Archbald, a borough of 7,000 north of Scranton, now has six proposed data center campuses, four separate court fights, and a seventh developer mailing survey flyers to residents. Billions in promised investment, and after eighteen months, not one developer willing to name a tenant. Most of how it got here happened out of public view.
The email
In September 2025, an engineer at the firm Pennoni Associates emailed Archbald Borough Manager Dan Markey with a straightforward question about the data center zoning map the borough was drafting: how were the boundaries drawn?
Markey wrote back: “Besides the I-1, I-2 zones on the bottom of the map…the rest of the lines drawn were property lines of property owners looking to develop or sell to developers.”
The borough manager — appointed, not elected — told his own consultant that he drew Archbald’s public zoning boundaries around the property lines of the developers who wanted to build. Not a traffic study. Not an environmental review. The edges of land specific people already owned and planned to sell.
The email surfaced through a Right-to-Know request and was published by DeSmog. It’s the clearest evidence yet of what residents had suspected for a year: the map was never neutral.
March 15, 2023
The setup came two years earlier. That day, borough council passed a comprehensive zoning rewrite drafted by Urban Research and Development Corporation, a planning firm out of Bethlehem. Somewhere in the use table sat a single new line: “Data Center, which may include an Internet Server Building.” The classification mattered more than the words. It was listed as permitted by right in five of the borough’s six zoning districts.
By right means no hearing. No council vote. No newspaper notice. No chance for a neighbor to stand up and object. Meet the requirements, get your permit from the zoning officer, done.
Two months later, the land started changing hands.
$825,000 becomes $22 million
In May 2023, D&L Realty — the DeNaples family of Dunmore — sold 186 acres along Eynon Jermyn Road to Five Up Realty, an entity run by James Marzolino, president of Kriger Construction in Dickson City. Price: $825,000.
Eighteen months later, Five Up sold the same 186 acres to a group called Western Hospitality Partners. The deed, recorded in October 2024, listed no price at all. Transfer tax records and local reporting pegged it at roughly $22.5 million; Grist, working different records, put it above $12 million. Under a million dollars to eight figures in eighteen months — on land that changed hands two months after the zoning did.
The seller has a history. Louis DeNaples was charged with four counts of perjury in 2008 over alleged ties to the Bufalino crime family during his casino licensing; the charges were dropped in 2009 after he surrendered control of Mount Airy Casino. Regulators forced him off a bank board in 2012; a court reinstated him in 2013. His nephew separately sold land to a data center developer one town over, in Olyphant. None of it proves anyone knew the zoning was coming — only that the land found its price fast.
Two names, one developer
Western Hospitality registered in Pennsylvania in October 2024 through Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck — the top-grossing lobbying firm in the country, nearly $51 million in 2024 revenue, with NVIDIA on its client list. The entity later became Archbald 25 Developer LLC. Its project, Project Gravity: seven buildings, identical 138,000-square-foot footprints, 186 acres, a stated $5 billion investment, and 300 permanent jobs.
Three months before Western Hospitality registered, a separate company — Green Mountain 6 LLC — filed with the state through the exact same Denver law firm, signed by the exact same paralegal. In January 2026, Green Mountain applied to build Project Green Mountain: seven buildings, same footprints, on 272 acres at the old Stavola Quarry. Same local attorney. Same engineer. No public mention that the two were connected.
The link came out by accident. At a March 2026 hearing, a Times-Tribune reporter photographed the developer’s own laptop, projected on a screen for the room. The Project Green Mountain slides were saved in a folder labeled “Western Hospitality.”
If council denies one, the other keeps going.
The setbacks and the lobbyists
The Markey email wasn’t a one-off. Around the same time, the borough shrank the required setback — the buffer between an 80-foot data center wall and the nearest home. In another message obtained by DeSmog, Markey explained how the new distance was chosen: “after speaking with some potential developers,” it was “the number that can potentially be agreed upon.”
The rule meant to protect residents from the buildings was worked out with the companies building them.
Then came Harrisburg. State records show Archbald 25 Developer LLC paid $67,500 to lobbyists in 2025, filed under “real estate.” In September 2025, the Governor’s Office of Transformation and Opportunity slipped Project Gravity into the state’s Permit Fast Track Program — without ever listing it on the program’s public dashboard. In May 2026, the same office threw it out, citing the developer’s “unwillingness to provide a transparent overview of the project.” What happened in between, and who signed off on the quiet enrollment, has never been explained.
