On July 27th, Plymouth Township's council held a livestreamed public statement to explain, in unusually blunt language, why negotiations with the developer proposing a data center at the former steel plant site in Conshohocken have gone sideways. The council's line, roughly translated: they had an agreement, and then they didn't.
According to reporting from MoreThanTheCurve, the township claims developer Brian and his team backed out of previously agreed-upon conditions. Patch went one step further with the framing, quoting council as saying the application as it stands "blatantly disregards the health, welfare, and safety of the community" and characterizing the situation as "demanding approval by tantrum."
That is a lot of temperature for a zoning matter. Which is the point. For families living within earshot of the old steel site, the questions are the practical ones. What is the noise profile of a data center at 2 a.m.? What happens to traffic on the local grid when construction starts? What conditions were on the table in the first place, and which ones evaporated? The township has not published a full side-by-side yet, but council has now put itself very publicly on record.
We will keep tracking this one. It is the rare local story where the phrase "livestream press conference" is not overkill.