The process has shifted, and every inch of the shift favors the developer.

Between the application that collapsed in November and the one now before the Zoning Hearing Board, something changed, and it was not the project. The building is still two million square feet. The gas turbines are still planned within and between the buildings. What changed is the process, and the change runs in one direction.

A reset that wiped the slate.

On June 18, resident and attorney Nick Liermann wrote to the township asking for what any prepared community would need: the identity of the applicant's experts, their CVs, and their reports, "provided well in advance of the hearing." The board's solicitor wrote back on June 22 that this is "a new hearing, not a continuation of the prior hearing," that until June 25 "the only parties to the hearing are the Applicant and the Township," and that "The Zoning Hearing Board has no exhibits or other evidence except the application itself." Residents who fought the first application and packed the November hearing that collapsed over the applicant's missing standing were told their party status counted for nothing until they applied again. The evidence, meanwhile, arrives only "when it is presented to the Zoning Hearing Board." In plain terms, residents will meet the experts when the experts start talking.

Cross-examination on the clock.

The same email spelled out how the hearings will run. The board "cannot guarantee that a separate hearing will be scheduled after each of the Applicant's witnesses," and when a witness finishes direct testimony at 8 p.m., the board "expects to go directly into cross-examination at 8 PM rather than adjourning to the next hearing." A resident who has never seen the expert's report, never read the expert's CV, and does not even know the expert's field is expected to stand up at 8:01 and test sworn testimony about one of the largest industrial projects in this township's history. Liermann had already told the township he was "operating completely in the dark," and he told the solicitor it is "incredibly difficult to imagine anyone can prepare to cross-examine an expert" without knowing the opinion they intend to render, the assumptions behind it, or the witness's background and credibility. The solicitor's answer was that "This is the nature of zoning hearings." A hyperscale data center is not the nature of zoning hearings, and treating it like a fence variance is a choice.

The burden belongs to the applicant. The homework went to residents.

Pennsylvania law is clear that a special exception is not automatic, and the applicant carries the burden of proving compliance with the ordinance's standards and intent. Yet the only people being told to perform without preparation are the residents. The application itself, as Liermann put it to the board's solicitor, "is barren." What the community knows amounts to a square footage, stand-by generators, gas turbines, and a cooling system that "purports to be" closed loop. None of it was explored at the planning stage, and it all lands amid what he counted as "no less than 9 proposed data centers for our county." When he raised the disclosure question in the room on June 25, the board's solicitor said zoning hearing law does not require the applicant to provide that information, and the meeting moved to adjourn. MoreThanTheCurve reported the evening ended with boos and shouts of "shame." The room understood exactly what it had watched.

The law is a floor. This board is treating it as a ceiling.

Nothing in the Municipalities Planning Code forbids fairness. The opposite is true. Section 908(4) of the MPC gives the board the power to "compel the attendance of witnesses and the production of relevant documents and papers, including witnesses and documents requested by the parties." The board does not have to hope the applicant volunteers its experts' identities, reports, and CVs, it can order them produced. State Representative Gregory Scott made the same point in a June 29 letter to the board's solicitor, writing that "the greatest concern is not that the Board lacks the authority to create a fair process, but that this authority does not appear to have been exercised." The applicant, for its part, could hand its information over tomorrow, as the solicitor himself acknowledged in the room, and an applicant confident in its evidence would. This one is choosing the bare legal minimum, and the board is letting the minimum set the pace of a case it admits will span multiple hearings. That choice does not happen in a vacuum. This is the same developer who, in emails obtained through a Right to Know request by Concerned Citizens of Montour County and reported by Patch, pressed the Shapiro administration to make residents who appeal projects like this one post bonds worth double the project's cost. Squeezing preparation inside the hearing room and pricing out the appeal beyond it are two ends of the same strategy, and we can see both from here.

So here is our answer. Twelve residents, the Township Solicitor, and the Borough of Conshohocken Authority hold party status, and the room will be full on July 28. We will keep asking, on the record and in writing, for expert disclosures in advance, and as Liermann told the solicitor, he will continue to ask until the board grants this community "appropriate latitude to prepare." Every withheld report, every objection, and every 8:01 cross-examination goes into the record, and records get read on appeal. The process has been tilted, but it has not been ceded, and this community is not going anywhere.