I was in the room Tuesday night, July 14th, when the Lancaster City Council took up its new data center zoning ordinance, Bill No. 10-2025. It was an impressive turnout of the citizenry and standing room only.
That standing-room-only crowd is indicative of what an emotionally charged issue AI data centers have become, as well as larger concerns over the consequences of a world succumbing to AI and all its generative iterations. My community’s journey into the world of data centers began officially in November 2025, with the signing of a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) between the City of Lancaster and the data center developer known to us as Chirisa Technology Parks. As CBAs go, it wasn’t half bad, as it extracted environmental and operational performance commitments from the developer, and the city actually received payments of $20 million in total, delivered as two $10 million installments. This is opposed to places like Austin, Texas, that doled out incentives in the form of tax credits to AI data centers in the past. Moreover, as I pointed out in an earlier Substack, the two sites are former industrial properties that were sitting dormant and will now both be a source of jobs and tax revenues again.
Local Righteous Anger
But something went awry early on that is now fueling a portion of the local righteous anger against the project: the lack of public involvement and comment in the year or two leading up to the signing of the CBA in 2025. At the outset of Tuesday’s meeting, I had the good fortune to sit next to Arthur (Art) Morris, a man who served as Lancaster’s mayor from 1980 to 1990. He remarked to me that there will always be a price to pay when you don’t involve the public early on in issues such as this. In the end, this was a failure of process.
Lancaster’s two existing data centers were approved under a zoning determination that classified them as electronic data processing warehouses, which is the same broad category as wholesale trade and storage. This was rightly lampooned by local activist Tony Dastra. Nobody asked what a data center actually draws power in, or what its cooling system pulls from local water, because the zoning code didn’t ask those questions either. That is the reason Tuesday’s room was full of people who didn’t trust the process, and they weren’t wrong to feel that way. When government approves something without examining what it is, distrust is the correct response.
Fortunately, the data center zoning amendment is genuinely strong and addresses almost all of the shortcomings. Moreover, it gives our state and the country, for that matter, a model to follow that answers the deeper question of qui bono, who benefits. In our case, both the City of Lancaster and future developers will benefit. For instance, the amendment states:
Data centers will be pulled entirely out of Central Manufacturing zones and will only be permitted by special exception in Suburban Manufacturing zones. As Councilman Amos Stoltzfus stated, that leaves only sixteen parcels for data center development in the whole city.
There will be mandatory water utilization reporting with cooling system disclosure, thermal impact mitigation plans, and decommissioning bonds. Setbacks will be increased to two hundred and three hundred feet. Additional provisions strengthen heat mitigation and decommissioning standards and bar data centers from externalizing costs onto the grid or building within floodplains.
Although more needs to be done on the sound mitigation front, this is not a rubber stamp with better PR. It is a real, substantive constraint, arrived at through exactly the kind of public process that should make people trust it more, not less.
AI As An Overarching Issue Versus AI Data Centers
At this point, it may not be possible to separate these large AI training data centers from the overall debate on AI, since these large language models require enormous processing power, resting on the latest in central processing (CPU) and graphics processing (GPU) unit technology. And make no mistake about it — these processors are power-hungry, heat-shedding animals.
Years ago, the largest data center company in America was a state and local tax client of mine. When we spoke of cooling needs, we spoke about cooling floors and aisles. Today’s AI data centers cool individual chips in a process known as direct-to-chip liquid cooling. The layout logic then was distributed and modular, whereas today it is centralized and tightly clustered. Power requirements are orders of magnitude higher than in the past.
And there is a lot of fear and dread being spread about AI in general, from its role in creating a surveillance state to job destruction to the dumbing down of the citizenry. Some of it is warranted and worthy of spirited public debate, and some of it is hyperbole and outright fearmongering. Regardless of how these views were shaped, they are real and have consequences.
A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 76% of Pennsylvania voters follow news about AI data centers either very closely (26%) or somewhat closely (50%). Additionally, 74% said they would oppose an AI data center in their community, while 16% said they would support one and 10% offered no opinion.
