Six properties. One overlay. Somebody requested it. The public record doesn’t say who — but the list of suspects is very short.
Opinion & Analysis · PoconoReview.com
In April 2026, the Pocono Township Board of Commissioners unanimously approved a Data Center Overlay District covering six parcels near the intersection of Warner Road and Route 715. The overlay made data centers a permitted conditional use on roughly 315 acres of land.
Somebody asked for that. Zoning overlays don’t write themselves.
Nobody has said who it was. No commissioner has volunteered it. No reporter has asked. No resident has filed a Right-to-Know request to find out (that we know of).
So let’s look at who it could have been.
The Six Properties
The overlay covers six parcels:
Anthony M. Farda, Trustee — 39.39 acres of vacant land. The Farda family is a local operation out of Tannersville. Landscaping, restaurants, real estate. No connection to data centers.
Farda Reality Associates LP — 42.24 acres. The former Summit Resort, now defunct. Same family. Same profile.
Pocono Medical Center — 39.71 acres, vacant. Now part of Jefferson Health after Lehigh Valley Health Network’s 2024 merger. A hospital system with no reason to be in the data center business.
Old Dominion Freight Line Inc. — 67.68 acres, trucking service center. National LTL carrier out of North Carolina. Moves freight. No connection to data centers.
Core5 at Stroudsburg LLC — 86.68 acres. A 702,000-square-foot warehouse is going up on it right now. Core5 Industrial Partners is based in Atlanta, capitalized by Kajima USA, the American arm of Tokyo-based Kajima Corporation. Kajima builds data centers in Japan. Core5 has no documented data center activity in the United States. They say it’s a warehouse.
PP&L Co. (PPL Electric Utilities) — 39.87 acres, utility office. PPL has disclosed a 28.3-gigawatt data center pipeline against a system peak load of just 7.8 gigawatts. It formed a joint venture with Blackstone to build gas-fired generation specifically for data centers. It built the Archbald Mountain Transmission Project — a new substation and eight miles of new transmission lines — because of data center demand. PPL is not adjacent to the data center industry. PPL is the infrastructure the data center industry runs on.
When the Overlay Actually Appeared
The overlay arrived inside the township’s own zoning rewrite. Who initiated it and why is what we’re trying to pinpoint. Since January 2023, Pocono Township has paid an outside consultant — Nanci Sarcinello of Sarcinello Planning & GIS Services — to rewrite its zoning ordinance, map, and subdivision rules, working through monthly review sessions held on the fourth Monday of each month.
Data centers were not part of that rewrite at first. They are absent from Draft #2 of the supplementary regulations, reviewed on August 26, 2024. They appear for the first time in Draft #3, reviewed on October 28, 2024 — a new data center use and the overlay district that goes with it. Somewhere in those nine weeks, someone directed the consultant to add them. A zoning consultant doesn’t wake up one morning and decide to draw a data center overlay on six specific parcels. Someone told her to add it. Someone told her where. And the location they chose just happened to include Core5 and PPL side by side.
The record doesn’t say who because no one wrote it down. The fourth-Monday rewrite sessions were held without minutes. The township’s own files prove it: the placeholders for those meetings are named, literally, “SALDO WORK SESSION NO MINUTES.” There are seven of them. The overlay that opened 315 acres to data center development was conceived, drafted, and mapped in meetings that kept no record of who said what.
There is a step between drafting and adoption that the public record can’t account for. Pennsylvania law requires that a zoning amendment go to the Planning Commission for a recommendation and to the Monroe County Planning Commission for review before the township can adopt it. For the Data Center Overlay, neither appears in the township’s records. On January 12, 2026, the Planning Commission recommended three measures to the board by name — the Historic Overlay, the Chicken Ordinance, and the MCTI rezoning. A data center ordinance is not among them.
So the question shifts. It is no longer only “who asked for the overlay.” It is also: who told the consultant to add it between August and October 2024, and where is the Planning Commission recommendation the law requires? Both answers should exist. We’re trying to find them.
The Short List
A landscaping family didn’t ask for a data center overlay. A hospital system didn’t ask for one. A trucking company didn’t ask for one.
Put the pieces next to each other. A warehouse whose specifications were already the subject of a previous Pocono Review investigation. An overlay that would let that warehouse become a data center, written into the zoning in a nine-week window in 2024, in sessions that kept no minutes, without the Planning Commission recommendation or county referral the law requires. And a district drawn to include Core5’s parcel and PPL’s adjoining one. None of that names a hand. All of it points the same direction.
Their parcels share a property line.
The Vote Was Unanimous
The overlay passed with every commissioner voting yes. That includes Ellen Gnandt. The same commissioner who spent years as the lone vote against the zoning decisions that opened the door for Core5’s warehouse. She fought the LERTA. She pushed for impact studies nobody else wanted done. She lost every one of those fights 4-1 while four colleagues voted lockstep with developers.
