Your 3 minutes are up - A talk on Data Centers
Your Three Minutes Are Up: Inside Big Beaver Borough’s Data Center Fight
In this episode of Exposure, Jill and Stuart bring together six people from Western Pennsylvania for a wide-ranging conversation about a proposed hyperscale data center in Big Beaver Borough—and the larger questions the project has raised about transparency, development, and who gets a meaningful voice when a community is about to change.
The discussion centers on the former Pittsburgh International Race Complex, or Pitt Race, a longtime motorsports venue purchased in March 2026 by Wampum I LLC for $50 million. Switch has since emerged publicly with plans for a hyperscale data center at the property. But as residents began investigating the project, they discovered that Big Beaver Borough's involvement with people working to advance data center development began well before the sale became public.
A Community Caught Off Guard
For many people in the motorsports community, the story began in fall 2025 when they learned that Pitt Race would close at the end of the season. For residents of Big Beaver, the questions quickly became much larger than the loss of the racetrack.
Residents began attending Borough meetings seeking information about what was being planned, what officials knew, and what a project of this scale could mean for the surrounding community. Their concerns ranged from noise, water and electricity demand to property values, emergency response, environmental impacts, and the changing rural character of the area.
Throughout the roundtable, several participants describe a process in which obtaining substantive answers from the Borough has been difficult. They recount being restricted to three-minute public-comment periods, being told that meetings were not a forum for answering questions, and turning to Pennsylvania's Right-to-Know Law in an effort to understand what had been happening behind the scenes.
That question—what did the Borough know, and when did it know it?—became one of the central subjects of the episode.
What the Public Records Show
As part of Exposure's reporting, Stuart submitted five Right-to-Know requests to Big Beaver Borough and another to Beaver County seeking records concerning prospective data center development.
The records produced by Big Beaver establish that by at least July 2025, Borough officials were already communicating with attorney Jeffrey Esch McCombie and Nick Farris of Provident, a Texas-based real estate and data center developer, while data-center-specific zoning language was being developed.
The earliest emails produced do not read like introductions. Instead, they reference existing discussions, ordinance language, meetings, calls and people who had apparently already met in person. From July through September, the records document continuing interaction among Borough representatives, Farris, Esch and others as Ordinance 245 took shape.
One July email contains a particularly revealing detail. While coordinating a conference call, Farris tells Borough Secretary Jennifer Gasser: “Jennifer, you already met Zach on our trip to Southland Engineering. However, Jorge will join on the call too.”
The records produced do not explain when that earlier trip occurred, who attended it, or precisely what was discussed.
Then, on August 26, 2025—months before the racetrack property was sold—Farris told Gasser that he would be “at the racetrack” and available to meet afterward.
That email does not establish what Farris was doing at Pitt Race or the status of any potential transaction at the time. It does establish that someone already communicating with the Borough about data center development was visiting the racetrack months before its March 2026 sale.
For residents who say they were repeatedly given little indication that substantive discussions were already occurring, that timeline has become an important part of the story.
The Debate Is Bigger Than Data Centers
The roundtable does not present data centers as a simple good-versus-bad question.
Kimberly Koller-Jones, executive director of the Hoyt Center for the Arts, provides an important counterweight throughout the discussion. She acknowledges the growing role of AI and digital infrastructure while asking whether development is moving faster than communities and governments can understand and regulate its impacts.
That distinction becomes one of the episode's central themes.
The participants discuss water infrastructure, electricity demand, backup generators, noise, light, emergency response, taxation, construction jobs and the long-term economic value of large industrial projects. Some participants strongly oppose the Big Beaver project, while others focus on whether projects could be developed differently—with stronger ordinances, better protections and meaningful community involvement.
The conversation ultimately moves away from the question of whether data centers should exist and toward a more difficult question: If they are going to be built, what does responsible development actually look like?
Who Gets a Seat at the Table?
That question brings the conversation back to Big Beaver's governing process.
There is nothing inherently unusual or improper about municipal officials communicating with developers. Local governments routinely work with businesses, attorneys, engineers and property owners when considering economic development.
What makes the records significant is the contrast between the access reflected in those communications and the experience residents describe.
The documents show project representatives participating in discussions about ordinance language, conference calls, meetings and other communications while the regulatory framework for data centers was being developed. In the records produced through Exposure's Right-to-Know requests, there was no comparable discussion centered on negotiating additional community protections or benefits with residents.
