Hell No, Eventually

On Friday, Governor Shapiro’s office looked at Brian O’Neill’s lawsuit to erase Plymouth Township’s zoning ordinance and posted eighteen words: “This is the exact wrong way to do development here in Pennsylvania. I’m a hell no.” He is right, residents should welcome him to the fight, and everyone should understand that the road to this project runs directly through his own office.

Start with the good news, because it is genuinely good news.

On Friday afternoon, the official account of the Governor of Pennsylvania shared a story about Brian O’Neill suing to invalidate Plymouth Township’s entire zoning ordinance and added this: “This is the exact wrong way to do development here in Pennsylvania. I’m a hell no.”

Residents of Plymouth Township and Conshohocken should take that at face value and take the win. For a year, the people closest to this site have packed hearing rooms, filed Right to Know requests, read thousand page applications on their lunch breaks and stood at microphones explaining what a two million square foot gas fired computing campus would do to the houses two hundred feet away. On Friday the Governor of Pennsylvania, a man from Montgomery County who is regularly discussed as a presidential candidate, looked at all of that and picked a side, and it was ours. Converts win fights. Nobody standing in the Colonial Middle School parking lot on Thursday night should be interested in purity tests.

But this effort runs on a lot more than just Facebook posts, and the same Right to Know records that residents pried loose from Harrisburg show something that has to be said out loud, precisely because we now agree with the Governor about the destination. This project did not fall out of the sky onto Conshohocken Road. It was walked here, meeting by meeting and email by email, with the active help of the Governor’s own office.

The office that worked the deal

The Governor’s Office of Transformation and Opportunity exists to move big projects through state government, and its Chief Transformation Officer is a man named Ben Kirshner. In July 2025, Kirshner wrote an internal email to the leadership of the state’s Department of Community and Economic Development about Brian O’Neill. It opens like this: “I can’t remember a day where Brian hasn’t called me multiple times regarding the data center site we’ve been working on together for several months.”

Working on together. His words.

The email goes on. Digital Realty, one of the largest data center companies on earth, “is his client, and they are very serious about this project.” Kirshner describes having “assisted Brian O’Neill and Digital Realty by arranging a meeting in the governor’s office in Philly” with PECO’s leadership. He describes O’Neill’s frustration with PECO’s cluster study timeline. And then the sentence that matters most: “I’m helping Brian secure at least a term sheet so that he can lock in Digital Realty.”

He closes with a joke to his colleagues: “If anyone from DCED wants to get yelled at everyday let me know, ill tag out of this :)”

That is the state’s chief transformation officer, describing daily phone calls from a private developer, meetings arranged in the governor’s Philadelphia office, and his own personal work securing that developer a term sheet, and signing off with a smiley face.

It was not a one month arrangement. In February 2025, on an email chain about O’Neill’s data center pitch deck for PECO, Kirshner wrote: “Ok I think the CEO of Peco will be attending that as well, from my request.” From my request. The state was producing the utility’s chief executive for the developer’s pitch meetings.

By February 2026, O’Neill was comfortable enough to write to Digital Realty executives this way: “Ben Kirshner, my dear friend in the Governor’s office is copied on this email. The Governor would like to invite you to a small group of players in the data center business including Google, AWS, Oracle, etc. Please respond to Ben immediately, this is a time sensitive matter.”

Read that again. A private developer, extending invitations in the Governor’s name, to a private circle of the biggest technology companies in the world, with his dear friend from the Governor’s office copied to make it real.

The number in the Governor’s inbox

Now the email that residents of Connaughtown should print out and bring to the hearing.

On the morning of September 4, 2025, O’Neill wrote to Kirshner about this site. Not Discovery Labs, not a hypothetical, this site: “we have put the Cleveland Cliffs Steel Mill site under agreement in Conshohocken, (Plymouth Township).”

He tells the state the site “was a former plating operation” and adds, of a property that made steel for a century, “We believe the site to be clean environmentally.” He explains the seller is requiring an as-is closing on a short window. And then the ask: “We need to get fast track treatment from DEP.”

He describes what the fast track is for. “Our plan is to build a 600 gigawatt data center on the site which would be about a $4.5 billion investment. In addition to the $4.5 billion, 600-gigawatt data center on site, we are also building an 800 megawatt power plant which the grid desperately needs at a $1 billion additional cost.”

Set aside, for one moment, that a 600 gigawatt data center would consume roughly half the generating capacity of the United States, that he presumably meant megawatts, and that nobody on the thread appears to have asked. Look at the other number. An 800 megawatt power plant. For a year, residents have asked one question at every hearing and in every comment period: how big is the gas plant you want to run next to our homes? The application does not say. The testimony has not said. And here is the developer, in his own email, telling the Governor’s office the number is 800 megawatts, a plant in the class of the large gas fired stations that anchor entire regions of the grid, sited a couple hundred feet from bedrooms.

Kirshner’s reply came at 4:37 that same afternoon: “I just sent in the request to DEP.”

Five and a half hours. That is the turnaround a developer gets from this administration. Residents who have submitted Right to Know requests to these same agencies can compare it to their own experience.

