A local data center developer wants to build a power plant on Eynon Jermyn Road in Archbald less than 1,000 feet from Staback Park and about half a mile from the Valley View Intermediate School.
Developer Jim Marzolino signed a zoning permit application dated March 12 for a 491,811-square-foot electric power generating plant on the west side of Eynon Jermyn Road. The proposed power plant site is across from the Highway Auto Parts junkyard where Marzolino applied last year to build a nearly 620,000-square-foot data center known as Project Boson. The Times-Tribune obtained the power plant zoning application and an accompanying site plan via a Right to Know Law request filed with the borough.
There are six data center campuses proposed in Archbald, amounting to 51 individual data centers. The majority of those facilities are sited in a less than a mile-long stretch of Eynon Jermyn Road and Business Route 6, spanning from Staback Park and the neighboring Archbald Pothole State Park north to the Jermyn border.
If every proposal moves forward, the borough will have 30 data centers and a power plant in that stretch, placing the facilities near parks, homes and schools.
Marzolino, who is the president of Kriger Construction, currently proposes to build data centers above Business Route 6 in Dickson City. He previously sought to build data centers in Blakely near Business Route 6 and Terrace Drive. He also sold 186 acres along Eynon Jermyn Road for the Project Gravity data center campus, which plans to build seven data centers.
A vehicle travels on Eynon Jermyn Road in Archbald near Staback Park Friday, March 209, 2026. (SEAN MCKEAG / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER)
A new power plant
The zoning application does not indicate how much electricity the power plant would generate, only describing it as “consisting of four 66,000-square-foot turbine pads with appropriate entrance and access roads.” The power plant would be up to 55 feet tall.
The 17-acre site falls into Archbald’s general industrial, or I-2, zoning district, which classifies electric power generating plants as conditional uses. The borough gave the same designation to data centers, which means the application will follow the same process as recent data center proposals. Representatives for the power plant will have to attend a public hearing to describe their project and how it will abide by the conditions the borough established for power plants. Borough council members, affected residents and their attorneys will have the chance to cross-examine the power plant’s witnesses, and residents will have the opportunity to testify for or against the project.
After testimony, council will vote to approve or deny the power plant.
The application does not explicitly describe what type of power plant it will be, but an on-site gas pad shown in the site plan indicates it will be a natural gas power plant. Although the site plan was not submitted to Archbald until March 12, it’s dated April 10, 2025.
Upon zoning approval, the power plant would submit a land development plan showing site work to remove the auto salvage/junkyard/retail parts sales from Highway Auto, including detailed site plans, according to the application.
Marzolino and his attorney, Mike Mey, applied for the power plant under the newly registered Essential Energy LLC. Mey, who is listed as the organizer of Essential Energy LLC, registered the limited liability company with the Pennsylvania Department of State on March 12 using his Mey & Sulla law firm’s address at 1144 E. Drinker St., Dunmore, according to a certificate of organization obtained by The Times-Tribune. Mey also represented Marzolino’s data center proposals in Blakely and Dickson City.
The application lists the property owner as PDC Realty LLC, 805 Enterprise St., Dickson City,. The Department of State’s business registry describes Marzolino as the governor of PDC Realty, with a principal address at 99 Power Blvd., Archbald, which is the business address of Kriger Construction Inc. and its affiliated NEPA Concrete & Asphalt plant.
PDC Realty acquired the Highway Auto Parts auto salvage yard for $1,575,000, totaling about 83.5 acres across 17 parcels, according to a property transaction recorded Aug. 8.
Attempts to reach Marzolino and Mey were unsuccessful Friday.
Data center background
Over the past year, Marzolino has been involved with at least four data center projects.
In August, he told The Times-Tribune his interest in data centers stemmed from a Bitcoin mining hobby, and that he had spent the past three years researching the industry. As of August, Marzolino reported having about 20 people in-house working on finding land, developing, planning and engineering data centers.
His earliest data center venture’s roots date back nearly three years when he purchased just over 186 acres along Eynon Jermyn Road from Louis and Dominick DeNaples’ Dunmore-based D&L Realty Company for $825,000, according to a property transaction recorded May 15, 2023. The following year on Oct. 15, 2024, he signed a memorandum of purchase and sale agreement on behalf of Five Up Realty LLC with Western Hospitality Partners — Jermyn LLC for what would become Project Gravity, which was recorded with the county Oct. 21, 2024. The memorandum predates Archbald’s earliest data center proposal in January 2025 for the Wildcat Ridge Data Center Campus.
Plans for Project Gravity became official April 2 when the developer submitted a sketch plan to the borough to build seven two-story data centers, each with a 138,000-square-foot footprint. The project includes purchasing the Valley View Estates mobile home park, displacing the park’s roughly three dozen residents.
Marzolino’s firm then sold the Project Gravity land to Archbald 25 Developer, formerly Western Hospitality Partners — Jermyn, for $12,025,000, according to a property transaction recorded Oct. 9. Archbald 25 Developer also paid Louis and Dominick DeNaples $10 million for the rights to the “coal and or coalbed methane” beneath Project Gravity, according to a deed recorded Dec. 12.
A week after Archbald received the Project Gravity sketch plan, in a zoning application dated April 10, Marzolino applied for the Archbald Data & Energy Center LLC at the site of the Highway Auto junkyard. The initial proposal sought three two-story data centers, each with a 150,000-square-foot footprint, but those plans were later consolidated into a single 619,925-square-foot data center known as Project Boson. The new plans, which The Times-Tribune obtained via a Right to Know Law request, are dated Aug. 18.
