The first statement at Pennsylvania’s Plymouth Township’s Aug. 6 data-center hearing came from the school district hosting it.

Colonial School District wanted everyone to know that hosting the crowd “should not be construed as support” for the proposed data center. The district was neutral. The room was not.

For two and a half hours, residents applauded objections, cheered rulings and repeatedly forced the board to stop the proceeding so the court reporter could hear. 

The data center applicant’s attorney eventually asked that people disrupting the hearing be removed.

This is what local resistance looks like after it becomes a legal case.

The project

900 Conshohocken Road LLC wants to convert the former Cleveland-Cliffs steel plant into a hyperscale data-center campus. The application describes 66 acres, ten existing buildings and up to 2 million square feet of data-center space, with standby generators outside and natural-gas turbines in and between the buildings.

The property is zoned Heavy Industrial. Data centers are not named in Plymouth’s ordinance. That leaves one route: persuade the Zoning Hearing Board that a data center has the same general character as a use already allowed there and will be no more harmful to public health and safety.

Plymouth Township Council is not waiting quietly for that argument to succeed.

Forty-three conditions

In June, Council authorized the township solicitor to oppose the application. It also offered a way out: agree to enforceable safeguards and Council might reconsider.

On July 27, Council published the safeguards — 43 demands in a 12-page statement.

They would keep the project inside the existing footprint and height; require 500-foot equipment setbacks and 100-foot planted buffers near homes; impose detailed low-frequency-noise and vibration limits; require a closed-loop cooling system using non-toxic coolant; prohibit withdrawals from or discharges into the Schuylkill River; and make the campus power itself rather than draw electricity from public utilities.

The developer would also have to fund independent studies, train first responders, hire locally at prevailing wages, post financial security for decommissioning, publish continuous data on air, water, heat, noise and vibration, allow township inspections and promise not to seek tax reductions.

The Council says the applicant rejected those controls. Its official statement called the developer’s response an attempt to “demand approval by tantrum.”

That is unusually blunt language for a township. It also explains the hearing.

Data as raw material

The developer’s first expert, engineer and planner Richard Roseberry, was hired to establish the legal theory. His argument was that a data center resembles three permitted uses: 

manufacturing, research and development, and warehousing.

“Data is a raw material,” Roseberry testified. “AI is a product.”

He said a data center processes and distributes digital material much as a factory processes physical material or a warehouse stores and ships goods. Its controlled climate, redundant power and security, he said, also make it resemble a laboratory.

The township solicitor challenged Roseberry before he could reach that opinion. Other party objectors pressed further. Their questioning established that Roseberry had never worked on a data center in the Philadelphia area; when pressed about expert testimony on data-center impacts, he could not identify a single jurisdiction; and he had no formal university education in planning. The township objected to qualifying him as a planning expert at all.

The board overruled the objection and qualified him in planning and civil engineering. The township and other party objectors kept pressing — over letters from other municipalities, testimony about Gov. Josh Shapiro’s energy program, and treating the old steel operation as an active comparison.

This is not passive review. The township, residents and neighboring parties are building a record for whatever comes next.

The second route

The applicant has already opened that next route. Alongside the special-exception case, it filed a substantive validity challenge, arguing that Plymouth’s ordinance unlawfully excludes data centers if the catch-all provision does not admit this one.

So the choice being presented is stark: this project is sufficiently like a factory, laboratory or warehouse to be allowed by special exception — or the ordinance is invalid because it leaves data centers nowhere to go.

Plymouth’s answer is neither approval nor a ban. It is opposition backed by conditions, lawyers, expert cross-examination and a roomful of residents gaining party status so they can call witnesses, cross-examine the developer and appeal a decision.

The Aug. 6 hearing ended before Roseberry finished. The board will meet Aug. 17 only to choose a date for testimony to resume. Public comment comes later.

Plymouth Township cannot legally make the data-center question disappear. It has decided to make the developer answer every part of it.