Archbald Borough Council’s unanimous rejection of the Wildcat Ridge Data Center Campus application inspired a jubilant “Yellow Wave” of relief and hope that spread to targeted communities far and wide. The seven neighbors who honored their oaths and stood up against the industrialized annihilation of Archbald were hailed as Main Street heroes who struck a righteous blow to Wall Street villains.
The seven neighbors elected to Olyphant Borough Council are about to ditch their oaths in the surf and surrender to the undertow of deep pockets and shallow returns. It’s a good time to buy stock in torches and pitchforks. (Are you listening, Congressman Bresnahan?)
On Thursday, Olyphant Borough Council plans to vote to settle a lawsuit with developer ERCOR Triboro LLC and approve a “community benefits agreement” (CBA) that would pay Olyphant $101 million over 15 years. In exchange, residents get some tax and electricity bill relief and seven 80-foot-tall data centers and a substation sprawled across 470 acres. Olyphant’s neighbors up and down the valley get a share of the pollution and the reasonable fear of their elected officials selling them out for similarly shabby paydays.
For a borough with an annual budget of less than $5 million, $101 million over 15 years is a fortune. To data center developers, it’s peanuts. This CBA is a dollar-store distillation of the corporate formula for bypassing local control: If ya can’t beat ‘em, buy ‘em.
I lack the space to explore all the reasons council’s lopsided deal with ERCOR is a fire sale of the entire valley. Read Times-Tribune Staff Writer Frank Wilkes Lesnefsky’s exhaustive report for all the maddening details.
For now, I’ll stick to the basics. Council’s sellout to ERCOR ends a lawsuit filed to sideline public scrutiny of the project and skip the municipal process for earning approval altogether.
In a June lawsuit, ERCOR argued that because it received approval to build warehouses in 2022, it has a right to build data centers, which Olyphant zoning didn’t regulate then. ERCOR contended that the Triboro project is exempt from the conditional use process that exposed the Wildcat Ridge proposal as a disaster in flashy drag and no deal with Trader Joe’s.
First, any argument that equates data centers and warehouses is absurd. Hyperscale data centers are comparable to warehouses only in their size, construction and utility in storing vast stocks of valuable commodities. Data centers are designed to reduce all humans to digitized merchandise stowed on shelves and sold like pallets of paper towels, plastic cups and processed foods.
Warehouses win municipal government approval because they generate jobs and stimulate local economies well beyond the construction phase. Once a data center is built, it requires only a handful of human employees to operate while leeching off the local economy, gutting home values and poisoning public health.
ERCOR’s absurd argument is the equivalent of claiming that approval to build, say, a library, can be applied to building an “adult” bookstore. They’re both buildings with shelves, but only one sells sex toys.
The ERCOR lawsuit is as arrogant as it is absurd. The developer notes that requiring the project to navigate the conditional use process would require tiresome hearings to collect public testimony and hard evidence that would create a factual record proving the project’s compliance or noncompliance. Wildcat Ridge showed what a drag that can be.
Here’s a quote from ERCOR’S lawsuit, which I swear I’m not making up:
“Opponents to the conditional use application would then have the opportunity to present evidence and testimony in an attempt to demonstrate that the proposed uses would have some detrimental impact beyond what is normally expected from a data center use.
“Any person objecting to the application or decision by the Borough Council could file appeals to the Lackawanna County Court of Common Pleas and the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania and unduly delay and prejudice the delivery of an ongoing construction project.”
The audacity of this “argument” is breathtaking. The developer expressly requests that Olyphant Borough Council disenfranchise the public because due process would “unduly delay” their plans to franchise the public’s lives and livelihoods.
Initially, Olyphant rightly rejected ERCOR’s ridiculous attempt at an end-around and asked a judge to dismiss the lawsuit.
Then the two sides started bargaining. The third side wasn’t notified. The Mid Valley School District had no place at the table and will go hungry if council votes for the ERCOR CBA.
Aside from a school tax fund to lower homeowners’ costs, the Mid Valley School District gets no money from the CBA. None. Despite the obvious long-term impact and the district’s clear stakeholder status, district officials were not invited to participate in council’s “negotiations” with ERCOR. It’s mind-boggling that council opted to cut out the school district while cutting a deal that will earn Olyphant $101 million.
Unless you consider the extra cost to ERCOR for cutting the school district in and the flaming public unpopularity of the project and data centers in general. Until the deal was finalized, the fewer people in the know, the better. If council thought Frank breaking the news last week would amount to a “soft launch” that would give the public time to cool off by Thursday, I’ve got a library/”adult” bookstore to sell the borough.
I’m writing on an early Election Day deadline, so I don’t know whether the widely predicted “Blue Wave” materialized in Tuesday’s midterms. I know in my bones that a “Yellow Wave” is bound to crash into the Regal Room, 214 Lackawanna Ave., at 6 p.m. on Thursday.
It may be the only time residents have an opportunity to share their thoughts on the Triboro project and Olyphant Borough Council’s entirely elective, utterly indefensible fire sale of the “Queen City” for a pauper’s ransom.
CHRIS KELLY, The Times-Tribune columnist, will see you there. Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook; and @chriskellyink on Bluesky