Today's throughline: the zoning window. Three communities showing three positions on the timeline. A North Carolina town has its public hearing in six days. In Pennsylvania, the state township association spent yesterday urging colleagues to write their ordinances before developers even arrive — with Upper Merion Township as the cautionary tale of what happens when you're ten days too late. And in Sterling, Virginia, residents are living with what happens when the ordinance gets written but the definition of “data center” leaves the door open.
Pennsylvania's township supervisors used their state convention in Hershey to press colleagues statewide to adopt data-center zoning before a developer proposal arrives. The Upper Merion cautionary tale is the one to study: a township that consulted Loudoun County officials, hired a planner, listened to residents, and drafted what its vice chairperson called a “very solid ordinance” still lost ten days to a developer filing nearly a dozen data-center proposals on office- and industrial-zoned parcels. Under Pennsylvania's Municipalities Planning Code, those filings lock in under the old zoning regardless of what comes next. “You want to be able to set the rules,” Chairperson Tina Garzillo told supervisors from across the commonwealth. Read the full story →
Sterling, Virginia residents are pressing Loudoun County over eight natural-gas turbines running 24/7 as a microgrid next to their homes — the operational case of what happens when a zoning definition folds “associated utility infrastructure” inside the definition of a data center. A Piedmont Environmental Council study estimates $53 to $99 million per year in localized health damages from the turbines; a half-mile away, Kasey Hatch measures 70 to 80 decibels on warm days against the county's 55-dBA cap. Loudoun's Board has closed the zoning loophole prospectively — but only prospectively. The existing Vantage II approval runs under the 2023 definition, with no hard sunset on the gas-turbine operation until the utility has grid capacity to connect the site. Read the full story →
Weaverville, N.C. will hold a public hearing Monday, April 27 at 6:00 p.m. on a zoning text amendment covering data centers and crypto mining — with written comments accepted. It's the third Appalachian-region town in two weeks to advance a pre-emptive ordinance through legal-notice channels rather than press releases, alongside Amwell Township (Pa.) and the PSATS statewide push above. The hearing is six days out. Written comments to Planning Director James Eller (jeller@weavervillenc.org) and Town Clerk Tamara Mercer (tmercer@weavervillenc.org) become part of the record and are harder to ignore than verbal testimony alone. Read the full story →
Also today: The Trump White House helped kill Utah's AI child-safety bill as the federal-state AI preemption fight reaches state legislatures and Democratic primary ballots — a pro-AI PAC has now spent $2.3 million against NY Assemblyman Alex Bores in the race to replace retiring Rep. Jerrold Nadler. Amwell Township holds its own zoning hearing May 14 in Washington County, Pa.