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A public outpouring of disgust, frustration, and concern about Pennsylvania’s pell-mell rush toward data center construction filled the Capitol Rotunda Tuesday afternoon in Harrisburg at a rally where advocacy groups called for the Legislature and Gov. Josh Shapiro to enact a moratorium.
Both the House and Senate were in session, but no significant data center bills have had serious discussion since before July 12. That’s when the state budget was passed and then lawmakers left Harrisburg for about two and one-half months.
A separate rally took place earlier in the day. It happened on the steps outside the Capitol, where there were calls for lawmakers to pass legislation legalizing so-called “skill games.”
“We are here to tell the data centers, ‘Get out of our communities,'” speaker Maya van Rossum, founder of Green Amendments for the Generations, told the crowd at the rally in the Rotunda. “Pennsylvanians are offended that data center developers keep walking into our communities and declaring they have rights.”
Shapiro was mentioned repeatedly. It was often in the context that the governor had fanned the flames of data center development by embracing the industry until he abruptly changed course on Aug. 18. On that day, he signed an executive order to create “guard rails” on the industry.
Among the points made on Tuesday:
-- The “cloud” mentioned so frequently in modern society is nothing more than a euphemism for a mass of buildings, pipelines, transmission lines, and other infrastructure that include data centers, said Stuart Day, a farmer from western Pennsylvania and member of the group Ohio Valley Allies. The rapid buildout of data centers amounts to an “economic colonization of rural America,” Day said.
-- The data center industry seeks to “conflate” the effects of relatively small data centers that existed prior to the current development frenzy with massive hyperscale centers now being proposed and built, according to a lead organizer of the rally, Karen Feridun of the Better Path Coalition. Feridun said the “guard rails” outlined by Shapiro are “not even close to providing the protections that we need.”
-- Systems created by the major AI company Palantir are being used by the federal government to make decisions on detaining people, said Teofilo Reyes of Make the Road Pennsylvania. He called for a halt on data center development and said, “Pennsylvania should not be a testing ground for mass surveillance.”
-- An ordained Presbyterian minister, Kevin Long, said hallowed teachings of faith profess the value of “wisdom over intelligence” and asked, “Does artificial intelligence offer promise for Pennsylvanians?” If so, he said, a “measured” approach to it was necessary.
-- Multiple lawmakers have endorsed the concept of giving municipalities the power to enact optional six-month moratoriums. The bill mentioned most on Tuesday, though, was one seeking a three-year, statewide moratorium and sponsored by Democratic Sen. Katie Muth of Chester County.
That bill is awaiting action in the Senate Local Government Committee.
At the earlier rally, there were multiple calls for lawmakers and Shapiro to quickly enact a law that would make at least some of the estimated 70,000 as-yet-unregulated “skill games” around the state legal.
Sen. Gene Yaw, a Republican from Lycoming County who has an active bill on the issue, urged the crowd to head inside the Capitol and make noise. The fact that his bill had not come to a vote on the Senate floor, he said, just “makes no sense to me at all.”
In mid-June, a state Supreme Court ruling in two separate appeals cases essentially found the devices are illegal slot machines. The court put a 120-day stay on its order to give lawmakers time to come up with a law clearing up the situation – and that clock runs out on Oct. 13.
Among those attending on Tuesday was T.J. Grewal, a 60-year-old Cumberland County resident who owns a small market in Harrisburg that sells coffee and hot and cold food.
Until last week, he said, there were seven of the machines on the premises. The revenue from them, he said, helped cover increased overhead costs that have happened since the COVID pandemic.
Last week, he said, the machines were removed by their distributor. Grewal said, “They didn’t want to wait until the last minute.”