SCRANTON — The Lackawanna County Housing Authority plans to engage outside legal counsel to potentially enter the fight over data center projects proposed near its public-housing complex along Gibson Street in Jermyn, attorney and authority Chairman Paul Walker confirmed.

Walker — who is not the Paul James Walker that recently served as county solicitor — said authority officials “directed our solicitor (Rocco Valvano Jr.) to talk to people about filing some type of intervention” regarding controversial data center developments proposed in neighboring Archbald.

“He’s not an expert on that, nor am I, but we’re going to be talking to attorneys about doing something,” Walker said.

What specifically that might be remains to be seen, but Walker confirmed the authority is exploring its legal options as a landowner to protect its tenants and property in Jermyn. It’s located near the proposed Project Gravity, which entails constructing nearly 1 million square feet of data centers in the wooded area between Business Route 6 and Eynon Jermyn Road.

On the northwest corner of the prospective data center campus, two of the project’s seven data center buildings would be located just south of the housing authority’s townhouses along Gibson Street. Another proposed data center development called Project North would construct a smaller, four-building campus bordering Jermyn in close proximity to the housing authority site.

Project Green Mountain, meanwhile, proposes constructing seven data center buildings, each with a 138,000-square-foot footprint, at the Stavola Quarry site located east of the Casey Highway and less than a mile south of the county’s Aylesworth Park.

While county officials publicly discussed earlier this month the county’s potential standing to enter the data center fight given the closeness of the park and housing authority property to proposed data center sites, Commissioner Bill Gaughan and county Solicitor Chris Caputo said Wednesday that the county itself isn’t actually the landowner in those cases. The authority owns the housing development and the federal government owns Aylesworth Park, though the county leases the land and maintains the park, they said.

But Caputo said the housing authority is “going to move forward and seek out counsel to represent them to intervene in the current lawsuits, or, if possible, bring lawsuits on their own to protect that asset of theirs and protect their residents.”

Gaughan, a chief critic of local data center proposals, also noted recent action by the Valley View School District’s Board of Education, which voted Monday to adopt a two-part motion targeting data centers. It’s siding with the borough of Archbald in one legal battle against the developer trying to build the 18-data-center Project Scott campus on Eynon Jermyn Road, while simultaneously challenging the validity of the borough’s data center zoning via a curative amendment.

The school board-approved motion authorizes law firm Joyce, Carmody & Moran PC, to intervene and oppose developer Archbald I LLC in its “deemed approval” lawsuit against Archbald; and to prepare and file a substantive validity challenge under the Pennsylvania Municipalities Planning Code to “attempt to prevent data center development near the (Valley View) high school and intermediate school, for the protection of the health, welfare and safety of the students and the school community.”

Regarding the housing authority property and its tenants, Gaughan said low-income families “should not be treated as collateral damage in this global AI arms race,” noting the potential negative impacts of data centers and related infrastructure on the local environment and residents’ quality of life.

He also recently reached out to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers inquiring about any potential jurisdiction or authority it might have given the proximity of proposed data centers to the federally owned Aylesworth Park property.

“I just want to be clear that I believe that all options should remain on the table,” Gaughan said. “So what I’m going to continue to ask … is there anything else that we can do legally in terms of opposing these data centers? So if we can I will definitely be pushing that, because this is not about politics, it’s not about any one specific project, it’s about the cumulative impact.”

Fellow Democratic Commissioner Thom Welby, who also noted the potential noise and air-quality impacts of data center infrastructure, said county officials will “continue to push” the issue.