Opinion & Analysis | PoconoReview.com

At last week’s Board of Commissioners meeting, nobody asked Commissioner Mike Velardi about data centers. The agenda item was individual commissioner reports. The room had just spent an hour fighting about protest ordinances. And then Velardi, unprompted, launched into a defense of data center water usage and explained why Core5 being a data center would actually be fine for the township.

Nobody asked. He just volunteered it.

That’s worth sitting with for a moment. Because in the same breath that Velardi tried to reassure residents, he inadvertently told them two things: he doesn’t actually understand how data center cooling works, and he apparently already knows — or strongly suspects — that Core5 is a data center.

The “Closed Loop” Myth

Here’s what Velardi said, roughly: data centers use closed loop cooling systems, like a car radiator. The water gets recirculated. They’re not pulling from Pocono Creek and dumping it back in polluted. They use gray water you can’t drink anyway. Nothing to worry about.

It sounds reasonable. It’s also incomplete in a way that matters enormously to anyone with a well behind their house.

Yes, most hyperscale data centers use closed-loop cooling systems. But “closed loop” doesn’t mean the water disappears into a magic cycle with no losses. It means the water circulates internally — and then passes through a cooling tower to shed heat. And cooling towers shed heat the same way your body does: evaporation. A portion of the water literally evaporates into the atmosphere on every cycle.

That evaporated water has to be replaced. Constantly. The industry term for it is “make-up water” — fresh water drawn from a municipal supply or a well to replace what was lost to evaporation. It doesn’t get discharged into a stream. It disappears into the air. But it still came from somewhere, and that somewhere is the same watershed Pocono Township residents depend on.

How Much Water Are We Actually Talking About?

A mid-size data center running 20 megawatts of IT load can consume between 20 and 50 million gallons of water per year — roughly 55,000 to 137,000 gallons per day — depending on climate, cooling design, and efficiency. A hyperscale facility running 100 megawatts or more scales proportionally.

For context, the average American household uses about 80-100 gallons of water per day. A single hyperscale data center can consume the equivalent of thousands of households — every day — while the building sits on what looks like a quiet industrial parcel off Warner Road.

Google, Microsoft, and Meta have all published water sustainability reports acknowledging this consumption. Microsoft made headlines in 2022 for consuming 1.7 billion gallons of water globally — a 34% increase in a single year — largely driven by data center expansion and the cooling demands of AI workloads. These are companies with dedicated sustainability teams and public accountability. They still can’t hide the numbers.

The residents on Ruby Lane and Kevin’s Way who showed up to that same meeting — the ones whose well filters are turning black every three weeks, whose survey markers have been ripped out, whose houses have been rattled by 50 construction blasts — they live directly adjacent to this site. They are already experiencing what happens when a large development doesn’t take its neighbors seriously. A data center drawing millions of gallons annually from the same aquifer those wells tap into is not a hypothetical concern. It’s a predictable consequence.

Velardi told them not to worry. He compared it to a car radiator. That’s not an analysis. That’s a talking point.

Why Is He Defending It At All?

This is the more important question.

Velardi’s comments weren’t in response to an agenda item. They weren’t a rebuttal to a specific resident complaint. They were a spontaneous monologue defending data centers in general and Core5 specifically — delivered at a meeting where multiple residents had already raised concerns about the site.

His framing is the tell. He didn’t say “Core5 is a warehouse and people need to stop worrying.” He said: “Hey, if Core5 is a data center — no trucks, no road damage, half a dozen employees.” That’s a conditional defense of a conversion scenario. You don’t construct that argument unless you believe the scenario is real.

A previous PoconoReview investigation documented the spec anomalies at 246 Warner Road in detail: 296 dock doors at a density more than double any comparable logistics facility in the region; an 8-inch reinforced slab designed for concentrated point loads, not forklifts; 40-foot clear heights; 70-plus surplus acres on the same parcel; and a utility-owned PPL parcel sitting immediately adjacent inside the same data center overlay district. The overlay itself was approved in April 2026 — while the warehouse was still under construction — before the building had even received a certificate of occupancy.

Velardi knows all of this. He was on the board when the overlay was approved. He knows what the specs say. And when residents started asking questions publicly, his response wasn’t to defend the warehouse. It was to defend the data center.

The Commissioner Who Wants to Silence Protests Is Also Running Cover for the Development

There’s a through line here that residents should not miss. This is the same commissioner who called residents “idiots” at the same meeting for pushing back on a protest ordinance widely seen as a response to demonstrations against ICE enforcement. The same commissioner who wants a township manager to have subjective authority over which public gatherings are “low risk” and which ones require $2 million in insurance certificates.

And he’s also the commissioner volunteering unsolicited defenses of a development his constituents have been raising alarms about for months.

Whether Core5 at Stroudsburg converts to a data center or not, the residents of Pocono Township deserve a commissioner who gives them accurate information about what that would mean — not a reassuring car radiator analogy that leaves out the part where millions of gallons of water evaporate into the atmosphere every year.

If Velardi wants to make the case that a data center at 246 Warner Road would be good for the township, he should make it honestly. With the actual water consumption numbers. With an honest accounting of what “closed loop” means and what it doesn’t. With a real answer to the residents whose wells are already struggling.

The closed loop doesn’t close as tightly as he’d like residents to believe.