{"id":38282,"date":"2025-11-19T05:03:06","date_gmt":"2025-11-19T05:03:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/38282\/"},"modified":"2025-11-19T05:03:06","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T05:03:06","slug":"archbald-no-place-for-82-ai-football-fields","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/38282\/","title":{"rendered":"Archbald no place for 82 ‘AI’ football fields"},"content":{"rendered":"

When reporting on the scope and scale of high-impact development projects or the size and volume of expansion plans for existing businesses, smart journalists compare measurements like square footage, height and tonnage to easily envisioned equivalents. Numbers are never enough.<\/p>\n

Times-Tribune Staff Writer Frank Wilkes Lesnefsky has a knack for such comparisons. In a 2024 report on the unconscionable 40-plus-year expansion of Keystone Sanitary Landfill in Dunmore and Throop, he wrote: \u201cSpread out evenly across Dunmore\u2019s 8.92 square miles, the Phase III expansion would bury every inch of the borough under nearly 13\u00be feet of garbage.\u201d<\/p>\n

See what Frank did there?<\/p>\n

In a must-read report<\/a> published earlier this month, Frank calculated the footprint of a staggering 29 data center buildings proposed in Archbald alone. The four planned campuses would cover 4.7 million square feet, or the same ground as 82 football fields. That kind of perspective really brings the gravity of what\u2019s happening home, especially if you live in what developers want to remake as \u201cAI-bald.\u201d<\/p>\n

The more data center projects proposed, the less citizens trust elected officials to protect their interests. While they pay lavish lip service to obvious potential harms, Republican and Democratic officials, including Gov. Josh Shapiro, are besotted by the billions in tax revenue and short-term job creation data centers could bring.<\/p>\n

The long-term costs to host communities are background noise to the cheerleaders in charge, but grassroots resistance is growing louder and stronger by the day. A vocal, bipartisan cross-section of Lackawanna County residents don\u2019t want to live in the next Loudoun County, Virginia, home to \u201cData Center Alley.\u201d<\/p>\n

Loudoun County hosts about 200 data centers, with another 177 planned or under construction, according to several probably reliable internet sources. The county\u2019s existing data centers occupy about 25 million square feet, or 434 football fields. Loudoun is the \u201crichest county in America,\u201d due largely to its data centers, but I wouldn\u2019t live there even if I could afford it.<\/p>\n

Of the many ironies swirling in the local data center drama, maybe the most bracing is that opponents of data center development are using the internet and antisocial media to organize and educate themselves and their neighbors. Some are even using AI to collect and condense information less attentive humans might otherwise miss or misunderstand.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve danced with the devil, too. In a recent column<\/a>, I \u201cinterviewed\u201d three AI \u201clarge language models\u201d \u2014 ChatGPT-5, Elon Musk\u2019s \u201cGrok\u201d and DeepSeek. l asked \u201cthem\u201d questions our elected officials should be asking. The \u201cvampires\u2019\u2019\u201d answers strongly suggested it would be a mistake to invite them in to build gargantuan concrete coffins around homes, schools and public spaces.<\/p>\n

If approved, the proposed buildings would render their host communities unrecognizable. Neighborhoods, parks, streets, schools and other businesses will be overshadowed and undermined by mammoth artificial intelligence factories. No amount of tax revenue or job creation can compensate for the certain losses in property values, quality of life and community identity. No one wants to live in \u201cAI-bald.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ask Justin Healey and his wife, Tamara Misewicz-Healey, founders of the Facebook group Stop Archbald Data Centers. The couple, parents of three young children, started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for a legal fund to defend residents\u2019 rights. As of Tuesday afternoon, the campaign, called \u201cProtect Archbald: Data Center Zoning & Overlay Legal Review,\u201d raised $6,640 of its $15,000 goal.<\/p>\n

I reached out to the Healeys, but they declined to comment. When they\u2019re ready to talk, I\u2019m here to listen.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, Archbald Borough Council will hold a special meeting Nov. 24 at 5 p.m. at the borough building to reconsider its zoning ordinance, which would place some hurdles in front of developers but still leave the borough open to be overrun by data centers.<\/p>\n

I couldn\u2019t find a number specific to Archbald, but the median home size in Lackawanna County is about 1,800 square feet, according to Realtor.com. That\u2019s less than 0.04% the size of 82 football fields.<\/p>\n

CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist, was surprised to learn that a single football field covers 57,600 square feet. 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":"When reporting on the scope and scale of high-impact development projects or the size and volume of expansion…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":38283,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[2117,1590,3069,201,182,3052,139,1559,1560,28,178,180,179],"class_list":{"0":"post-38282","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-scranton","8":"tag-archbald","9":"tag-chris-kelly","10":"tag-data-center","11":"tag-lackawanna-county","12":"tag-local-news","13":"tag-midvalley","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-opinion","16":"tag-opinion-columnists","17":"tag-pennsylvania","18":"tag-scranton","19":"tag-scranton-headlines","20":"tag-scranton-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38282","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=38282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38282\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}