The Lowhill Township board of supervisors and Planning Commission reviewed a draft Ordinance No. 2026-5, amendment the township’s zoning ordinance data center regulations during their third joint meeting Sept. 10.

“As per our last meeting we decided that we would table this ordinance,” Mike Siegel, township manager said at the start of the meeting.

Seigel said after last month’s meeting he and Attorney Rocco Beltrami of Norris, McLaughlin, P.A., sat down and did some research on the wattage requirements and made changes to the ordinance and some minor modifications to the water regulations.

“Other than that, I think it’s pretty well cleaned up, and we’re ready to go,” Seigel said.

“The board has asked me to do several things,” he said. “They asked me to prepare some type of press release. I have that already done. I broke it down in such a way that the press can understand what we’re trying to do in an image that is very synced and very prepared on how the residential versus industrial commercial are separated in this new ordinance.”

He said this will be the first type of ordinance like this in Pennsylvania that he knows of after doing a tremendous amount of research.

“I have been finding out throughout the country that nobody has broken it down to the type of tiers like we have done,” Siegel said. “Everybody has been concerned with the edge and hyperscale that they [have] never broken it down to the future of what’s coming.“

He said that, in drafting this ordinance, he and Beltrami considered developments over the past six to eight months involving cellular phone towers and 6G upgrades throughout the township.

“They’re getting ready to start transmitting data to a switching station after the hyperscale’s get up and run,” he said.

Seigel said that with this ordinance, he has tried to cover what is coming in the future to allow residents in homes to be able to use some of that data center information, and that’s why it’s broken down in tiers.

Beltrami then discussed the legal implications of de facto exclusion, explaining how the ordinance addresses such situations and why it establishes specific wattage levels.

Pennsylvania has two types of exclusionary ordinances, Beltrami said.

“One is a de jure exclusionary ordinance which you’re not going to find often. That’s where an ordinance prohibits outright otherwise lawful use,” he said. “The more common is the de facto exclusionary zoning ordinance in which a landowner will come in and say ‘based on what your ordinance requires, there’s no possible way that we could develop the land in accordance with the ordinance and it acts as an exclusion on our use in your township.’

“What Mike and I were trying to avoid was the challenge of a landowner based on a facto exclusion that we were only providing for a hyperscale data center or an edge computing facility, and that there may be certain lesser intense data center uses that don’t require the level of scrutiny that these larger facilities do,” Beltrami said. “Somebody proposing one of those smaller facilities or seeking to do an accessory data center use which was not provided for in the original ordinance adopted they could then claim some sort of exclusionary argument. This really is in my view, a bulletproof against an exclusionary argument, because we’re providing not only a residential accessory version, a commercial industrial accessory version but two forms of principle data centers, so that’s the whole gist behind it.”

According to a press release sent to The Press, Lowhill Township’s four-tier system is designed to connect emerging digital technology to the land-use, environmental and infrastructure responsibilities of local government.

The press release further states, “The proposed ordinance is not simply a ‘data center ordinance.’ It is a land-use framework for a rapidly evolving family of digital uses. The draft expressly anticipates artificial intelligence, machine learning, large language models, high-performance computing, GPU computing, quantum computing, cloud and edge computing, blockchain, digital storage, data processing, telecommunications-integrated computing, and future technologies with substantially similar operational impacts.”

According to item 2 in the press release titled Executive Summary, “What Lowhill is trying to Accomplish” states, Lowhill Township’s central planning premise is that the digital economy cannot be separated from the physical world. A digital facility may deliver an intangible service — computing, storage, artificial intelligence, cloud processing, or network functions — but the facility itself must occupy land and depend upon physical systems.

“The four-tier system is the mechanism Lowhill uses to make that connection. Lower-impact residential and distributed systems receive a simpler land-use path. Larger Edge and Hyper facilities are treated as principal uses requiring Conditional Use review in the Regional Use Overlay District 2 (RUO-2), together with detailed performance standards and technical studies.”

According to item 3 in the press release Where Facilities May Locate, “The proposed ordinance draws a clear line between major principal uses and lower-impact accessory uses. Edge Computing [Tier 2] and Hyper Digital Infrastructure [Tier 1] facilities are permitted only as principal uses by Conditional Use in RUO-2. Distributed Compute Node Systems [Tier 3] may be accessory to lawful nonresidential uses, and De Minimis Residential Compute Systems [Tier 4] may be accessory to lawful residential uses, both subject to their applicable standards.”

After further discussion at the meeting on kilowatts vs megawatts, the different usage and terminology and tiers, energy consumption and demand, the planning commission gave the recommendations to go ahead and advertise Ordinance No. 2026-5.

Before the board of supervisors’ motion, Beltrami said this would just be the motion to authorize advertising the ordinance with the minor changes that were discussed that evening.

After Beltrami’s comment, vice chairman Mike Drivers made a motion for the board of supervisors to authorize the advertisement of Ordinance No. 2026-5 requiring data center regulations with the minor changes and it was unanimously approved by all board members.