Nestled in a narrow gorge between mountain ridges, with protected watershed land on its borders and an industrial zone barely 500 feet wide in places, Jim Thorpe Borough may be one of the least hospitable places for a data center.

That geographic reality sat at the center of a lengthy debate at Thursday’s borough meeting, where council voted to advertise a data center zoning ordinance for a public hearing. Though the ordinance is moving forward, council openly grappled with the legal risk that its industrial zone, which is concentrated along the Lehigh River and railroad corridor, may be too small to survive a court challenge.

Under the timeline laid out by borough solicitor Jim Nanovic, advertising the ordinance in April would put the public hearing in June, with a possible adoption vote in July.

The ordinance, drafted after state-level pressure on municipalities to address data centers, would restrict the facilities to the borough’s industrial zone and establish a series of requirements including landscape buffers, sound studies and design standards.

Council made several amendments before voting to advertise, including changing language to allow multiple noise studies rather than a single one, and expanding the list of zoning districts that must be considered in the buffer requirements.

But looming over those technical fixes was a larger question: Is Jim Thorpe’s industrial zone big enough to constitutionally permit a data center at all?

Borough Manager Maureen Sterner raised the concern directly, noting that some of the zoning map changes council is simultaneously considering would shrink the already-small industrial district further.

“Some of the changes in the zoning are pulling parcels out of the industrial district and putting them into another district, which makes it even smaller,” Sterner said. “We should look at that better before we make sure that we’re doing proper with the data ordinance.”

Nanovic explained the legal stakes plainly.

“If you’re saying it’s only allowed in industrial and the court would say that it’s exclusionary, the court would then say they can put it anywhere,” Nanovic said. “But at least then you can say the other criteria in the data center ordinance apply.”

To protect against that outcome, council voted to add a clause stating that even if a court found the ordinance exclusionary, all other criteria in the ordinance would still apply to any data center permitted in the borough, regardless of location.

Map changes

Former Councilman John McGuire, who sits on Jim Thorpe’s planning commission, pushed back against the premise that the borough was being exclusionary at all, delivering an extended argument that Jim Thorpe’s geography, not its zoning, is the real barrier.

“We’re built in a gorge,” McGuire said. “The only property that’s left is watershed at the (Mauch Chunk) lake and watershed right here behind our gun club, and we called them out as watersheds in our comprehensive plan many years ago. This isn’t something that we’re just planning to exclude — we’ve had this (zoning) map forever, and the changes are super minor.”

McGuire said the zoning map changes under discussion involved removing only about four residential properties from the industrial district, houses he argued never belonged there to begin with.

“They were just stuck down by the Acme (now Jim Thorpe Market), which used to be a train station,” McGuire said. “Behind that was a lumber yard, and then behind that it went up to the Silk Mill. They’re all commercial. They’re not industrial.”

He argued that the borough’s protected watershed land exists for reasons that predate the data center debate by decades.

“We called it protected forever — not because we knew data centers were coming,” McGuire said. “I don’t know how the courts could find we’re being exclusionary when we’re in a gorge.”

Industrial zone is tight

Nanovic acknowledged the physical constraints but cautioned that a future applicant with a smaller, differently designed facility might change the calculus.

“We don’t say there’s a minimum size of a data center — we just say data centers,” Nanovic said. “Technology changes. Who knows what the future is going to be.”

Council Vice-President Mike Yeastedt noted that the ordinance requires a 100-foot setback from surrounding zone boundaries, and that the industrial district running up toward the old silk mill is barely 500 feet wide in some areas, making it extremely difficult to site any building there while meeting the setback requirement on both sides. The only area in the borough that might realistically accommodate a data center, he said, would be the county-owned parking lot — which is already zoned industrial — or the site of the current supermarket.

“The county parking lot is the biggest piece of property that could be used,” McGuire said. “The data center ordinance doesn’t say who has to own the property, just that somewhere be provided for it.”