ALLENTOWN, Pa. (WFMZ) — The city of Allentown has a new ordinance that regulates data centers. The policy was approved in a 4-2 vote during Wednesday night’s city council meeting.<\/p>\n
The new ordinance will dictate how data centers operate within Allentown city limits.<\/p>\n
The measure, known as Bill 20, received a lot of attention following a proposed project to convert a 224,000 sq ft warehouse into a data center on Emaus Avenue. However, the new safeguards will not apply to that project.<\/p>\n
Council vice president Cynthia Mota voted in favor of Bill 20 Wednesday night. Prior to the measure, Mota said there was no city policy restricting how these centers can function.<\/p>\n
“Bill 20 is the only thing that we have that can regulate data centers. We’re going to be able to regulate the noise, how they’re going to be dealing with a cooling system\u2026how far that they’re going to have to be from a community,” Mota explained.<\/p>\n
Councilwoman Ce-Ce Gerlach voted against the new policy.<\/p>\n
“I believe that there needs to be regulations, I just think that they need to be much stronger than what’s in Bill 20,” Gerlach told us.<\/p>\n
Gerlach said she already submitted amendments to the ordinance and is hoping for a meeting next week to introduce them.<\/p>\n
“I don’t believe that data centers should be able to set up so close to residential areas as well as schools, daycares and other sensitive populations,” Gerlach stated. “Every municipality in the state of Pennsylvania must include in their zoning code a place for data centers so that’s why we’re doing this. Now it’s up to us so that we’re making it, making sure that there’s layers of accountability and that they are highly regulated.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ALLENTOWN, Pa. (WFMZ) — The city of Allentown has a new ordinance that regulates data centers. The policy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":222665,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[119,96841,153,155,154,529,2750,60414,14934,554,555,915,28,560,27394],"class_list":["post-222664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bethlehem","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-council","tag-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem-headlines","tag-bethlehem-news","tag-bill","tag-ce-ce-gerlach","tag-councilwoman","tag-cynthia-mota","tag-keystone-symbol","tag-liberty-bell","tag-new-jersey","tag-pennsylvania","tag-puerto-rican-diaspora","tag-vice-president"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222664","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=222664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222664\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/222665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}