Who side are these Politicians on ?

We’ve spent years watching the data center fight spread across northeast Pennsylvania. Fire halls packed to the walls. Church basements standing room only. People who have never been to a township meeting in their lives, showing up in red shirts, holding handmade signs, begging their elected officials to pay attention.

And the officials do pay attention. They listen carefully. They nod. They say things like “we hear your concerns” and “we take this very seriously.”

Then they vote yes.

We’ve started wondering if that’s a bug or a feature.

The Play Being Run

Not every official who votes wrong is dirty. Some are genuinely outmatched — small-town supervisors facing corporate attorneys who do this for a living, in a state where the law already tilts toward developers before anyone sits down. We get that.

But some of what’s happened in this region doesn’t look like overwhelmed officials making hard calls. It looks like a play being run.

Clifton Township

Clifton Township, Lackawanna County. A developer wants 17 buildings across 500 acres, most of it residential land — uncut forest, protected streams. The township drafts an ordinance to push them into industrial zones. The right call. The obvious call.

The developer filed a legal challenge to the existing ordinance hours before the township announced the new one was coming.

Not the day before. Hours before.

Somebody told them. Developers don’t track planning commission draft schedules to the hour by accident. They have contacts. And because they filed first, they now have a legal argument that the new rules don’t apply to them. The township is currently weighing a settlement that would let the developer skip the conditional use process entirely — no public hearing, no council approval, straight to building.

They beat the clock. The question nobody is asking out loud: who handed them the schedule?

Archbald

Hundreds of residents showed up. Council President Dave Moran put a 1,000-yard buffer zone on the table — data centers kept that far back from homes.

The final ordinance: 300 yards.

DeSmog published documents showing developers shaped the ordinance language directly. Residents who sued over it put the allegation in plain English in their court filing: the amendment was written “at the request of and for the benefit of data center developers who paid for the costs of preparing and adopting the ordinance.”

The residents filled the room. The developers wrote the bill.

Covington Township

Covington Township didn’t even bother with the pretense. The township solicitor drafted the data center zoning ordinance with the developer in the room — before any public process started. This isn’t from a lawsuit or a whistleblower. It’s in the township’s own meeting minutes from May 2025.

The public hearings came after. By then the document existed. The hearings were theater.

Three Townships. Same Outcome.

Three townships. Three different versions of the same outcome. The community shows up, makes noise, and loses anyway. The developer walks out with what they came for.

So here’s what we keep turning over:

When 200 residents beg a council to hold the line and the council votes to pass an ordinance the developer helped draft — is that a failure of nerve, or the plan working exactly as designed?

When a legal challenge drops hours before a public announcement — is that sharp lawyering, or did someone make a call?

When a buffer zone shrinks from 1,000 yards to 300 yards between the first draft and the final vote — who was in those rooms?

What We Know. What We Don’t.

We don’t have proof of coordination. We have timelines that don’t make sense, documents that say the quiet part out loud, and a pattern that keeps repeating across townships that supposedly have nothing to do with each other.

Maybe these officials are just in over their heads. Maybe it’s all coincidence.

Or maybe the opposition is part of the performance — and some of the people standing at that podium expressing concern already know how the vote is going to go.

You tell us. Are we onto something, or are we connecting dots that aren’t there?

If you think there’s something real here — if you want names, votes, paper trails, and a full accounting of who knew what and when — say so. We’ll do the work.

We just need to know you’re ready to read it.

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