The Governor has since built a public framework around data centers, and its language is worth holding up next to that email. In his budget address he warned that too many of these projects have been shrouded in secrecy, with communities left in the dark about who is coming in and what they are building, and he said that needs to change. He was right. Plymouth Township was in the dark. His own office had the lights on the whole time.

What they knew, and when

None of this happened to an administration that was unfamiliar with Brian O’Neill.

In November 2023, DCED staff confirmed internally that a decline notice had been sent on what one official called O’Neill’s big ask for state funding. The email chain carrying that confirmation also carried a news headline the staff were circulating to each other: “Unpaid contractors file more than $125M in liens against Discovery Labs.” More than thirty contractors ultimately sued MLP Ventures over unpaid invoices for work at Discovery Labs in King of Prussia.

So the administration knew, in the fall of 2023, that this developer’s flagship project was buried in liens from the tradespeople who built it. What followed was not distance. The records residents obtained show the administration went on to approve at least fourteen million dollars in grant funding for O’Neill sites, to provide a support letter for placing his Upper Merion property on the National Historic Register, and, as recently as this January, to help him pursue a purchase of state owned land. When O’Neill wrote asking to be connected with “the appropriate real estate executive at the state of PA so we can negotiate the purchase of this property,” calling it “important to our overall development,” the reply from the Governor’s office was five words: “We are researching this on our end.”

The county was in the loop as well. In an internal report, DCED Secretary Rick Siger described a call with Neil Makhija, who chairs the Montgomery County commissioners, and listed as the first follow up item: “Discovery Labs/Brian O’Neill. Do we have a sense of what is happening on this site? They may be partnering with a data center developer; is this real and if so what is status and timeline? Are we involved at all?”

Are we involved at all. The county’s top official was asking. The honest answer, sitting in the state’s own inboxes, was yes.

He asked them to take away your right to appeal

There is one more chapter, and it explains why Friday’s post matters so much.

This spring, in a letter to the Governor’s office obtained through a public records request by Concerned Citizens of Montour County, O’Neill asked the administration to support policies making it harder for communities to challenge data center decisions. He described residents’ appeals as frivolous and complained about “people that just want to slow us down for sport”. In emails to Kirshner he went further, proposing that anyone who appeals a data center project be required to post a bond equal to twice the developer’s claimed damages, which for a project he values in the billions would mean that no resident, no township and no borough in Pennsylvania could ever afford to be heard.

Hold that next to what he filed on July 21. The man who asked the Governor’s office to price residents out of the appeals process is the same man now asking a zoning board to declare the township’s entire ordinance unconstitutional, with a relief clause demanding exemption from the noise limits and “any and all other zoning relief necessary,” without limitation. The two documents are the same idea wearing different clothes. Both of them are arguments that the people who live here should have no say.

That, we suspect, is what finally made Friday’s post possible. As long as O’Neill was pretending to work within the rules, the state could pretend its help was ordinary economic development. The validity challenge ended the pretending. There is no way to stand next to a lawsuit whose premise is that a Pennsylvania community’s zoning should not exist, and the Governor, to his credit, did not try.

What a hell no is worth

So residents should welcome the Governor sincerely, and then they should ask him for the things a governor actually controls, because his office has already demonstrated exactly what those things are.

His office requested fast track treatment from DEP for this site. A hell no means DEP reviews the air permits for an 800 megawatt power plant next to homes with the full rigor and the full timeline that scale demands, and says so publicly. His administration has put state grant money into O’Neill projects before. A hell no means a public commitment that no state dollars, no RACP funding and no incentive of any kind touches 900 Conshohocken Road. His office produced PECO’s chief executive on request and researched state land purchases on request. A hell no means the introductions stop. And the Governor has proposed his own standards requiring transparency and community engagement from data center developers. A hell no means backing those standards as binding law, and saying plainly that a developer who sues to erase a township’s ordinance while hiding the size of his power plant fails them.

The post was the easy part. Every one of these is a decision the Governor can make this month, without the legislature, without the courts, and without waiting for the Zoning Hearing Board.

Positions evolve when rooms fill

This is now the third positional evolution in this fight, and the pattern is worth naming.

O’Neill spent eleven months arguing that Plymouth’s ordinance permits his project, then filed a sworn petition arguing the same ordinance is unconstitutional. Township Council spent months negotiating forty three conditions with him, then formally opposed the application and now publicly opposes the challenge. And the Governor’s office spent more than two years working the deal, and on Friday declared itself a hell no.

None of those reversals happened on their own. They happened because residents kept showing up, kept filing requests, kept reading the documents and kept putting what they found on the record, until the cost of standing with this project exceeded the cost of standing with the people who live next to it. That is not cynicism, that is how this is supposed to work, and it is working.

The Zoning Hearing Board takes testimony Thursday, August 6, at 7:00 p.m. at Colonial Middle School. The Governor of Pennsylvania says he is a hell no. The best way to thank him, and to hold him to it, is to make sure he was not the last convert, and the way you do that is the way this community has done everything for the past year. Bring a neighbor.