History is riddled with the bitter ends of heedless leaders who rode into battle against insurmountable odds and got cut down by overwhelming opposition.<\/p>\n
Custer at Little Big Horn.<\/p>\n
Napoleon at Waterloo.<\/p>\n
Dave Moran at Valley View High School.<\/p>\n
Tuesday\u2019s hearing on a wildly unpopular, obscenely invasive data center development almost certainly marked the end of the Archbald Borough Council president\u2019s meager political career.<\/p>\n
Let history record it as the \u201cWildcat Ridge Massacre.\u201d<\/p>\n
Moran\u2019s mortal wound was self-inflicted. In an ill-fated attempt to quiet the rowdy, disruptive crowd packed into the school auditorium, he said the following, which I swear I am not making up:<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought Archbald was better than this.\u201d<\/p>\n
The collective gasp that filled the room was predictably followed by righteous rage from citizens who naturally bristled at being insulted by an official elected to represent them.<\/p>\n
A crew from \u201cCBS Sunday Morning\u201d documented the moment. Some Sunday soon, Moran may be nationally infamous for his electoral last words.<\/p>\n
For Moran and the developers, it was all downhill from there. The council president seemed destined to go down as the hearing\u2019s star villain when Tom Shepstone, a consultant for Brooklyn-based Cornell Realty Management LLC, essentially said, \u201cHold my report.\u201d<\/p>\n
The report \u2014 which for some reason Shepstone neglected to sign \u2014 is the least believable thing I\u2019ve sat through since a Trump stump speech. To hear Shepstone tell it, the Wildcat Ridge project is the best civic advancement since penicillin. It will create hundreds of high-paying jobs and new businesses, generate tens of millions in tax revenue, lure scores of young families to move into the borough and produce armies of new children to save the school district from costly declines in student enrollment.<\/p>\n
Shepstone\u2019s presentation was chock-full of numbers, all of them speculative and suspiciously spectacular. I\u2019ve seen more convincing math scribbled on betting slips. The sources Shepstone bothered to cite were of equally dubious value. One was an AI search engine called \u201cPerplexity.\u201d I am not making that up, either.<\/p>\n
Even if his sources were more trustworthy, Shepstone offered no details about the methodology (Alchemy? A seance? A dart board?) he used to conjure the fantastical projections he presented as practically guaranteed.<\/p>\n
Shepstone\u2019s tax-revenue projections were apparently derived by superimposing Virginia\u2019s wildly progressive tax structure over Pennsylvania\u2019s pro-exploiter system, which is like comparing Wagyu beef filet mignon to discount ground chuck. Virginia taxes every nut and bolt of a data center. Pennsylvania\u2019s tax code is built to benefit developers, which is why they\u2019re so hot to pave over the state.<\/p>\n
Among the most valuable assets veteran local journalists acquire over time is \u201cinstitutional knowledge,\u201d which translates to long memories enriched by experience. We know where the \u201cbodies\u201d are buried. In many cases, we shoveled the dirt.<\/p>\n
Shepstone and I go way back to the dawn of the fracking \u201cboom\u201d that was \u201cguaranteed\u201d to rain an eternal golden geyser of jobs and prosperity on poor old Pennsylvania. Shepstone is a longtime shill for the natural gas industry. He led the charge for fracking and used his blog to propagandize against skeptics who raised legitimate questions and concerns, including this newspaper.<\/p>\n
More recently, Shepstone was an ardent cheerleader for the Lackawanna Energy Center, which is sited in Jessup but an inescapable eyesore and environmental irritant to most of the Midvalley. He said the LEC would generate scores of jobs, mountains of tax revenue and cheaper utility costs. Whatever the plant\u2019s realized benefits to some, I\u2019ve yet to meet a neighbor who\u2019s happy it\u2019s there.<\/p>\n
Call me a cynic (I\u2019m used to it), but I see an obvious conflict of interest in Shepstone working as a paid planner for a municipality and a paid consultant for a developer in the space of 2\u00bd miles.<\/p>\n
As Dickson City borough planner, Shepstone helped write the data center zoning ordinance amendment that essentially froze out his data center client\u2019s competition. In his work for the borough, Shepstone judged Bell Mountain unsuitable for building data centers.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we\u2019ve come up with here is an ordinance that we think is practical and defensible,\u201d Shepstone said in February. \u201cIt may not please some of the developers, but it\u2019s something we feel is going to accomplish the objectives of the borough council, which are to protect the interests of the community.\u201d<\/p>\n
In his work for Cornell Realty Management, Shepstone judged the Wildcat Ridge site \u2014 2\u00bd miles up the same mountain range \u2014 as the perfect home for a \u201ccampus\u201d of 14 buildings each the size of a Walmart Supercenter.<\/p>\n
Who\u2019s side is Shepstone on? That\u2019s debatable, but he is certainly not on the side of the community his developer bosses are here to exploit. The 400-plus citizens who swamped the hearing know this in their bones. The opposition is unlike any I\u2019ve ever seen over 30-plus years in local journalism. It is bipartisan, united and too educated on the sordid realities of the data center scourge emerging elsewhere to buy the bunk Shepstone was selling.<\/p>\n
The opposition knows the paltry number of permanent jobs data centers actually create, that property values will surely sink while utility bills soar, that quality of life and health outcomes will be irreparably damaged and that no sane family would choose to move into a borough and school district with all the curb appeal of a haunted mausoleum.<\/p>\n
The opposition is powered by people who see through the cartoonishly speculative \u201crewards\u201d promised by developers and a pitchman working both sides of the mountain. They live downhill from there.<\/p>\n
In spite of himself (and his constituents), Dave Moran inadvertently articulated the gospel truth that animates the opposition to the Wildcat Ridge project and invasive data center development anywhere in our valley.<\/p>\n
Archbald is better than this. Moran and his council colleagues have a duty to live up to that.<\/p>\n
CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist, believes every community in our valley is better than this. Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook; and @chriskellyink on Bluesky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"History is riddled with the bitter ends of heedless leaders who rode into battle against insurmountable odds and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":80619,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[2117,1590,2116,201,182,3052,139,1559,1560,28,178,180,179],"class_list":["post-138960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-scranton","tag-archbald","tag-chris-kelly","tag-data-centers","tag-lackawanna-county","tag-local-news","tag-midvalley","tag-news","tag-opinion","tag-opinion-columnists","tag-pennsylvania","tag-scranton","tag-scranton-headlines","tag-scranton-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}