$10,000 Per Household Isn’t Swaying This Town on a New Data Center

Ed Negra has received four letters from NorthPoint Development. Each one promises a $10,000 check — direct to his household — once the company’s proposed data center is up and running in Hazle Township, Pennsylvania. He has kept all four letters. He is organizing the opposition anyway.

“If that’s not a bribe, I don’t know what is.”

The project is called Project Hazelnut, and it involves NorthPoint Development building a massive data center campus on 1,300 acres in the Pocono foothills of eastern Pennsylvania — a facility intended to support Amazon Web Services. To smooth over local resistance, NorthPoint put together what it called a community benefits package: a broader $165 million in community investments, and a direct payout of $10,000 to every eligible household in the township. With roughly 4,500 households qualifying, the direct payment fund alone totals approximately $45 million.

In a town where one in six residents lives below the poverty line and the median household income sits around $60,000, $10,000 is not nothing. And yet residents have organized to reject both the data center itself and a planned stretch of high-voltage power lines meant to supply it — viewing the cash offer not as generosity but as a transparent attempt to buy their silence.

Why $10,000 Wasn’t Enough

The concerns residents cite are familiar from data center battles playing out across the country: noise, property values, water consumption, and power draw. But the specific framing in Hazle Township is sharper than in most places.

“$10,000 doesn’t match how much it’s going to tank my property value,” said Jeff Fasnacht, a retired high school teacher who lives near the proposed site. He called the offer both a bribe and “a drop in the bucket” relative to potential losses.

Diana Spallone, a special education teacher in the area, acknowledged “$10,000 would be nice” while still expressing concern about the impact on her home’s value. Others were less conflicted — and less diplomatic about it.

What made things worse for NorthPoint was how the $10,000 offer was handled. When residents pressed developer representative Frank Griguoli at a town meeting in August about the cash payments, his response did not exactly project confidence. “That’s what they’re saying they want to do,” he said, adding: “I don’t even know if that’s legit, that it’s going to happen.”

Telling residents you’re not sure whether the $10,000 you promised them is actually real is not typically a winning persuasion strategy.

The Broader Pattern

Hazle Township’s resistance is part of something larger. Local opposition blocked or delayed at least 75 data center projects in just the first three months of 2026, according to industry tracker Data Center Watch. A Gallup poll from March found that 70% of Americans oppose data center construction in their neighborhood.

The energy and infrastructure demands of large-scale AI data centers have made them deeply unwelcome in many communities. They require enormous amounts of electricity — driving up local utility costs — and substantial water for cooling. They often generate constant low-frequency noise that neighbors compare to a vacuum running in their living room 24 hours a day. And they tend to arrive in communities without warning, with trees cleared before residents know what’s being built.

A Payment Offer Came After An Initial Rejection

Hazle Township’s government had already rejected the Project Hazelnut proposal on zoning grounds the previous year and enacted a temporary moratorium on data center construction. The direct payment offer came after that rejection — which is part of why residents read it as an attempt to circumvent their own local government’s decision rather than a good-faith community partnership.

Residents of neighboring Sugarloaf Township — who are fighting the power line that would supply the data center — aren’t eligible for the $10,000 payment at all. They get the infrastructure consequences without the check.

NorthPoint Development has said there is “a lot of misinformation and fear” circulating about data centers and the project. That may be true for some of the concerns. But the image problem of mailing cash to thousands of households while tree-clearing begins behind their homes — before they’ve agreed to anything — is one the company created for itself.

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