Bradford County, Pennsylvania amended its land use regulations to include a framework for any proposed data centers in the area.
Commissioners approved the amendment at a regular meeting earlier this month after hearing from residents. It was approved unanimously by all three county commissioners.
The county amended its Subdivision and Land Development Ordinance (SALDO) to include data centers. SALDOs are the most common way land is divided and developed in the commonwealth.
Previous versions of the county’s SALDO do not include language that addresses the fast-growing business of data center construction and the needs of the county’s residents.
Asylum Township resident, Sue Corie, is in favor of the updates to the SALDO.
“We don't know what the impacts would be on the environment, the wildlife in the area, just our quality of life overall is absolutely devastating to me,” said Corie
Part of the land in the township that is now being proposed for a possible data center site is where Corie’s family has lived for five generations.
“I can't imagine not being able to go out and sit on my front porch and look across the field that the farmer has just plowed and planted in the evening, watching the deer come out and looking at the trees and the mountains, listening to that peacefulness, and to have that threatened, it just is beyond comprehension to me,” she said.
She wants more information about these large facilities because she wants to know how to be able to preserve the rural landscape.
“There are so many unknowns about data centers and the potential harm that they can create, that I wish there was some way we could slow them down, get our questions answered, and perhaps even stop them all together from coming into these beautiful rural areas.”
The county’s SALDO update is meant to provide protections for “public health, safety, and welfare of the County” in the development of data centers, according to the draft available on the county website.
It lays out guidelines for minimizing water and energy consumption, visual impacts, as well as noise and light disturbances on adjoining properties.
According to Corie “consultants have been coming around” and presenting property owners with something called “listing agreements.”
“They aren't sales agreements at this point, but they're asking residents, ‘Would you sign a listing agreement?’ And then they will collectively take those, map out an area that they feel a data center might be interested in, and then come back to the property owners who have listed with them and potentially offer them a price if they were willing to sell their properties,” Corie said.
“I do live in the neighborhood- they’re right now proposing to take the whole interior of Echo Beach Road, and that is a significant number of properties.”
Some larger landowners have agreed to list their properties and she said that impacts the other properties.
“There are a lot of smaller landowners, although they don't want to sell, they're afraid of what the impact is going to be if they remain,” said Corie.
Currently, there are no formal applications for data centers in the county, according to Duane Naugle, director of community planning, grants and mapping.
However, he said there are two places with properties that might be suitable for a data center.
Wysox Township has a possible 200-acre area for such construction. The area extends from Shiner Drive to the Susquehanna River and from Craftmaster Road east to the river in the west.
In Asylum Township, where Corie lives, the area for possible data center construction could encompass up to 400 acres of land. The area encompasses Route 87 to the Susquehanna River and from the intersection of Echo Beach Road and 187 North to the Panda Liberty power plant.
Bradford County Commissioner, Republican Daryl Miller said data centers are “no different” than other industrial or manufacturing development.
“That's the one way you grow as a community, as a county, is to have economic development, job creation, and a lot of other things that come with it, because it's not just- hypothetically, let's say, a data center- it's not just the data center itself, but it's all the other ancillary businesses that may come along with it.“
Miller said there would be jobs in construction, HVAC, electronic services and facilities operations with a data center build but how many is unknown.
“The inability for us to speak directly to what may or may not show up, we're at a loss at that right now, because we don't know what type of data center is going to show up if one shows up,” said Miller. “So, there may be half a dozen, [a] dozen, two dozen, three dozen jobs [that] come with a data center, but we don't know that.”
Miller also does not support tax breaks for data centers.
“I am not interested in giving any kind of tax abatements to anything, because number one, we're going to lose some tax revenue in the initial stages of it,” he said. “So, we need to be sure that we're treating our citizens, the rest of our communities fairly, and that they're not overburdened with the disruption in the tax revenue coming to the county.”
Earlier this year, Gov. Josh Shapiro introduced developer accountability standards for building data centers including energy affordability, transparency and community engagement, environmental protections, and workforce and economic growth.
Some of the commonwealth’s data center compliance requires job creation, municipal cooperation, public meetings, mechanisms for emissions reduction and to meet its energy demands by providing its energy supply and paying for that supply.