Salem Township Just Rezoned 3,000 Acres for a Second Data Center Campus. In Return, It's Getting the Emergency Room the County Doesn't Have.

Salem Township, Pennsylvania, has an emergency room problem. The nearest full one is a drive away, and for years the fix nobody could afford has been a line item on a wish list. On October 27th, the township's board of supervisors found a way to pay for one: by giving a data center developer 3,000 more acres to build on.

The board voted 2-0 at a special meeting to expand Salem Township's Special Data Center Overlay district, the zoning tool that designates land in the township as eligible for data center use. The vote covers two separate projects. The larger one, a 4,466-acre campus called Salem 3 targeting roughly four gigawatts of eventual demand, comes from 4-3 Glennbrook Group, a local development partnership co-founded by Jack Sordoni and Dave Scoblick. The smaller one, about 185 acres for a project called Salem 4, came from a filer called Moores 109 LLC. Vice Chairman Steven Fraind abstained on that second vote, saying a property he owns may be involved in the deal. Both followed a unanimous recommendation from the township's planning commission on September 24th.

This is not Salem Township's first data center. The township already hosts a large existing campus built next to Talen Energy's Susquehanna nuclear plant, tied to a long-term, gigawatt-scale power purchase agreement that made the site one of the more closely watched examples anywhere of a hyperscaler building directly against existing nuclear generation. That history is the actual reason Salem 3 is happening here and not somewhere with cheaper land: a campus that sites next to an operating nuclear plant and an existing combined-cycle gas facility can skip years of the interconnection queue that's stalling data centers almost everywhere else in PJM territory, trading a longer commute for open land against a shorter wait for power. Supporters of Salem 3 lean on that history hard: Sordoni has argued the township already carries the scars of decades of power generation, gas infrastructure, and transmission buildout, and that Salem is arguably the single largest contributing township to the entire PJM grid. The pitch isn't that data centers are new here. It's that the township has already paid the infrastructure cost once and should get paid for it again.

What the township is asking for in return is the more unusual part of this story.

What the township actually got

4-3 Glennbrook's community benefits package is reported at roughly $43 million, built around a $12 million commitment toward a 24-hour micro-hospital, a stabilize-and-transfer facility with a full emergency department, sited on about 42 acres the company is donating along Route 11. Sordoni has said the company has invited a regional health system to evaluate operating it, though no partner has been named publicly yet. For a township without a nearby emergency room, that is a genuinely different kind of community benefit than the park upgrades, fire equipment, and tax-sharing arrangements most of these deals produce.

This is not a question of yes or no to data centers. Data centers is a question of where and how.Jack Sordoni, co-founder, 4-3 Glennbrook Group

It's a bigger number than the township's own recent history on this exact issue. The community benefits agreement tied to the earlier Salem 2 project, built for a different data center tenant on nearby land, was reported at roughly $9 million. Whatever else is true about how these packages get negotiated, the price for a township's cooperation in Luzerne County's data center corridor has climbed sharply in a short stretch of time, and it's climbing because townships like Salem now know developers will pay for access to existing power infrastructure rather than wait years for new interconnection somewhere else.

What the vote isn't

Township officials were careful, in their own comments around the vote, to draw a line that's easy to miss in the coverage: this was a zoning action, not a project approval. Expanding the Special Data Center Overlay district makes data centers a permitted use on an additional 3,000-plus acres. It does not approve a single building, a site plan, or a construction permit for either Salem 3 or Salem 4. Both developers still have to come back with real applications, and the township still has to review them. That's a distinction worth sitting with, because overlay zoning is exactly the mechanism that trips up outside observers (and, sometimes, the companies doing the diligence): "the land is entitled for data center use" and "this specific building is approved to break ground" are two different findings, decided at two different meetings, and a press release describing the first often reads like it's announcing the second. Pennsylvania townships have taken wildly different approaches to writing that permitted-use category this year, and the terms each one attaches before the use is even allowed, not just after a building permit is filed, are usually the real tell for how much leverage a township actually kept for itself.

That distinction matters most for the $43 million figure itself. As reported, it's a proposed and projected package tied to a project that doesn't have site-plan approval yet, not a signed, binding community benefits agreement with payment milestones attached, the way Swatara Township's $120 million agreement with Corscale was once it actually closed. A number like that sits on the claim end of the evidence ladder until it's in a recorded document the township can enforce, and the gap between a developer's generous opening offer during a rezoning fight and a township's actual signed leverage once the land is already entitled is exactly the kind of gap that's burned other communities before. Salem Township got a real commitment of intent. It has not yet gotten a contract.

The township next door said no

Salem's yes looks different next to what's happening a few townships over. Hazle Township, also in Luzerne County, unanimously rejected a competing data center campus known as Project Hazelnut after a packed public meeting, then went further and voted to pause all consideration of new data center proposals entirely. Residents in nearby Dorrance Township have raised similar concerns at their own meetings about strain on the local water table and the sheer scale of power the industry is pulling into a county that, as Sordoni's own argument concedes, is already carrying more than its share of generation and transmission infrastructure. Environmental reporters covering the broader Pennsylvania buildout have documented the same grassroots pattern spreading well beyond Luzerne County this year, as communities that once took data centers on faith over tax revenue and jobs have started showing up at zoning meetings with their own questions about water and noise instead.

State Rep. Jamie Walsh, a Republican whose district covers part of Luzerne County, has made data center growth close to his signature issue in Harrisburg this year, introducing a cluster of bills aimed squarely at what's happening in townships like his own: a Commercial Data Center Transparency Act, a companion bill that would let local governments enact an 18-month moratorium on new and pending data center applications, a bill to repeal the state's sales-tax exemption for data center equipment outright, and a separate ratepayer-protection measure aimed at the cost data center demand pushes onto residential electric bills. None of them has passed yet, and nothing about Salem Township's vote changes their odds either way. But they exist because enough of Walsh's own constituents, in the same county where Salem just said yes, have decided the terms on offer so far aren't good enough.

Luzerne County is turning into a real test of whether a township can actually negotiate its way to a good deal, or whether the only reliable tool local government has is the blunt one Hazle reached for. Salem's bet is that a developer who needs land next to existing power infrastructure badly enough will pay real money for a hospital the township couldn't otherwise build. Hazle's bet is that the safest answer, for now, is not to find out. Both bets are being placed by neighbors who share the same grid, the same water table, and, if either project's power numbers hold up, the same strain on both. Which township's approach looks smarter will depend less on what got voted on this week than on whether Salem's benefits package survives the trip from a developer's pitch to a document someone can actually enforce.