ALLENTOWN, Pa. — The land sits near American Parkway and the Executive Education Academy Charter School.<\/p>\n
The developer is J.G. Petrucci. It’s one of the smaller data centers being proposed in the Lehigh Valley, with just one building.<\/p>\n
The application was submitted last week.<\/p>\n
Allentown Mayor Matt Tuerk says the plan is being reviewed by the Zoning Board.<\/p>\n
“I haven’t seen the proposed plans or use so I don’t know how big of a building they are talking about. Our zoning dictates how big of a building you can build on a particular sized parcel with setbacks, so they might not be able to build something big on a site like that,” said Mayor Tuerk.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Mayor says the proposal will be evaluated against existing law to determine if the use is acceptable.<\/p>\n
City Council passed “Bill 20” a couple of months ago, which puts restrictions on Data Center Development.<\/p>\n
Bill 20 was amended with Bill 52 on Aug. 5, approving stricter zoning regulations and safeguards.<\/p>\n
“If a proposed use for a site can’t answer basic questions about water, we should say, hold on. If a proposed use can’t clearly answer the impact that it’s going to have on the neighborhood, or the environment, we need to say hold on,” Tuerk said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He says most cities are interested in development, because it adds to tax rolls and municipal services.<\/p>\n
“The trade-off is always, what are the potential benefits, and how can we understand the potential benefits vs. the potential costs. And there’s a lot of uncertainty about the costs, a little bit of uncertainty about the benefits,” he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ALLENTOWN, Pa. — The land sits near American Parkway and the Executive Education Academy Charter School. The developer…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":265684,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[214,119,121,120,232],"class_list":["post-265683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-_homepage_top_stories","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-allentown-area"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265683","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=265683"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265683\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}