As Tuesday’s primary election looms, the candidate generating the most buzz with swarms of angry Lackawanna County voters isn’t on the ballot.
A year ago, Democratic and Republican prognosticators near-unanimously agreed that Commissioner Bill Gaughan had no hope of winning a second term in 2027. The bipartisan consensus held that Gaughan’s support for an urgently necessary 33% property tax increase and a decades-delayed reassessment rendered him terminally unelectable.
Gaughan’s response? Hold my toe tag.
The commissioner’s out-front leadership in the resistance to invasive data center development has resurrected his political career and put pressure on the rivals who tried to bury him alive. Gaughan is more popular now than any candidate on Tuesday’s ticket.
Call it a “miracle,” but all Gaughan had to do was draw a line and stand on it. While other incumbents embody the antiquated “committed bystander” model that created the tax and reassessment messes, he made himself the elected standard-bearer of grassroots resistance to the annihilation of communities in service to Wall Street thieves and their greedy local accomplices.
“It’s not too late to join the fight,” Gaughan says in a TV and online ad campaign he paid for with his own campaign money.
“They (developers) want us to think it’s too late, but not if we show up together. Go online, go to meetings, join me and say, ‘No.’”
The campaign includes ShowUpLackawanna.com, a website that links to more than a dozen community groups and resources aimed at understanding and resisting invasive data center development. Gaughan also pushed for a review of the county’s legal options as a landowner. He is using the position voters put him in to proactively protect the public interest. It’s really that simple, and in widespread demand.
Voters across the country are ousting officials who openly defy overwhelming public opposition to data centers or passively accept their “inevitability.” Democrats, Republicans and independents are swarming like angry hornets in united defiance of a common threat to our lives, livelihoods, and our constitutional rights as Americans.
A new Gallup poll reports that 71% of Americans are opposed to invasive data center development. Those who said they were “strongly opposed” include 56% of Democrats, 39% of Republicans and 48% of independents.
Most survey respondents cited familiar concerns about negative health, resources and economic impacts. These are naturally the immediate focus of the opposition, but there are larger consequences every American should consider.
Despite the sanctimonious spin of developers, data centers are not necessary to keep Facebook, Instagram or your email online. They are essential to facilitate the surveillance and enslavement of free people and to choke out the power of labor, individual privacy and economic security.
I have relentlessly sifted the record on data centers for any evidence of lasting benefit to everyday (nonbillionaire) humans and found nothing worthy of the sacrifices it demands. The more we learn, the clearer it is that each data center is a concrete box stuffed with spiders.
Which makes invasive data centers impossible to sell to an informed, galvanized resistance that exults in putting its foot down. More than 400 resistors turned out at Valley View High School on Thursday evening for the latest installment of Archbald Borough Council’s “conditional use” hearing on the proposed Wildcat Ridge Data Center “Campus.”
The hearing’s focus was noise. The crowd came ready to make some. Gaughan showed up for the same reason.
The hearing followed a familiar, frustrating pattern. The developers’ “expert” witness made preposterous claims and was forced to admit that she didn’t have properly documented data to back them up.
Even the most gullible audience would reject the ridiculous notion that the noise generated by 14 data centers, 840 rooftop chillers, 168 pieces of HVAC equipment and 588 diesel generators could be quieter than a neighbor’s lawnmower, a household refrigerator or a conversation across backyards. That this empty assertion was based on measurements made with monitors of dubious certification and reliability was just the rancid cherry atop the slop sundae.
The four-hour hearing must have seemed twice as long to the hapless sales team on the developers’ side of the stage. Under cross-examination, noise “expert” Caitlin Ormsbee sat wide-eyed as the credibility of her noise “study” was picked apart using her own testimony.
In a “Hail Mary” attempt to salvage a smidgen of a win from the disastrous hearing, Wildcat Ridge attorney Edmund J. Campbell Jr. threw money at council and the crowd. He offered Archbald a “community benefits” agreement worth $17 million — if all 14 proposed data centers go online.
That’s couch money for the wealthy elites pushing invasive data center development and an insult to citizens who view the heritage, identity and security of their hometown as priceless. Archbald ain’t for sale. Pass the word to Wall Street.
The hearing ended before Gaughan had a chance to take the floor, but his presence and face-to-face interactions with voters said he understands the stakes and is committed to serving the interests of his constituents. He hears their noise, and isn’t afraid to side with angry hornets.
The noise all Democratic, Republican and independent elected officials should hear above all other hubbub this spring is the rising, collective swarm of resistance coming together everywhere data centers have been built or proposed.
Those who ignore or defy the clear, consolidated will of the people are writing their own political obituaries.
CHRIS KELLY, The Times-Tribune columnist, urges you and yours to vote on Tuesday. Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook; and @chriskellyink on Bluesky.