All three Schuylkill County commissioners signed a nondisclosure agreement before meeting with a company seeking to build a data center in Kline Township.

But the NDA, commissioners Chairman Larry L. Padora said, was meaningless because the county would have to release the information should anyone file a Right-to-Know request.

“We went into this meeting, and they said, ‘Will you sign this NDA?’ Because they wanted to talk about it.

“At that point, it wasn’t known who the end user was, that it was Amazon (Web Services).”

Padora said the commissioners signed the NDA in 2024 or 2025, as Talen Energy was formulating plans to build the data center.

He said county solicitor Paul J. Datte advised commissioners it would be OK for them to sign the agreement because the information could be made public through Right-to-Know requests.

“We told them right out, the NDA is not worth anything because they’re subject to Right-to-Know requests,” Padora said. “And now that Amazon’s name’s out there, the NDA is not binding.”

Padora said the company wanted the end-user name kept secret “because of the ‘Walt Disney effect.’ ”

“If they’re buying land, and you know it’s Amazon, you’ll increase the price. It’s like Walt Disney when he was buying all the property in Florida. They didn’t want them to know it was Walt Disney because the land would have gone from $2,000 an acre for swamp land to $100,000 an acre, because that’s Walt Disney building,” Padora said.

“So basically, at this meeting, the only thing that was resolved was that it was Amazon. That’s it,” he said. “They didn’t want that public at the beginning because I guess there was some other company interested in developing it, and I guess they didn’t want it known that Amazon was the end user.

“Sometimes when developments come in, they ask for NDAs to be signed because of proprietary information, or if they’re in the process of acquiring land, that the land’s not jacked up to an unfair price,” Padora said.

He said he’s signed only that one NDA.

Meanwhile, the data center plans are wending their way through the permitting process.

The Kline Township Planning Commission has until Sept. 30 to determine whether the data center, to be composed of 10 buildings on 380 acres along Lofty Road, should be granted permission to proceed.