Meanwhile, residents describe struggling to obtain information, being limited to brief public comments and being told that Borough meetings were not a place where their questions would be answered.
That imbalance became the heart of the episode.
As Stuart explains during the roundtable, economic development requires government to engage with private industry. But local government's responsibility is not simply to facilitate development. It is also responsible for representing the people who already live there and ensuring that major projects produce an acceptable outcome for the community.
Several participants argue that the process could have unfolded very differently if residents had been brought into the discussion earlier.
“If this was all laid out in the beginning and they were truthful with us, I would have different feelings,” Ashley tells the group.
Amanda puts the desired outcome simply: proper regulation that protects residents and the environment while still allowing business to occur.
“I don't think that they have to be mutually exclusive ideas,” she says. “I think that both can happen.”
What Big Beaver Reveals
The proposed Big Beaver data center is one project in one small Western Pennsylvania municipality. But the issues raised during this conversation extend far beyond the Borough's boundaries.
Across the region, communities are confronting increasingly large and technically complex development proposals. At the same time, many of the people responsible for evaluating those projects are part-time local officials governing small municipalities with limited staff, limited resources and limited technical expertise.
The result can create a profound imbalance between sophisticated companies pursuing billion-dollar developments and the communities being asked to host them.
The Big Beaver story demonstrates why transparency matters so much in that environment.
Residents do not have to agree about data centers. They do not have to agree about AI, economic development, taxation or environmental policy. But meaningful public participation requires people to know what is being considered while there is still an opportunity to influence the outcome.
The final minutes of the roundtable reveal surprising agreement about what that should look like: communities should be valued, regulations should protect residents, development should be transparent, local governments should have the resources and knowledge necessary to evaluate complex projects, and citizens should have a meaningful role in decisions that will shape where they live.
As Amanda says near the end of the conversation, excluding the community is not inevitable.
“It's a choice to exclude them.”
And that may be the most important lesson from Big Beaver.
Public meetings require limits. Governments have to conduct business, and no resident can reasonably expect unlimited access to their elected officials.
But when private interests receive months of correspondence, meetings, conference calls and opportunities to help shape the rules governing development, while the people who will live beside that development struggle to have their questions answered, something fundamental has become unbalanced.
In all of the records Exposure obtained documenting the Borough's discussions with people involved in data center development, there is one message we never found:
CITATIONS
Big Beaver Borough Ordinance No. 245 – Data Center Zoning and Zoning Map Amendments – Big Beaver Borough – 2025 Big Beaver Borough Ordinances
Big Beaver Borough Ordinance No. 246 – Local Economic Revitalization Tax Assistance (LERTA) – Big Beaver Borough – 2025 Big Beaver Borough Ordinances
Big Beaver Borough Right-to-Know Records – Ordinance 245 Drafting History and Data Center Communications – Big Beaver Borough / Pennsylvania Right-to-Know Law Records – 2025–2026 Records obtained by Ohio Valley Allies through Pennsylvania Right-to-Know requests. These records include correspondence among Borough officials, attorney Jeffrey Esch McCombie, Nick Farris of Provident and other project participants concerning the development of Ordinance 245.
Big Beaver Borough Right-to-Know Records – Ordinance 246 / LERTA Communications – Big Beaver Borough / Pennsylvania Right-to-Know Law Records – 2025–2026 Records obtained by Ohio Valley Allies through Pennsylvania Right-to-Know requests.
Big Beaver Borough Council Meeting Minutes – November 4, 2025 – Big Beaver Borough – 2025 Big Beaver Borough The official minutes document residents raising concerns about Pitt Race, the proposed data center, fire protection and other community issues.
Pitt Race Property Sold for $50 Million to Wampum I LLC – Pittsburgh Business Times – 2026 Pittsburgh Business Times coverage
Energy and AI – International Energy Agency (IEA) – 2025 Energy and AI – IEA Report
With More Data Centers in Pennsylvania, Will Energy Prices Spike? – The Allegheny Front – 2025 The Allegheny Front
Features of Data Center Load Growth in PJM – Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission / Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection – 2025 Presentation examining projected data-center electricity demand and load growth within the PJM grid.
Counties Try to Keep Data Center Development in Bounds – National Association of Counties (NACo) – 2024 National Association of Counties
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An Overview of State Data Center-Related Tax Incentives – NAIOP – 2024–2025 NAIOP
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