Update on the Lower Towamensing Township Data Center Threat
Save Carbon County joined local residents who attended the Towamensing Township Planning Commission meeting on Thursday regarding the curative amendment filed on September 1st for a proposed data center at the site of Blue Shamrock Golf Course and DTA Alliance LLC, 415 Golf Road. The property owners filed the curative amendment to challenge the township’s zoning ordinance, alleging the ordinance is defective because it fails to provide for data center use anywhere in the municipality. The developers are requesting data centers be allowed as a permitted use within an overlay district encompassing the Resort & Recreation (R&R) and Rural Conservation (RC) zoning districts.
The data centers will be built over 700 acres of rural landscape, situated next to pristine streams and residential homes. While the science is catching up with data centers, more information is available about the harms caused by living in close proximity to a data center including noise, light, and air pollution as well as super-heated, toxic wastewater discharge (see the reference URL at the end of this text).
Residents must hold the line and hold local and state governments, municipal water authorities, planning commissions, and the PA Department of Environmental Protection (PA-DEP) accountable for permit compliance, long-term monitoring, adaptive management, and independent environmental oversight. The epic finger-pointing between the agencies must be stopped. The gaps between local, county, and state governments that allows greedy developers to extract value from our communities while returning no value must be closed. Once construction begins, planning and development assumptions can only be verified through a comprehensive monitoring and compliance program. The municipality and the PA-DEP should explain how those assumptions will be monitored, validated, and enforced throughout construction and long-term operation. Some questions that residents should ask of their local and state governments, municipal water authorities, planning commissions, and PA-DEP:
1. What post-construction monitoring will be required to verify that erosion and sediment controls, post-construction stormwater management facilities, and other environmental protection measures perform as represented during permit review?
2. How will the municipality, municipal water authority, and the PA-DEP verify that groundwater recharge, wetland hydrology, stream baseflow, and other hydrologic functions remain consistent with assumptions made during permit review?
3. Did the municipality, or PA-DEP consider requiring an independent third-party environmental compliance monitor, selected or approved by the municipality or the PA-DEP and funded by the permittee/developer, to oversee construction activities, verify implementation of erosion and sediment controls, and provide independent reporting throughout construction? If not, why was such oversight deemed unnecessary?
4. What adaptive management provisions will apply if monitoring demonstrates increased sedimentation, groundwater impacts, degraded wetland hydrology, elevated stream temperatures, or adverse biological trends?
5. Will the municipality or the PA-DEP require public availability of monitoring reports, inspection reports, enforcement actions, corrective action plans, and long-term environmental monitoring results so affected residents can independently evaluate project
performance?
6. What permit conditions authorize the municipality or the PA-DEP to require corrective actions, additional monitoring, restoration, permit modification, or suspension of construction if environmental impacts exceed those anticipated during permit review?
7. Every monitoring plan, inspection protocol, adaptive management strategy, compliance document, enforcement policy, and factual finding relied upon by the municipality, municipal water authority, planning commission, and PA-DEP must be made publicly available to demonstrate that long-term environmental performance can be verified and maintained throughout construction and operation of the project at the cost of the permittee/developer.
More information on the health impacts of data centers is available at:
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