{"id":239348,"date":"2026-07-09T13:49:07","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T13:49:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/239348\/"},"modified":"2026-07-09T13:49:07","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T13:49:07","slug":"residents-form-nonprofit-to-fight-south-whitehall-data-center","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/239348\/","title":{"rendered":"Residents form nonprofit to fight South Whitehall data center"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the freshly mowed athletic practice fields at the North Cedar Crest Boulevard entrance to Parkland High School, it\u2019s easy to visualize the proposed 1.5 million-square-foot Project Atlas data center looming over students playing football.<\/a><\/p>\n

For Alice Lenthe, a retired environmental health and safety professional who has two grandchildren who will attend the high school, that image includes droning generators and hot machinery.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo child should have to practice on that field with the heat that\u2019s going to come off that data center,\u201d Lenthe said. \u201cThere are a lot of environmental issues. There are a lot of health and safety issues for the community, and for the students here at Parkland.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mobilized by concern over the data center\u2019s impact, Lenthe and other South Whitehall Township residents have formed a nonprofit to fight the project. Members of the South Whitehall Civic Alliance<\/a> retained an attorney and are raising funds for what they expect to be a long and expensive legal battle.<\/p>\n

The first shot will likely be fired Thursday, when the data center\u2019s developers go before the township planning commission to move the project forward.<\/a> Alliance lawyers are expected to file an objection to the plan. Next, they\u2019ll need to hire experts, Alliance member Spurgeon J. Dunbar said. As of this week, members have raised nearly $35,000 of their $120,000 goal.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re asking the community to help us. These are attorneys for the entire community. Our group really represents the people of South Whitehall, and in order to fight this we can\u2019t just show up as an angry mob saying we don\u2019t want it,\u201d Dunbar said.<\/p>\n

Project Atlas is proposed for a 410-acre site at 2493 N. Cedar Crest Blvd. The complex would include three data center buildings, a 40,680-square-foot administrative building, a 39,167-square-foot warehouse and an electric substation.<\/p>\n

A new road is proposed to connect Cedar Crest with Mauch Chunk Road, and include a 10-foot-wide path that would be open to the public.<\/p>\n

Edged US, the firm building the data center, has promised that it will be a quiet operation with minimal environmental impact that would bring in $11.5 million annually in taxes for Parkland School District.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cEdged US is committed to being transparent throughout this process and to being a good neighbor in every community where we build,\u201d said Marcie Kaplan,\u00a0Vice President and Head of Marketing.<\/p>\n

The land where the data center is proposed sits in South Whitehall\u2019s Planned Innovation, Research and Technology<\/a> overlay, an area specifically zoned to attract tech development. This will make any legal fight against it even tougher, Dunbar said. But he noted that South Whitehall residents last year voted overwhelming to approve a 0.1% increase in their earned income taxes to support an open space referendum.<\/p>\n

While the land across from the high school was not part of the land addressed in the referendum, the vote showed that residents prize natural spaces, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t have zoning laws that can keep up with how fast technology is moving. And with that vote, a vast majority of the community said, \u2018Hey, we want to preserve the land we have,\u2019 \u201d Dunbar said.<\/p>\n

The nonprofit\u2019s work against the data center has attracted residents from outside South Whitehall. Evan Sandercock, a North Whitehall woodworker with a degree in civil engineering, joined the alliance to protect the school where he hopes to send his future children.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs soon as I saw what they wanted to build so close to Parkland High School, I was against it. This really is not the location for it,\u201d Sandercock said.<\/p>\n

The group hopes members of the community pack Thursday\u2019s meeting, which has been moved to Springhouse Middle School in anticipation of a large crowd.<\/a> Though the members admit they\u2019re waging a David vs. Goliath fight against a deep-pocketed developer, Alliance members believe they stand a good chance.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is our home,\u201d member Greg Sussman said. \u201cHistory has proven that people fighting for their home tend to do better than the invaders.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From the freshly mowed athletic practice fields at the North Cedar Crest Boulevard entrance to Parkland High School,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":239349,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,433,182,139,28,664,432],"class_list":["post-239348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-lehigh-county","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-pennsylvania","tag-south-whitehall-township","tag-top-stories-tmc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239348","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=239348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239348\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/239349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}