Upper Merion thought it had this handled. After hearing that a developer was scouting sites, township officials spent more than a year building a data center ordinance. They talked to their planner, brought in outside experts, studied Loudoun County, Virginia, the place people call the data center capital of the world, and listened to residents. Board vice chairperson Bill Jenaway summed up the mood at the PSATS annual conference in Hershey this spring: “We thought what we had was a very solid ordinance.”
Then the calendar caught them. Just 10 days before the new rules were set to go to the board for adoption, the developer filed eight data center proposals totaling more than 4 million square feet, spread across sites on Renaissance Boulevard, Horizon Drive, Swedeland Road, and River Road, in parts of the township zoned for office and industrial use. Under Pennsylvania land use law, board chairperson Tina Garzillo said, the new ordinance would not apply to those applications once it passed.
A year of careful work, and the projects that prompted it slipped in under the old rules with days to spare. That is the whole lesson, and it is worth sitting with before it happens in your township.
Why filing first wins in Pennsylvania
The rule that beat Upper Merion is not a loophole someone invented. It is how the Pennsylvania Municipalities Planning Code works. An application for development is reviewed against the zoning in effect on the day it is filed. A zoning amendment still moving toward adoption does not reach an application already on the table. Whoever files first, files under the rules that exist that day.
This protects applicants for a reason. A developer who spends money on engineering and plans is entitled to know the rules will not change mid-review. The same protection that gives an honest builder certainty also lets a well-advised developer watch a pending ordinance, see it coming, and file ahead of it. Upper Merion’s developer did exactly that.
There is a partial defense, and it cuts the other way. Once a township has properly advertised a zoning amendment, the pending ordinance doctrine can let the township judge later applications against the amendment even before final adoption. The catch is in the word “later.” The doctrine reaches applications filed after the ordinance is advertised and pending. It does nothing about the ones already filed. So the protection is real, but it is only as good as your timing. If the application beats your advertisement, the doctrine does not help.
That is why this is a calendar problem before it is a legal one. The strongest ordinance in the county is worthless against a project that filed the week before you advertised it.
What a township should do before a proposal shows up
The work divides into things you can do now and things that get much harder once an application is on file. Do the first group before you need them.
Audit where a data center can land today. Pull your current zoning and find every district where a large data center could go by right or by conditional use under the rules in effect right now. Many boards are surprised by the answer. In Upper Merion the sites were zoned for office and industrial use, categories written long before anyone pictured a 4 million square foot computing campus. Derry Township, in Montour County, found a data center could have come in as a special exception even under agricultural zoning. If you do not know where one could land by right today, you do not yet know your exposure.
Decide the conditions that matter locally. A data center ordinance is only as useful as the specific limits inside it. The ones that carry weight at the property line: noise limits measured at the boundary, setbacks, a maximum building footprint, water usage disclosure, backup generator rules, screening and buffering, and a decommissioning requirement so an abandoned shell does not become the township’s problem in fifteen years. Generic language will not hold up. The conditions have to fit your parcels and your neighbors.
Move the ordinance before a proposal arrives, and budget for it honestly. A data center zoning amendment runs roughly $30,000 to $150,000 and can take anywhere from a few months to a couple of years, depending on how much outside help you need. Montour County pulled its amendment together in under four months by forming a committee across the county and its municipalities and borrowing from places that had already done the work. Whatever your timeline, the reserve conversation and the solicitor conversation should start before a developer knocks, not after.
Use a pending posture knowingly, with your solicitor. If you are drafting an amendment, understand exactly when advertising it starts the pending ordinance clock, and coordinate that timing with counsel. This is the one place where a few days of sequencing decides whether the doctrine protects you or not. Do not leave it to chance, and do not advertise a draft you are not ready to defend.
None of this stops a determined developer from filing early if they see the ordinance coming. What it does is shrink the window. The faster you move from “we should regulate this” to an advertised, pending amendment, the less room anyone has to file ahead of you.
Where to go next
You do not have to draft from a blank page. Montgomery County and Chester County jointly produced a Data Center Ordinance Guide written for municipalities in our two counties, and it is a working starting point for the conditions above. Pennsylvania’s Department of Community and Economic Development publishes a Data Center Planning Toolkit with model siting and zoning considerations. For the statewide picture and the bills moving in Harrisburg, including House Bill 1834, described as the first regulatory framework for data centers in the state, the PSATS data center resource center tracks what is passing and what is stalled.
The best resource may be a phone call. Officials who have already adopted an ordinance, in Upper Merion, in Montour County, and in a growing list of townships, have been open about what they would do differently. A neighbor who has been through it can save you a five figure consulting bill and a hard lesson.
For the related question every board eventually gets, whether a township can do anything about the electric bills residents blame on data centers, see MCATO’s earlier piece, Data centers and your residents’ electric bills. The short version: zoning is the lever you actually control, which is exactly why the timing on it matters so much.
The bottom line
Upper Merion did the homework and still lost the projects that started it, because the developer filed 10 days early and the code rewards whoever files first. The board that treats its data center ordinance as a real deadline, advertised and pending before a proposal can beat it, keeps control of what gets built and on what terms. The board that treats it as a project for next quarter inherits whatever shows up under the rules it was about to replace.