Pennsylvania Developer Offers $10,000 Checks for Data Center Approval While Eminent Domain Threats Hit Neighboring Homeowners

A Missouri-based developer wants rural Pennsylvania homeowners to take $10,000 and look the other way. Some residents are refusing, and they say they've uncovered a bigger problem: a hidden corporate player and a utility company threatening to seize their land.

NorthPoint Development sent letters to roughly 4,500 households in Hazle Township starting in June, according to the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by Fortune. The offer: $10,000 per eligible household if the company's proposed 1,300-acre, 15-building data center campus, called Project Hazelnut, gets built. NorthPoint set aside about $45 million for those payments, according to Yahoo News, plus another $120 million over 15 years for community needs including the local police department. Add it up and you get the roughly $165 million figure Fortune reported for the overall local investment package.

There's a catch. The money doesn't show up until the first building gets its certificate of occupancy, which NorthPoint expects in late 2027, according to the Journal. Hazle Township, population about 10,460, already rejected the project once on zoning grounds and currently has a moratorium on data center construction in place, Breitbart reported.

Residents split on the cash

Jeff Fasnacht, a retired teacher living nearby, told the Journal the payment "doesn't match how much it's going to tank my property value." Ed Negra, a retired homeowner, said the offer could backfire: "most people have the opinion that, 'Hey, are they trying to bribe us here?'" Not everyone is opposed. Retired resident Charlie Leshko said the money is worth considering.

NorthPoint's chief marketing officer, Brent Miles, told the Journal the payments were a direct response to a public meeting last year where angry residents asked what they personally stood to gain. "I think we've got something here that's on the cutting edge, really in direct response to 'what's in it for me?'" Miles said.

The eminent domain problem

Erika Cook, an insurance agent in neighboring Sugarloaf Township, owns one of 28 properties facing eminent domain threats from PPL Electric Utilities, the same utility tied to the Hazelnut project. That arrangement dates back to 2024, before most residents even knew what was coming. A private utility invoking government condemnation power to clear land for a privately owned data center raises property-rights concerns that transcend typical zoning disputes and represent a materially different issue than whether a household accepts a $10,000 check.

Amazon's hidden hand

Local officials and NorthPoint wouldn't confirm who the end-user of the data center would be. Residents filed right-to-know requests and, according to records released in January and reviewed by Fortune, confirmed Amazon's involvement through emails between Amazon and Pennsylvania's Department of Community and Economic Development. Those emails showed state officials wanted to disclose Amazon's role publicly, while Amazon pushed to keep it covert, citing unspecified "contractual issues."

Amazon's defense deserves a fair hearing here. A company spokesperson told Fortune that Amazon is "evaluating multiple sites across the Commonwealth" and is in talks with NorthPoint, but has no definitive agreement. AWS CEO Matt Garman also announced in a blog post that the company will no longer enter nondisclosure agreements with government agencies on data center projects going forward, a policy shift that at least acknowledges the secrecy problem residents raised.

The sequence matters: state officials wanted transparency and Amazon didn't provide it until residents forced the issue through public records requests. The gap between what officials wanted to disclose and what Amazon wanted kept quiet is documented in the emails themselves.

A national pattern

Hazle Township isn't unique. Data Center Watch, a project tracked by the AI intelligence firm 10a Labs, found $68 billion in data center projects canceled or delayed in a recent three-month period, more than half of all large-scale developments the group monitored, according to Breitbart. The group counted 843 opposition groups across 49 states. In Tennessee, a single petition against one project drew more than 500,000 signatures on Change.org.

In Loudoun County, Virginia, home to the world's largest concentration of data centers, residents on Statesboro Place told Fox News Digital they now live roughly 150 feet from AWS and Microsoft facilities that run with a constant mechanical hum. Microsoft and Amazon both told Fox News Digital they're working with neighborhood associations on noise and landscaping. Environmental activist Erin Brockovich, known for her work exposing PG&E's groundwater contamination in Hinkley, California, has since launched a crowdsourced tracking project, BrockovichDataCenter.com, that collected nearly 4,000 complaint submissions in its first month, according to Before It's News. Residents reported water bills jumping from $30 to nearly $300 and well damage from construction vibration.

None of this proves fraud or illegal conduct by NorthPoint, PPL, or Amazon. No investigation or charges have been announced against any of the companies involved. The documented gap between what state officials wanted to disclose and what Amazon wanted kept quiet is now a matter of public record. Hazle Township's zoning moratorium remains in place, and whether NorthPoint's $165 million package changes the township's vote remains an open question heading toward the project's next public hearing.