“If you’ve got terrible ordinances in your township, and you add in bad zoning, guess what? You get a hyperscale data center,” she said.

The surge in data center projects in Pennsylvania has been driven by tax breaks for developers, as allowed by a 2021 law that lawmakers should repeal, said Republican state Rep. Jamie Walsh, who spoke at the town hall event. In Virginia, the state with the most data centers, developers have to pay a sales and use tax, but Pennsylvania doesn’t require that, he said.

“That has made Pennsylvania a target. In Virginia, they have to pay tax on the contents of those buildings. Pennsylvania will never realize that. That is why we’ve become ground zero,” said Walsh, who represents Luzerne County in northeast Pennsylvania.

State Sen. Katie Muth, a Democrat who represents part of the Philadelphia suburbs, plans to introduce a bill to place a three-year moratorium on data center development so state and local governments can first study and plan for the industry. She announced the bill in a legislative memo in February and expects to introduce it soon, a spokesman said.

Muth told activists at the town hall that the data center industry has not done enough to fully disclose its plans to the public. ”This has all been planned long before any of us had a clue, so don’t feel that you missed all these things,” she said. “You were supposed to; no one wanted you to know about it.”

Michael Sauers, a retired school teacher from Bloomsburg, southwest of Scranton, called on officials to amend the Pennsylvania Municipalities Planning Code, a regulation first published in 1970.

“This has to be strengthened to empower communities to be able to say no to unwanted development that is being shoved down their throats,” he said. “Communities must be empowered to reject top-down development that gives them little or no voice in the future.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.