How a Centre County township is preparing as plans for AI data centers grow across PA
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- College Township proposes adding data centers to definitions and conditional uses.
- Amendments aim to preserve municipal review time in response to SB 939.
- Planners weigh water, land use and infrastructure impacts alongside local control.
As planned AI data centers continue to grow across the United States and Pennsylvania, one Centre Region township is looking to take precautions in case one is proposed there.
While no data centers have been proposed for the area yet, the College Township Council will look to add “data centers” to its zoning ordinance’s list of definitions, and include data centers as a conditional use in the township’s rural residential zoning district during its meeting on Thursday, Feb. 19.
If the ordinance amendments are approved, the council’s meeting agenda states that the definition for data centers will be “buildings or premises primarily occupied by computers and/or telecommunications equipment where data is processed, transferred, and/or stored.”
According to assistant township manager Mike Bloom, the ordinance amendments come in response PA Senate Bill 939, which was introduced last year and includes language that limits municipalities’ authority related to land use and zoning regulations as assigned under the Pennsylvania Municipalities Planning Code (MPC).
“In particular, the original bill truncated the MPC’s permitted 90-day review period in areas where data centers were considered permitted uses to 30 days,” Bloom wrote in a Feb. 11 email to the CDT. “However, if data centers were otherwise permitted as a conditional use, the bill allowed a 120-day review. The original language also restricted municipalities from imposing stricter standards on data centers than those applied to other industrial uses.”
Amending the zoning ordinance, Bloom said, “is intended to afford the municipality a measure of control and sufficient time with which to react to any potential future data center land development plan submission.”
The amendments were discussed during a Feb. 5 Centre Region Planning Commission meeting, where College Township Principal Planner Lindsay Schoch said that the rural residential district was selected for conditional use allowance due to the Oak Hall Quarry being located within its boundaries.
While most AI data centers require massive amounts of water for their cooling systems, Schoch hopes that any potential data center developers would be able to use the water from the quarry, instead of tapping into an aquifer below the earth’s surface.
“We thought that there was an opportunity maybe to use beneficial re-use of [the quarry’s water] to get the data center out into the area of town where there really isn’t much else around it,” Schoch said at the planning commission meeting.
William Burnett, a member of Patton Township’s planning commission, vehemently disagreed with College Township’s proposed amendments at the meeting, calling the changes “a very bad idea.”
“You have a lot more issues and a lot more problems with data centers coming into an area, and it doesn’t support the number of jobs that people think it does. Data centers really don’t have a large staff of people working in them — it’s three or four people after it’s been built,” Burnett said.
As the data center boom continues in Pennsylvania, politicians on both sides of the aisle, including Gov. Josh Shapiro, have thrown their support behind AI industry investment while calling for more guidelines. But many Pennsylvanians have expressed concerns about impacts on energy prices, the environment and water usage.
Burnett echoed some of those concerns and said he could see College Township running into problems with its ordinance.
“I think it opens you up to having uncomfortable conversations of realizing that you’ve slipped into something too late, or you’ve slipped into something, and when you realize you’ve slipped into it and it turns out to be a bad case, that it’s already too late,” he said.
But Schoch noted that without including data centers as a conditional use, a developer could come into the township and build a data center wherever they pleased, disregarding the township’s different zoning districts.
Centre Region Planning Agency Principal Land Use Planner Jenna Wargo said during the Feb. 5 meeting that College Township would be the first Centre Region township to implement zoning changes related to data centers, although one other could be following suit soon.
Bill Keough, a Ferguson Township Planning Commission member, said at his commission’s Feb. 9 meeting that Ferguson Township officials should also begin looking at changes to their zoning ordinances, and fellow commission member Lewis Steinberg wholeheartedly agreed.
“I would suggest, and I can’t be more emphatic, that the township discuss this matter with its solicitor,” Steinberg said. “Staff should be considering working on the zoning ordinance, I would say immediately.”
Despite the discussion about data centers, it was not determined when the township’s staff would begin looking at ordinance amendments, or when the matter would officially be put onto the agenda of a future Ferguson Township Supervisors or Planning Commission meeting.
College Township’s council will discuss the ordinance amendments during their meeting at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 19. The meeting will also be streamed live on C-Net’s YouTube channel.