The noise study arrived after the meeting ended. It added six generators across the street.

You filled 750 seats. The paperwork waited for the parking lot.

The zoning hearing resumed on August 6 before the Plymouth Township Zoning Hearing Board at Colonial Middle School, and you showed up the way this community has shown up at every stage of this fight, filling a 750-seat auditorium nearly to capacity on a Thursday night in August. The board granted party status to the Borough of Conshohocken, to five nearby residents, and to a Whitemarsh man who cited medical conditions in his family and the air his children breathe. Norristown asked for the same standing and was refused, on the reasoning that its concern was general rather than specific. Hold that word, general. It comes back.

Attorneys for the parties opposing the application then made their motions. They challenged whether the application itself is adequate. They questioned the qualifications of Richard Roseberry, the senior principal at Colliers Engineering and Design whom the applicant called to interpret Plymouth’s own zoning ordinance. The board rejected the motions while the room applauded them, the applicant’s attorney complained that he could not get through a sentence or two without interruption, and the board’s solicitor, David Sander, told the audience the board sees you and understands what you are invested in. Someone answered him with two words, hear us, and that exchange is the whole proceeding in miniature.

Brian O’Neill has every legal right to commission a noise study from his own consultant, and his consultant has every right to be paid for one. Candor is a different matter. The assessment is dated July 30. It reached the public after the August 6 meeting ended. For a full week the study that speaks directly to the question residents have asked since September existed on somebody’s desk, and the room that came for evidence got procedural motions and a gavel instead. When the applicant finally handed the document over, he handed it to the parking lot.

A study that calls itself preliminary is telling you how much weight it can bear

Read the cover before you read anything else. The applicant’s own consultant titled this work a Preliminary Environmental Noise Assessment, and inside it the data carries the same qualifier, provisional, subject to refinement, dependent on information not yet in hand. Take that labeling seriously, because it is the most honest thing in the document. A consultant who writes preliminary on the cover is telling you, in the plainest professional language available, that this work is not finished and should not be treated as if it were.

That admission matters because of where this document is headed. A special exception under the Municipalities Planning Code places the burden of proof on the applicant. He must demonstrate, with evidence, that this use meets the standards and intent of Plymouth’s ordinance. A preliminary study offered against that burden is a promissory note, a commitment to produce real evidence at some later date, and the hearing where real evidence was due has already started. The residents who took the night off to sit in that auditorium did not come to hear a promise. They came to hear proof, and the applicant’s own consultant concedes on the title page that proof is not what this is.

The passing scenario depends on a product you cannot buy

Two hundred twenty-seven chillers. That is the mechanical inventory this project would set running next to the homes on Conshohocken Road, and the scenario in which the assessment finds all of them operating within acceptable limits depends on sound attenuation products that do not currently exist for this equipment. The study’s math works in a future where somebody has invented, manufactured, and installed a quieting technology that no one can purchase today.

Sit with what that means for the people 200 feet away. The applicant is asking a zoning board to approve two million square feet of industrial equipment on the strength of a compliance scenario his own consultant cannot point to on a shelf. If the product never materializes, or materializes at a performance level below the model’s assumption, the chillers run anyway, and the enforcement conversation happens after the buildings are full of servers and the leverage is gone. A noise limit satisfied by hypothetical hardware is a hypothesis, and nobody’s sleep should be conditioned on a catalog that has not been printed.

Six generators across the street is how an alley starts

Buried in the assessment is the detail that should alarm every resident who thought this fight was about one parcel. The document models six generators on a tract across Conshohocken Road, identified as Tract 2, feeding a microgrid whose total megawatts appear nowhere in its pages. No application before the zoning hearing board covers that tract. The equipment simply appears in the consultant’s model, across the street from the project everyone has spent eleven months examining, as if it had always been part of the plan and nobody needed to mention it.

