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An Ordinance of the County of Allegheny, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, amending and supplementing Part 7 of the Administrative Code of Allegheny County, entitled “Properties,” through the creation of a new Article 707, entitled “County-Owned Property Usage,” in order to prohibit the usage of County-owned property for certain purposes relating to data centers.
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WHEREAS, the Home Rule Charter of Allegheny County, Article IV, §2(k) vests County Council with broad authority over County-owned property by providing that it is the power and duty of Council to “[b]y ordinance, lease, convey, vacate or abandon, or permit the use of County land, buildings or other real or personal property”; and
WHEREAS, in a recently published interview, University of Michigan School of Information and Public Policy Associate Professor Ben Green noted that “The public broadly is quite negative about data centers. Overall, their concerns are very legitimate. The public is concerned about rising electricity rates caused by data centers. They are concerned about the enormous water use that data centers require. They’re concerned about public handouts in the form of tax breaks that are going to data center developers, and they’re also aware that data centers don’t bring meaningful economic development, especially in the form of jobs. I think the public is quite right to be concerned about data centers. My research and other research have shown that these are a bad deal for communities on the local level.” (Mineo, Why are communities pushing back against data centers?, The Harvard Gazette, April 9, 2026); and
WHEREAS, in that same interview, Professor Green continued: “[t]he standard definition of a hyperscale data center is that it is more than 10,000 square feet with more than 5,000 servers. But even that is way below the current standard of the data centers that are being built today. Just a few miles from where I live in Ann Arbor there is a big project, part of OpenAI’...
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