Narrowing the conversation just to AI data centers, I fear we may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater just as Central Pennsylvania is showing the country how to do this right. In our case, we took a former industrial printing plant and converted it into a multibillion-dollar AI campus on already industrial land, touching no farmland, all the while drawing on a deregulated power market with nuclear generation coming back online nearby. Compare that to what’s been proposed elsewhere: tens of thousands of acres of open land in water-stressed states, betting that kind of risk can be exported onto a community’s water table. Lancaster doesn’t have to make that bet. We are providing a model for data center development that maximizes the public’s interest. Moreover, we have the water, we have the power, and we have the workforce.
But this may be lost in the overall AI debate.
Unrighteous Anger and Outside Provocateurs
And it is at this intersection of the debate that nefarious individuals and groups are inserting themselves, and this was on display last Tuesday evening in the city’s council chambers.
A group known locally as Lancaster Stands Up had worked the crowd beforehand, and they weren’t alone as a good chunk of the local left-of-center activist infrastructure showed up to voice their opposition to data centers. All night we heard from citizens calling for no data centers. Not fewer. Not better-regulated. None.
Lancaster Stands Up is part of a larger umbrella organization, Pennsylvania Stands Up, and it is not a small operation. According to their 2024 Form 990 (EIN 83-2880678), the organization took in $1,832,453 in revenue and held $2,899,875 in net assets. The grassroots are, at minimum, well-funded.
In his book I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked, Upton Sinclair wrote that it is difficult to get a person to understand something when their livelihood depends on not understanding it.
The Tell Is In The Ask
I’ve spent a long time in advocacy work, and I’ve learned to read a movement by what would actually satisfy it and by when it declares victory and calls it a day.
In this instance, a group asking for setbacks stops showing up once it gets setbacks. A group asking for water disclosure stops showing up once it gets water disclosure. Lancaster Stands Up and the coalition around it got both, plus a hard parcel cap, plus decommissioning bonds, plus a thermal mitigation requirement most municipalities in this country haven’t thought to ask for. If the ask was ever really about any of those things, Tuesday’s vote should read as a win worth claiming credit for.
I don’t think it will be, because I don’t think the ask was ever about the provisions or about cutting a good deal everyone could live with. Their ask is that AI data centers, as a category, are illegitimate; that they are an extraction economy dressed up as infrastructure, in which a handful of jobs are traded for someone else’s water and someone else’s grid strain; and that the benefits flow to shareholders in San Francisco and Wall Street sovereign wealth vehicles rather than the people of Lancaster.
That’s a coherent worldview. It is not, however, a policy position, because it has no answer to the question of what the city is supposed to do instead. Pennsylvania law requires every municipality to zone somewhere for every legal use, and “somewhere” was always going to be an argument about which sixteen parcels and not whether there would be any parcels at all.
This is a pattern I’ve watched across a lot of adjacent fights, from labor issues to immigration. The pattern goes like this: a coalition organizes around a maximalist demand, wins substantial concessions through a legitimate democratic process, and treats the concessions as a waypoint rather than a resolution because the actual goal was never negotiable in the first place.
You have to respect the organizing capacity of Lancaster Stands Up. They got a genuinely packed room on a Tuesday night, which is something. But you also have to be clear-eyed that a movement built around an unfalsifiable demand isn’t in the business of being satisfied by policy. It’s in the business of satisfying its donors.
Conclusion
None of this required a categorical answer, and that may be the real lesson of Tuesday night. Art Morris was right: the first two data centers went in without anyone asking the public what it thought, and the city is still paying that bill in distrust. But watching this ordinance pass, watching sixteen parcels replace the entire industrial map of the city as eligible ground, and watching a water utilization report become mandatory instead of optional, I don’t think silence was ever the fix. Rules were made. Real ones, with teeth, arrived at the way good rules are supposed to arrive: messily, publicly, over the loud objection of people convinced the whole exercise was theater, though it wasn’t.
There is a much larger, much harder argument to be had about what AI is doing to work, to attention, and to the shape of a society, and it deserves every bit of the seriousness people want to bring to it. But that argument was not on the agenda Tuesday night, and pretending it was is how a zoning vote about sixteen parcels in Suburban Manufacturing turns into a referendum on the future of the species. Lancaster now has language on the books that most cities sitting in far more precarious positions with regard to land, water, and power do not. Whether that satisfies the room that showed up Tuesday night is a different question from whether it works. I suspect it will keep doing the latter long after it’s stopped being asked to do the former.
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