Thursday<\/a> at 5 p.m., when council holds its third hearing on Project Green Mountain\u2019s 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\u2019s proposal to build a 400-megawatt natural gas power plant on Eynon Jermyn Road next to Staback Park.<\/p>\nAll hearings will happen (where else?) in the Valley View High School auditorium.<\/p>\n
Like the four before it, Monday\u2019s 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 \u201cWildcat Ridge Massacre.\u201d<\/p>\n
No one on the developers\u2019 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 \u201cclarify\u201d the murky testimony another traffic \u201cexpert\u201d coughed up at an April hearing.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cfilling in\u201d for his teaching assistant.<\/p>\n
Asked by Stop Archbald Data Centers attorney Justin Richards about the unaddressed impacts of construction traffic on Wildcat Road during the project\u2019s build-out, Tavani said the following, which I swear I am not making up:<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the months that followed COVID, people stayed home\u2026 traffic rates plummeted, not just in Pennsylvania, but across the country\u2026 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\u2019t have, and that caused more deaths and caused bad issues.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, ironically, by approving this or any application and adding some traffic, you could reason that it actually benefits public safety.\u201d<\/p>\n
To paraphrase: Adding 20% (Tavani\u2019s estimate) more traffic could dramatically reduce accidents! Ask any AI agent!<\/p>\n
The audience, composed of people who avoid Wildcat Road to maintain manageable auto insurance premiums and trust their common sense over \u201cartificial intelligence,\u201d erupted in thunderous laughter.<\/p>\n
Tavani seemed unfazed by the raucous ridicule, reflecting a sturdy, itchy arrogance I found oddly inspiring, but not at all surprising.<\/p>\n
Arrogance has undermined every episode of the \u201cWildcat Ridge\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Tavani\u2019s testimony only amplified his team\u2019s 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.\n<\/p>\n
Stop Archbald Data Centers<\/a> co-founder Tamara Misewicz-Healey spoke for the incredulous crowd when she pressed Tavani on the emptiness of his testimony.<\/p>\n\u201cMy question is, what are you doing here?\u201d she asked.<\/p>\n
Tavani replied, but his answer was characteristically lame, so I\u2019m bumping him for space.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In show-business parlance, the star attraction of Monday\u2019s marquee event at Valley View High School was \u201cbumped for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":80619,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[1590,2116,182,3052,139,1559,1560,178,180,179],"class_list":["post-221074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-scranton","tag-chris-kelly","tag-data-centers","tag-local-news","tag-midvalley","tag-news","tag-opinion","tag-opinion-columnists","tag-scranton","tag-scranton-headlines","tag-scranton-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221074","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=221074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221074\/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=221074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}