So why did she vote yes on this one?
There are reasonable explanations. Pennsylvania law requires municipalities to allow all legitimate land uses somewhere in their zoning. If a township doesn’t zone for data centers at all, a developer can file a validity challenge and argue the ordinance is exclusionary. That’s what happened in Tobyhanna Township and Penn Forest Township. Developers showed up with attorneys and threatened litigation when the zoning didn’t accommodate them. Some townships passed overlays not because they wanted data centers but because they were trying to control where they’d go before a developer took that choice away.
Maybe Gnandt saw the legal landscape and decided a regulated overlay beat an unregulated lawsuit. Maybe the solicitor told her the township needed it on the books. Maybe she had a different reason entirely.
She can explain her vote anytime she wants. But she was on the board when the request came in. She knows who asked for it.
The silence is what creates the suspicion. Not the vote.
What Velardi Already Told You
At a meeting where residents were raising concerns about blasting, well contamination, and survey markers ripped out along Ruby Lane, Commissioner Mike Velardi went off script. Nobody asked him about data centers. It wasn’t on the agenda. During individual commissioner reports, he launched into a defense of data center water usage, compared cooling systems to a car radiator, and told residents that if Core5 converts it would mean no trucks, no road damage, and half a dozen employees.
You don’t build that argument unless you believe the scenario is real.
Velardi resigned from the Board of Commissioners on June 15, 2026.
Why the Public Needs This Name
Start with the simplest reason: residents have a right to know who asked their government to open 315 acres to data center development. Someone requested an amendment to Chapter 470 of the township zoning code. That request is a public record. The public should see it.
But the name isn’t just about transparency. It’s about what happens next.
If Core5 at Stroudsburg was built to convert, then Core5 controls the timeline. The township can only react.
If the request traces back to Core5 or someone acting on their behalf, that’s evidence of intent. It means the developer wasn’t passively building a warehouse that happened to fall inside an overlay someone else created. It means they were actively shaping the zoning to enable a conversion while telling the public, the planning commission, and the board it was a warehouse. Every environmental review was for a warehouse. Every traffic study was for a warehouse. Every permit was for a warehouse. If the developer was simultaneously requesting zoning authorization for a different use, every one of those approvals was obtained under false pretenses.
The township doesn’t have to wait for Core5 to file something. If the name leads back to the developer, the township can start building the record now. Challenge the original permits. Demand pre-application disclosures. Bring the fight to the developer before a conditional use application ever hits the table.
First mover advantage flips.
Gnandt, Keppler, and Long are three votes. That’s a majority. If they have the name, they have the evidence. If they have the evidence, they have the votes to act on it. Nobody on that board can outvote them. They don’t need Harrisburg. They don’t need a court order. They don’t need to wait for a developer to decide when the next shoe drops.
To the Commissioners
Keppler and Long moved fast on data centers. They’ve earned credit for that. Gnandt has earned more than most people realize for the years she spent voting alone.
But credit for what you’ve done doesn’t answer the question of what you’re not doing. The name of who requested the overlay amendment is not privileged. It’s not sensitive. It’s not complicated. It’s a public record.
Release it. Post it on the website. Read it into the record at the next meeting. Don’t make residents file an RTK for something you can answer in ten seconds.
If the answer is harmless, releasing it costs nothing. If it isn’t harmless, that’s exactly why the public needs to see it.
The July 20 Hearing
The public hearing on the updated ordinance — the one that removes data centers as a permitted use from the overlay district — is scheduled for July 20. Affected property owners will be notified that data centers will no longer be permitted on their parcels.
That’s why July 20 is not a formality. If the warehouse was built to convert, the overlay is the permission slip — and the board is about to tear it up. The moment data centers come off those six parcels, anyone who was counting on that use loses it. The only way to get it back is in court, arguing the rules in force when they filed still govern. That is precisely the corner Clifton Township is in right now.
But July 20 is not today. The overlay is still law. Every day between now and that vote is another day Core5 can point to and say data center use was authorized on their parcel while their building was going up. They’re not going to rush to file before the vote. They don’t need to. The longer the overlay stays on the books, the stronger their argument that they built a 702,000-square-foot building under zoning that permitted exactly what they intended. They’ll wait for the board to remove it, then launch.
The commissioners have the votes to close that door. But releasing the name of who requested the overlay doesn’t have to wait for the hearing. And it shouldn’t.
If the name traces back to Core5, the township doesn’t need to wait for a filing to act. Evidence that the developer was requesting data center zoning while permitting a warehouse is grounds to challenge the original approvals now. The township brings the fight to the developer on its own timeline instead of waiting to play defense.
If the name doesn’t trace back to Core5, the public still has a right to know who asked their government to open 315 acres to data center use. That’s not a controversial position. That’s basic accountability.
Either way, the answer is already in the building. Are the commissioners going to give it to the residents or is it going to be the same as usual — “Please file a Right-to-Know request”?