Residents of Lower Mount Bethel Township packed Bangor Area Middle School on Thursday night and spent three hours telling developers they did not want a proposed data center on farmland in their community. About three dozen people spoke during the public comment period, and none backed the Lower Mount Bethel Tech Center.
The project’s backers, including Peron Development and J.G. Petrucci Co., described the proposal as a 1.2-gigawatt data center on a 450-acre site that would cost more than $5 billion. They said it could create 500 full-time jobs, hundreds of construction positions and as much as $7 million to $8 million in annual tax revenue for the township. But the presentation left major gaps: developers did not say how many buildings the campus would include, how large the structures would be or how they would be laid out across the property, and there was still no confirmed end-user for the facility.
The meeting took place in a room full of people who rejected the idea that farmland should be treated as empty land waiting for a more profitable use. That argument has surfaced in other places facing data center proposals, including Mason County, Kentucky, where Ida Huddleston and her daughter, Delsia Bare, refused to sell family farmland even after offers topping $26 million. Huddleston was offered $60,000 an acre for her 71-acre property, while Bare turned down a $48,000-an-acre offer for her 463-acre farm.
The Mason County proposal is tied to 28 properties and roughly 2,080 acres, according to the application, and it calls for a hyperscale campus near Big Pond Pike, Germantown Road and Valley Pike Road. The filing says the project would include six data center buildings, mechanical yards, substations, water tanks, storm ponds and other infrastructure, with about 1,350 acres expected to be disturbed. It also says the campus would use a closed-loop liquid-cooled system that recirculates fluid and would consume zero water for cooling during normal operations, with water to come from the Western Mason Water District and the City of Maysville.
That contrast helped sharpen the debate in Lower Mount Bethel: developers came armed with promises of jobs and tax revenue, while residents came with a refusal to give up rural land for an industrial project whose full footprint is still undefined. For now, the opposition is plain. The question that remains is whether the proposal can move forward without the kind of local support it did not find at Bangor Area Middle School.
