Gateway Data Center Finally Gets Its Hearing Dates

The Dates. Smithfield Township has scheduled the public hearings on the Smithfield Gateway data center proposed along Route 209, Township Manager Julia Heilakka told residents on the township's data center mailing list Tuesday evening. Both meetings will be held at J.T. Lambert Intermediate School, 2000 Milford Road, East Stroudsburg, to fit the crowd.

Oct. 21: Planning Commission. The Planning Commission meets Wednesday, Oct. 21, at 7 p.m. The developer will present the project, and the commission will vote on whether to recommend that the supervisors approve it, approve it with conditions or deny it. There will be public comment, but requests for party status won't be taken that night.

Oct. 28: The Hearing Begins. The Board of Supervisors opens the formal conditional use hearing on Wednesday, Oct. 28, at 6 p.m., and will consider applications for party status, which gives a resident a formal role in the hearing. The form is on the township's Gateway page at smithfieldtownship.com. Email it to Heilakka by Oct. 27 or bring it to the hearing; the township will also have blank forms there. Both meetings are planned to wrap up by 9:30 p.m.

The Catch. Heilakka wrote that setting these dates keeps the township out of a "deemed approval," which happens when a township doesn't start the hearing before the project's deadline and the application is approved as submitted. The developer could still grant the township an extension, so the dates could be canceled or pushed back. The original Sept. 9 hearing was pulled over a newspaper notice error, and the application still had open questions on noise, water, buffering and emergency planning in the township engineer's review we reported Sept. 22. We said then we'd report the hearing date the moment it became public. Here it is.

Meanwhile in Harrisburg. A data center "sunshine" bill co-sponsored by Monroe's state senator, Rosemary Brown (R), was amended and sent back to the Senate floor by the Rules Committee, 16 to 0, on Monday, putting it in line for a final Senate vote. The Senate is in session today. Senate Bill 1408, now titled the "Data Center Transparency Act" in its amended form, started as a ban on nondisclosure agreements between public agencies and data center developers. As amended, it would also require a township or borough to hold at least two public meetings for comment before approving a data center, with notices naming the owner or operator and the site; bar data centers controlled by foreign entities tied to countries the State Department lists as Countries of Particular Concern or on its Special Watch List; and require data centers to file an energy and water report certifying that any shifting of power costs onto other ratepayers has been mitigated or eliminated. "There is no reason for an NDA, at least in municipal work," co-sponsor Sen. James Malone (D) said last week. The bill text doesn't spell out whether it would cover applications already in the pipeline, like Gateway. Only a handful of session days remain before the legislative session ends Nov. 30, and the House would still have to pass it.

Roadwork in Monroe County this month →Upcoming public meetings →