Pennsylvania Residents Are Turning Down $10,000 Each To Block A Data Center
NorthPoint Development wants to build Project Hazelnut, a 1,300-acre hyperscale data center campus in the Pocono foothills of northeastern Pennsylvania, and has been willing to pay handsomely for community support, offering a $165 million community benefits package including a direct payment of $10,000 to every eligible household in Hazle Township — roughly 4,500 households — on the condition that residents back the project. The offer has not gone over the way the developer hoped, with many residents interviewed by the Wall Street Journal unmoved, including retired teacher Jeff Fasnacht: "$10,000 doesn't match how much it's going to tank my property value." Special education teacher Diana Spallone said the money would be nice but didn't change her position. Retired homeowner Ed Negra, helping organize the opposition, called it what many residents believe it to be: a bribe. "It's ridiculous," said Ed Parks. "They are trying to drive a wedge between Hazle Township residents who are directly affected by the data center and people who might live a couple of miles away."
Hazle Township's government had already rejected the data center on zoning grounds and enacted a temporary moratorium before the $10,000 offer was even introduced in June, and the broader resistance across Pennsylvania has since grown into bipartisan demands for a three-year moratorium on data center construction and an end to the state's 100 percent sales tax exemption on data center equipment. Elsewhere in the state, a Cumberland County farmer turned down $15 million to allow his land to be used for a data center, choosing to preserve it as farmland for a fraction of that amount. Pennsylvania residents are being offered enormous sums of money to accept data centers in their communities and they keep saying no, which is the kind of civic determination that tends to get noticed.