Isaac Hager and Wildcat Ridge
The largest proposal in Archbald is Wildcat Ridge — $2.1 billion, 18 buildings, 574 acres, 1.6 gigawatts of power. It comes from Cornell Realty Management and its principal, Brooklyn developer Isaac Hager.
In February 2024, The Real Deal ran a profile on Hager headlined “Brooklyn’s most mysterious dealmaker is back.” It described a developer who had filed for bankruptcy in 2009, who testified under oath in 2015 and 2016 that he had no income, no bank statements, and not a single tax return to show — and who was, at that moment, facing foreclosure on the crown jewel of his portfolio: 200 Kent Avenue in Williamsburg, the building anchored by Trader Joe’s. His lender said the debt had swelled from $84 million to $140.5 million. The building was under half occupied. The magazine floated that he could “go back to being no one.”
Ten months later, Cornell Realty walked into Archbald proposing the biggest data center campus in the borough. It has never completed a data center anywhere, according to DeSmog’s review of industry databases.
Then, in March 2026, Hager lost 200 Kent Avenue outright — transferred to his lender for $65 million.
Seven weeks after that, Cornell’s lawyer stood in front of Archbald Borough Council and offered the town $17 million.
The $17 million offer
The structure, laid out by Cornell attorney Edmund Campbell Jr.: $2 million when preliminary land development is approved. Another $2 million at final approval. Six million within 30 days of the first building permit. Then $500,000 for each building that comes online.
Every dollar depends on approvals Cornell doesn’t have. Nothing is owed before council says yes. And it wasn’t a signed contract — it was read into the hearing “record.” No one asked where the money would come from. No one mentioned that the man making the offer had handed his most valuable building to a lender seven weeks earlier.
The room of 400 people groaned.
Council member Larry Marchetti noted that Cornell’s backup diesel generators run over 4,000 horsepower — freight-locomotive territory — each one the size of a bus. Campbell said the generator details would come later, “if the project gets to the land development phase.” When a resident asked whether Cornell had any data showing those generators would be safe running near homes, no one answered.
The power lines
While the hearings drag on, the power company isn’t waiting. PPL Electric Utilities is putting up a new 500/230 kV substation, a switchyard, and eight miles of high-voltage transmission line across Archbald, Jessup, Olyphant, and Jefferson Township, with a second project adding two more switchyards and four more miles.
At an April 2026 open house, PPL’s transmission siting manager, Doug Grossman, confirmed data centers drove the project — then said the utility builds “independent of their local approvals.” PPL keeps going until a developer tells it to stop. Its project website doesn’t mention data centers at all; it talks about “reliability” and “new customer connections.”
PPL says big customers like data centers pay directly for the lines that serve them, so residents are protected. But in March 2026, the utility filed a settlement creating a brand-new rate class just for data centers, plus $11 million for low-income rate relief — the kind of move you make when the old setup wasn’t holding residential customers harmless. It still needs state approval. And there’s a cautionary tale next door: in West Virginia, ratepayers are now staring down $572 million for transmission lines built mainly for data centers after the projected cost doubled, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
Water, courts, and no tenant
Project Gravity wants 360,000 gallons of water a day from Lake Scranton, which supplies more than 134,000 county residents. Wildcat Ridge wants 3.3 million gallons a day. Trees are already cleared. Wetlands permits are filed. A mobile home park’s residents have already been pushed out.
The courts are full. Eight residents are challenging the November 2025 zoning changes. Valley View School District has stepped in against a Dallas developer whose project council rejected 5–0 — but whose lawyers now claim a missed hearing notice automatically approved it anyway, under a quirk of state law. Two more campuses are still grinding through conditional use hearings. Notices claiming that “deemed approval” are posted right on the property line along Eynon Jermyn Road.
In Harrisburg, the state House voted 201–1 to let towns pause data center applications for 180 days, and 197–5 to repeal a data center tax break projected to cost Pennsylvania $517 million a year by 2030. Both bills sit untouched in the Republican-controlled Senate.
State Rep. Kyle Mullins, whose district covers Archbald, said his constituents have “every reason to be outraged.”
Back at that 2025 hearing, a resident named Anita Mancuso asked the question everyone wanted answered: “Who put the wording in the zoning in 2023? Because it’s caused such a huge mess.”
No one answered her that night. But Dan Markey already had — in an email to his own consultant, describing a map he’d drawn around the property lines of the people he was supposed to keep in check.
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