Republican gubernatorial candidate Stacy Garrity made one thing abundantly certain about her position on regulating data center construction in Pennsylvania: Gov. Josh Shapiro is doing it wrong.
But during the course of the hourlong discussion Tuesday morning in Cranberry Township, it was not always clear how her own approach would work.
As governor, she told a panel of local leaders from Butler County and surrounding areas, “You have to bring economic development in. [But] you have to make sure that whoever it’s impacting, that they have a seat at the table.”
Doing so, she said, meant allowing local officials to set the rules for development — and to pause such development while doing so. While there are bills in Harrisburg that would allow communities to halt development for a fixed period of time, Garrity said she favors giving communities “however long it takes.”
“You get all the stakeholders around the table, and you say, ‘OK, what do we need to do to protect … our communities?’” she explained. “So a pause is as long as we need.”
By contrast, she said, Shapiro has rushed to embrace the centers, despite misgivings about the noise pollution they create, the water they consume, and the stress they can put on local utilities. She noted that Shapiro’s last budget address pledged to make the state a leader in artificial intelligence, which depends on the computational power that data centers provide.
She reprised a familiar campaign theme: that Shapiro is focused more on a 2028 presidential campaign than on the state’s needs today. She characterized a sales-tax exemption on computer equipment — a state subsidy used to entice Amazon to make a $20 billion data center investment statewide — as an effort to improve Shapiro’s personal standing with Amazon owner Jeff Bezos.
Bezos, she noted, “owns and operates The Washington Post. That is the paper of record for Democratic presidential candidates inside the D.C. Beltway.”
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But Garrity herself praised Amazon’s data center investments a year ago, hailing it as a “historic investment into our commonwealth” that will “create thousands of jobs for Pennsylvanians.” (And while treating the Post as a Democratic bastion is a GOP trope, Bezos has engineered a makeover of its editorial page to be more conservative.)
Democrats contend that she has changed her message on data centers in other ways, noting occasions when she has urged the state to compete harder for them.
“Stacy Garrity is a desperate politician — and her long record of supporting completely unregulated data center development makes it clear that she just can’t be trusted,” said Shapiro campaign spokesman Manuel Bonder in a statement.
Garrity argues that she has always emphasized local control.
“ My position has not changed: It’s up to the communities,” she said.
It may seem unusual for a Republican to blast a Democrat for being too open to economic development, especially when President Donald Trump himself last year issued an executive order to expedite data center construction by streamlining federal regulations.
But the panel discussion Tuesday foregrounded such concerns as protecting wildlife from noise pollution and preserving farmland from development.
Butler County Commissioner Leslie Osche, meanwhile, questioned the centers’ long-term impact on local economies and tax revenues.
Constructing centers “is wonderful for the building trades because they’ll get a lot of work out of it”, said Osche, a Republican. But once built, she added, “it only takes a few people to run the data center. So it’s not necessarily an employment driver, either. So you do have to ask yourself, ‘What’s that return?’”
Local officials are having to think through such questions on their own, she lamented, because of “the lack of guidance from the state level.”
Osche said there’s been little word of data center projects in Butler so far. But the state says upwards of 100 data centers have been proposed statewide, with varying levels of commitment from developers: A half-dozen have begun construction.
And public support for centers, and artificial intelligence generally, is teetering among voters across the political spectrum. Polling late last year showed residents are sharply divided over the centers.
Facing a divided electorate, politicians in both parties are calibrating their approach. Shapiro has not taken a public position on calls to halt data center development, for example.
His own major policy initiative is the Governor’s Responsible Infrastructure Development (GRID) standards. The approach offers a “carrot” in the form of a sales tax exemption on computer equipment if developers commit to reach community, environmental and job-creation targets. For example, it rewards projects that produce their own power and operate with water-recycling systems — approaches meant to reduce the center’s impact on local electricity and water sources.
Shapiro’s campaign says the standards were compiled ”with community, labor, and environmental leaders to develop and propose some of the strongest data center regulations and standards of accountability in the entire country.”
Garrity faulted the measure both as strictly voluntary and as an unwelcome overreach in decisions that should be made locally.
“We absolutely have to get government out of the way,” she said. “And the control should absolutely remain local. We cannot force [centers] down the throats of communities that don’t want them.”
Garrity and state Rep. Aaron Bernstine, a Butler County Republican who took part in the panel Tuesday, agreed centers should be responsible for providing their own power and water.
But while Garrity said the state should provide recommendations for communities — “it’s up to the state to provide guidance and say, ‘OK, guys, this is what we suggest’” — she and Bernstine agreed that municipalities should choose for themselves how and whether to impose those rules.
“ As a state representative, it shouldn’t be my call,” Bernstine said.
On the other hand, Garrity also observed that developers “have these huge, powerful law firms” that may threaten to sue local governments. And when asked by a reporter whether local officials could negotiate on equal terms, Garrity said if a developer “tries to steamroll a local township,” the state “does have a role there to make sure … our communities are protected. And it’s not that difficult to do.”
But finding local consensus may not always be easy, either. Panelist Deborah Williamson, the mayor of Connoquenessing Borough, said it is important to be competitive in the AI sector.
Besides, she said of the centers, “If the Democrats are opposed to them, then I feel like we need them.”
