Investigations

NorthPoint mailed ten-thousand-dollar offers to Hazle Township residents

Mailers promised a one-hundred-sixty-five-million-dollar package after supervisors denied Project Hazelnut and froze zoning while new data-center rules were drafted.

In Hazle Township, Pennsylvania, Kansas City developer NorthPoint mailed residents direct-cash offers of about ten thousand dollars each as it pressed a roughly thirteen-hundred-acre data center called Project Hazelnut. More Perfect Union traveled to the Eagle Rock neighborhood to ask whether the payments were changing minds.

NP Hazleton Holdings, a NorthPoint affiliate, wants fifteen data-center buildings and supporting infrastructure on land cleared near Tomhicken Road and Interstate 81. Ed Parks, who moved to Eagle Rock four years ago with his wife AnnMarie Parks, pointed to bulldozed acreage and said the site sits in light industrial zoning while neighbors sought to classify hyperscale centers as heavy industrial.

Hazle Township supervisors denied land development approval in November 2025 after a packed meeting where the board voted down the plan and the room cheered. Luzerne County Judge Lesa Gelb upheld the denial in May 2026 and sent the project back to the township zoning board for a special-exception process. NorthPoint then appealed to Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court, where the case remained pending.

Supervisors later enacted a one-hundred-eighty-day curative amendment that paused challenges to the zoning code while they rewrote rules for data centers, with a Dec. 7, 2026 deadline to finish that work. In the meantime NorthPoint blanketed the township with mailers touting quiet cooling, nine hundred permanent jobs, and what it called one hundred sixty-five million dollars in direct community benefits.

Residents near the site called the ten-thousand-dollar line item a bribe. Parks said the flyers arrived every couple of weeks and dismissed claims that the campus would use zero drinking water for cooling. At a local diner, some people miles from Eagle Rock said they would take the cash because Big Tech could afford to share profits, while others near the footprint said longevity mattered more than a one-time check.

Josephine Gingerich, a local organizer, argued that a strong zoning ordinance should come before any community benefits agreement and compared the mailers to a wedge meant to split residents who would not live next to the noise and water draw. Warren Faust, president of the Regional Construction and Trade Council, said Northeast Pennsylvania still remembers coal barons who left scarred land and wanted developers to sign project labor agreements rather than dangle unsigned promises.

The crew also visited families near a separate Amazon and QTS buildout by the Susquehanna River, where some landowners sold farmland for millions and Teri Barren said fifteen households on her street were left four hundred feet from a planned campus without buyouts. A QTS executive told The Wall Street Journal the company had converted close to one hundred residents through outreach and community investments, a contrast Gingerich drew with Salem Township, where leaders signed a smaller Amazon benefits deal in 2024.

Frederick County, Maryland, rejected a one-hundred-ten-million-dollar Catellus benefits package because it would have blocked new county zoning rules for eight years, and data centers were built anyway after regulators lagged. Gingerich circulated an ordinance template so Pennsylvania towns could set buffers and permitted zones before developers arrived.

After the crew left Hazle Township, the planning commission held an Oct. 29 hearing where residents spent more than two hours attacking a revised draft. Planners still recommended the curative amendment to supervisors, but opponents said an Oct. 26 version weakened setbacks and allowed data centers by right in an industrial district mapped against high-voltage lines, a footprint attorney Jack Dean said appeared tailored to NorthPoint’s purchased acreage. Supervisors scheduled a Nov. 9 meeting as the curative clock ran toward Dec. 7.

Source video: We Went To Town At The Center Of A $10,000 Data Center Bribe