
The county received three proposals for the project as of Friday’s deadline, submissions a committee of county officials will review before making a recommendation to commissioners tasked with approving a contract. It’s not clear how long that review process, which will include interviews, will take, but members of a large and growing local data center opposition movement have implored officials to move quickly on the study that could provide invaluable evidence in future legal fights over the controversial developments.
County Deputy Chief of Staff Traci Harte confirmed the number of proposals but declined to identify the firms that submitted them pending the review and eventual awarding of a contract.
Officials have been discussing the air quality and health impact assessment since early June, when Commissioner Bill Gaughan, a chief elected critic of data centers locally, first called for the county to explore commissioning the independent study. What impact proposed data center campuses and power plants might collectively have on residents’ health in the county that’s become a hotbed for the industry is a question that “has not been adequately answered,” he said at the time.
Gaughan subsequently solicited a $165,000 proposal for the study from EmPower Analytics Group, the firm behind an air quality and public health assessment that served as the foundation of the grassroots Stop Archbald Data Centers movement’s case against the Wildcat Ridge Data Center Campus proposed there. It estimated that Wildcat Ridge’s nearly 600 diesel backup generators would cause anywhere from $3.3 million to $124 million in annual health damages across the county, though an engineer consulting for the developer disputed the assessment’s findings.
The countywide project officials are pursuing would be similar but broader in scope, assessing the potential impact of all proposed data centers, power plants and related infrastructure in the county collectively. Lackawanna is currently home to more than a dozen proposed data center projects, with multiple proposals tied up in litigation, and several proposals to build power plants to accommodate the industry.
It was not clear Friday whether the three proposals the county received include a resubmission by EmPower.
Gaughan wanted the county to quickly move forward with EmPower, as did numerous data center opponents who packed a commissioners meeting early last month and beseeched the board to act expeditiously. Both Commissioners Thom Welby and Chris Chermak support the goals of a data center health impact study but were unwilling to immediately award a contract to EmPower, much to the crowd’s chagrin.
Welby and Chermak instead opted to solicit additional proposals, with the county formally issuing the RFP, or request for proposals, in mid-August with a submission deadline of Friday. Defending the move, both noted last month the RFP’s potential to deliver a stronger and possibly less-expensive study while acknowledging EmPower might still prove the best option.
Who might ultimately conduct the study and what it might find remains to be seen, but the passion and zeal of local data center opponents eager for any resource that aids in their fight shows no sign of abating.
When commissioners might award a contract for the project, and how long the project might take, also remains unclear. The project duration listed in the EmPower proposal Gaughan released in early August, prior to the county’s RFP, is about three to four months.