{"id":253939,"date":"2026-07-28T18:45:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T18:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/253939\/"},"modified":"2026-07-28T18:45:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T18:45:09","slug":"project-atlas-data-center-meeting-delayed-in-south-whitehall-township","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/253939\/","title":{"rendered":"Project Atlas data center meeting delayed in South Whitehall Township"},"content":{"rendered":"

The South Whitehall planning commission will not discuss the hotly debated Project Atlas data center proposed for land across from Parkland High School<\/a> at its August meeting, officials said Tuesday.<\/p>\n

Marcie Kaplan, vice president and head of marketing at Edged US, the firm behind the proposed \u00a0$8.9 million project,<\/a> said the data center was removed from the Aug. 13 agenda because there were three other matters already scheduled.<\/p>\n

Township manager Tom Petrucci said the need to accommodate a large crowd at the meeting, given the level of public interest, was also taken into consideration.<\/p>\n

Discussion of the data center was rescheduled to 6 p.m. Sept. 23. The meeting will be held at Parkland High School, 2700 Cedar Crest Blvd.<\/p>\n

The planning commission has until Oct. 31 to act on the developers\u2019 requests. Petrucci said additional information regarding the special meeting, including the agenda and public participation details, is forthcoming and will be made available by the township.<\/p>\n

Residents packed the Springhouse Middle School auditorium on July 9 to oppose the data center, which is proposed for a 410-acre tract of undeveloped land on Cedar Crest Boulevard that is zoned for technology development. The developer\u2019s application includes three data center buildings totaling approximately 1.48 million square feet along with a 40,680-square-foot administration building and a 39,167-square-foot warehouse building, for a total of approximately 1.56 million square feet.<\/p>\n

Led by the newly formed nonprofit South Whitehall Civic Alliance,<\/a> residents have have organized to fight the project, citing concerns about the health effects on students and neighbors, falling property values and the affect on wildlife.<\/p>\n

An employee for Scannell Properties, the lead developer behind the data center, was fired after disparaging text messages he was sending during the heated July 9 meeting were photographed and posted online by audience members.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

South Whitehall Township\u2019s municipal website has links to all the planning commission documents related to Project Atlas.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The South Whitehall planning commission will not discuss the hotly debated Project Atlas data center proposed for land…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":253940,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,3069,433,182,139,28,664,432],"class_list":["post-253939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-data-center","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\/253939","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=253939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253939\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/253940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}