Mey approached Blakely’s planning commission Aug. 4 looking to rezone land below Business Route 6 and off Terrace Drive from a low-density residential district to allow for the construction of up to four two-story data centers, each with a roughly 150,000-square-foot footprint. Marzolino was co-developing that project with Alpesh “Al” Patel, most known for his Dunmore-based Al’s Quick Stop convenience stores, with both men owning portions of the roughly 200 acres where they proposed to build the data centers.
The project received significant pushback during an Aug. 13 public information session in Blakely. Marzolino and Patel withdrew their zoning application Sept. 12, just days before a scheduled public hearing on their proposal.
Finally, operating as Dickson City Development LLC, 99 Power Blvd., Archbald, another firm linked to Marzolino submitted plans in November to build data centers in Dickson City above Business Route 6. Mey and attorney Raymond Rinaldi then presented two proposals for data centers on behalf of Dickson City Development during a Jan. 21 public hearing in Dickson City. The attorneys argued that Dickson City already permitted data centers in its highway commercial zoning districts because of language allowing “data processing and record storage,” which they contended allows them to develop three data centers above the site of a proposed Wawa on the mountain above Cold Spring Road. Alternatively, the developer also submitted a zoning ordinance to the borough requesting a 403-acre data center overlay district that would have permitted a data center campus around Bell Mountain.
Dickson City officials disagreed with that characterization and adopted zoning standards that would prevent those developments, but Mey filed a land use appeal March 13 on behalf of Dickson City Development asking the Lackawanna County Court of Common Pleas to annul Dickson City’s zoning ordinance and remand it back to the borough, calling it exclusionary. The appeal notes multiple other ongoing zoning appeals against the borough.
Early opposition
Jeff Smith is no stranger to battling power plants.
The Jessup resident was a founding member of Citizens for a Healthy Jessup when residents organized in early 2016 in opposition of the Lackawanna Energy Center natural gas-fired power plant. He remains the group’s president. He is also the chairman of the Sierra Club’s Pennsylvania chapter.
“At first glance, I thought this sketch plan was an April Fool’s joke,” Smith said Friday after reviewing the plans. “The extremely sad part of this is that this threat is real. The placement of a power generation plant so close to our parks and our schools is going to be so harmful for future generations.”
There isn’t enough information in the power plant’s application for a reasonable person to make a determination, Smith said.
“Except the location is way too close to parks and schools,” he said. “I think there’s a lot of unforeseeable impacts that are going to happen.”
Referencing the large numbers of diesel generators proposed at data center campuses to provide backup power, Smith said the cumulative effects of potentially thousands of diesel generators — which require routine testing — plus the newly proposed power plant’s currently unknown power generation, “Is not an outcome any community can or should accept.”
“The Archbald citizens are putting up an incredible battle,” Smith said. “This community has stepped up in a way that is really remarkable.”
He hopes borough residents found some comfort looking at organizations like Citizens for a Healthy Jessup and Friends of Lackawanna, which formed in 2014 to oppose the Keystone Sanitary Landfill and its expansion.
“Community scrutiny and accountability is the most important thing,” he said. “It is literally the sunshine that goes into the dark corners — it is transparency at its best.”
Newly appointed Archbald Borough Council President Louis Rapoch, who began his first term on council in January, said council had not yet had the opportunity to review the application with the borough’s zoning officer. But, they’re not happy, he said.
“We don’t want it there, like we don’t want the data centers there,” he said. “These are speculators that are coming in here, hoping that we’ll just lay down.”
Rapoch said he has already watched more houses going up for sale near proposed data centers in the Highlands housing development on Eynon Jermyn Road, and he fears large amounts of deforestation will lead to flooding, especially in neighboring Jermyn, which is downhill of Archbald. He also noted the potential noise impacts from a power plant near Staback Park, which he said is Archbald’s most popular park.
“The people have suffered too much,” he said. “People have suffered way too much from the coal barons, and we’re not going to allow this.”
An aerial view of the Highlands housing developement on Eynon Jermyn Road in Archbald Friday, March 20, 2026. (SEAN MCKEAG / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER)
He wants to “fight as many conditional uses as we can that are legal” and noted that himself and fellow council members Joseph Altier III and Tom Aniska joined council this year after the borough had already adopted standards for data centers — standards that faced opposition from residents who wanted even more safeguards while allowing data centers in fewer locations.
“The three of us, we came into this, and it’s a nightmare,” Rapoch said. “It just seems like it’s tacking on more and more and more, and we’re fighting as much as we can.”
Madonna Munley, 68, is a fifth generation Archbald resident who has become a fixture at council meetings, work sessions and public hearings. With two great-nephews, seven generations of her family have lived in Archbald.
After learning of the proposed power plant Friday, Munley said she could cry.
“I’m stunned,” she said. “I didn’t think it was possible to be surprised anymore because I’ve been working and involved with this since last spring.”
Madonna Munley of Archbald shares her concerns about potential low-frequency sounds emitted from data centers while testifying during a zoning hearing at St. Thomas Aquinas Church, Archbald, on Monday, Sept. 29, 2025. (FRANK WILKES LESNEFSKY / STAFF PHOTO)
With the potential for 30 data centers and a power plant confined to one area, Munley worried about the children, especially those living in nearby housing developments, who could end up living near them, playing near them at Staback Park and going to school near them at Valley View.
“These kids are never getting away from these,” she said. “It’s scary, and I can’t even imagine that anybody is going to want to live in this town.”
The money promised by data centers isn’t worth it, Munley said.
“It might as well be Monopoly money for all I care,” she said. “I don’t think any amount of money is worth someone’s health or changing the character of this town to make it unrecognizable.”
Having attended numerous borough meetings over the past year, Munley believes the power plant will be a tipping point to drive more attendance to meetings.
“We cannot tolerate this, and I think a lot more people are going to come out,” she said. “I hope they do, because we need (developers) to know that we are a united front.”