In show-business parlance, the star attraction of Monday’s marquee event at Valley View High School was “bumped for time.”
Archbald Borough Council’s fifth hearing on the wildly unpopular, obscenely invasive Wildcat Ridge Data Center “Campus” was expected to be the first in which the general public would finally take the floor and mop it with the developers’ cast of “experts.”
Instead, the evening ended with a merciful curtain on said experts’ comically unconvincing case for the desecration of almost 575 mountainside acres above Business Route 6 with 14 data centers each the size of a Walmart Supercenter.
As usual, Lackawanna County Commissioner Bill Gaughan was in the house, as were Scranton Mayor and Democratic 8th Congressional District candidate Paige Gebhardt Cognetti and county Controller Gary DiBileo. For the third time in as many hearings, Paige signed up to speak but the hearing closed without public testimony.
The next episode is scheduled for July 6 at 5 p.m. Archbald residents’ next chance at testifying about the data center invasion could come Thursday at 5 p.m., when council holds its third hearing on Project Green Mountain’s plans to build seven data centers on 271 acres east of the Casey Highway. On Monday, June 22 at 5 p.m., council will hold its third hearing on Essential Energy LLC’s proposal to build a 400-megawatt natural gas power plant on Eynon Jermyn Road next to Staback Park.
All hearings will happen (where else?) in the Valley View High School auditorium.
Like the four before it, Monday’s two-plus-hour hearing was consumed by dubious, droning testimony that served no purpose other than to insult an already agitated target audience and further cement the immovable opposition to the “Wildcat Ridge Massacre.”
No one on the developers’ side of the auditorium stage chewed more scenery or choked on it harder than traffic engineer Frank Tavani, who explained that he was present only to “clarify” the murky testimony another traffic “expert” coughed up at an April hearing.
The only thing Tavani managed to make clear was his cartoonish lack of any new information and his cranky contempt for being expected to provide any.
To a professional absurdist who gets paid to plunk easy targets, characters like Tavani are comedic gold. He not only made laughable assertions that drew guffaws from the crowd of about 500, but delivered them with the smugness of a tenured professor “filling in” for his teaching assistant.
Asked by Stop Archbald Data Centers attorney Justin Richards about the unaddressed impacts of construction traffic on Wildcat Road during the project’s build-out, Tavani said the following, which I swear I am not making up:
“It’s not going to meaningfully affect congestion or delay, and if it did, something you could research with AI, which is very interesting, is you could ask about what happened with crash rates in the months following the COVID pandemic.
“In the months that followed COVID, people stayed home… traffic rates plummeted, not just in Pennsylvania, but across the country… There were more injuries, there were more fatalities, because there was less traffic, because roads that used to be marginally congested became very underutilized, and people had the freedom to take chances and do things that they probably shouldn’t have, and that caused more deaths and caused bad issues.
“So, ironically, by approving this or any application and adding some traffic, you could reason that it actually benefits public safety.”
To paraphrase: Adding 20% (Tavani’s estimate) more traffic could dramatically reduce accidents! Ask any AI agent!
The audience, composed of people who avoid Wildcat Road to maintain manageable auto insurance premiums and trust their common sense over “artificial intelligence,” erupted in thunderous laughter.
Tavani seemed unfazed by the raucous ridicule, reflecting a sturdy, itchy arrogance I found oddly inspiring, but not at all surprising.
Arrogance has undermined every episode of the “Wildcat Ridge” miniseries. Its producers launched the project with a poisoned premise and have fumbled its execution at every turn. The hapless representatives of Brooklyn-based Cornell Realty Management LLC have more than earned the Bronx cheers that greet them each time they step on the stage.
Tavani’s testimony only amplified his team’s unforced errors. He offered nothing new and unintentionally highlighted how little his side has offered Archbald in exchange for the desecration of those 575 mountainside acres.
Stop Archbald Data Centers co-founder Tamara Misewicz-Healey spoke for the incredulous crowd when she pressed Tavani on the emptiness of his testimony.
“My question is, what are you doing here?” she asked.
Tavani replied, but his answer was characteristically lame, so I’m bumping him for space.
CHRIS KELLY, The Times-Tribune columnist, testifies twice a week. Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook; and @chriskellyink on Bluesky.