This is creep, and it is exactly the pattern this campaign has warned about under the name No Data Center Alley. Loudoun County did not wake up one morning as the data center capital of the world. It got there one approval at a time, each hearing instructed to consider only the parcel in front of it while the corridor assembled itself in the aggregate. O’Neill is already running the two-front version of that play in Montgomery County, with roughly 4.6 million square feet proposed in Upper Merion alongside the two million here. And MoreThanTheCurve noted after the hearing that on two of Plymouth’s borders, in Norristown and Whitemarsh, data centers are moving toward being permitted by conditional use. The corridor logic is assembling itself in public. If equipment for this project is already spreading across the street before the first witness has finished testifying, the alley is not a slippery slope argument. It is in the noise model.

Three of your four neighbors are missing from the model

A two-million-square-foot facility with continuous mechanical noise sits at the seam of several municipalities, and sound does not check for a boundary line before it crosses one. The assessment is silent on three of the four neighboring municipalities. Whole communities of receptors, thousands of homes within range of 227 chillers and a generator fleet, are simply absent from the analysis, and the study offers no account of why they did not merit measurement.

Now recall what happened in that auditorium the same night. The board turned Norristown away from party status because its concern was general rather than specific. The applicant’s consultant went further than the board did. Where the board said Norristown’s interest was too general to participate, the assessment treats most of the municipal neighbors as if they do not exist at all. A Whitemarsh man had to invoke his family’s medical conditions to earn a seat at the table, and the study distributed that same night has nothing to say to him. The gap between who this project affects and who this document bothered to consider is itself evidence, and it points in one direction.

A limit the consultant says can never be measured again

The strangest concession in the assessment may be the most consequential. By the consultant’s own account, the ordinance can never again be measured at this site. The conditions his analysis rests on cannot be reproduced. Think through what that does to enforcement. Plymouth’s noise standards are only as real as the Township’s ability to walk to a property line with a meter and verify them, and the applicant’s own expert is on record that verification at this site is foreclosed. A limit that cannot be measured cannot be enforced, and a developer who rejected every one of the council’s proposed conditions is now offering a study whose central premise is that nobody will ever be able to check his homework.

The burden has not moved

Start with what the assessment concedes about itself. It is preliminary by its own title, provisional in its data, dependent on nonexistent products for its passing scenario, silent on three of the four neighboring municipalities, and unverifiable by its own account. Under the Municipalities Planning Code, the applicant carries the burden of proof on a special exception, and a study that concedes this much has carried nothing. When testimony resumes, the cross-examination questions write themselves: which application covers Tract 2, how many megawatts the microgrid totals, how many diesel testing days a year, which nonexistent product quiets 227 chillers, and how the Township is supposed to enforce an ordinance the applicant’s own consultant says can never again be measured at this site.

Party status holders will get to ask them, and the rest of us can keep filling auditoriums until they do. The petition has passed 4,000 signatures, the next procedural session is August 17, and the testimony date announced there is the one that belongs on your calendar.

Sources

• MoreThanTheCurve, “Almost full house for Conshohocken data center hearing before Plymouth Township’s zoning hearing board,” August 7, 2026, morethanthecurve.com
• WHYY, “Plymouth Township, Conshohocken-area residents shout, boo, as hearing for data center begins,” August 7, 2026, whyy.org
• 6abc Action News, “Developer Brian O’Neill defends Montgomery County data center proposals amid growing opposition,” August 6, 2026, 6abc.com
• MONTCO.Today, “Connaughtown’s Second Fight Against the Conshohocken Data Center, Explained,” July 2026, montco.today
• MoreThanTheCurve, “Data center developer submits substantive validity challenge to Plymouth Township in connection with proposed data center,” July 2026, morethanthecurve.com
• Auxia Design, “900 Conshohocken Road, Plymouth Township Data Center: Preliminary Environmental Noise Assessment,” prepared for MLP Ventures, LLC, July 30, 2026, distributed following the August 6, 2026 hearing.