CLINTON TOWNSHIP, PA — It would likely take Clinton Township six to 12 months to put zoning in place, if that is something the township wants to do. An amendment to Clinton’s Subdivision and Land Development Ordinance (SALDO) could be in place within the next two to three months, but it won’t offer as much protection as a zoning ordinance could, with some provisions in the draft amendment potentially vulnerable to litigation. 

Those were some of the takeaways from Clinton Township’s Wednesday, June 10 board of supervisors meeting, where interim solicitor Ron Bugaj explained to the board and to the gathered crowd the township’s options for regulating data centers. 

SALDO discussion

Clinton Township has been working for months on a SALDO amendment for data centers. The board of supervisors sent a draft out for review by the planning commission and Wayne County’s planning department and, in its April 8 meeting, instituted a six-month moratorium on data center development. (The legality and effectiveness of that moratorium has since come into question.)

On April 30, the township received an application for a 682-acre data center development from Linde Corporation. The planning commission deemed that application incomplete after review at a June 3 meeting, and the applicant now needs to revise the parts of the application deemed incomplete and resubmit it. 

“Right now, there is no application pending,” said Bugaj. “The passing of a SALDO amendment likely would bind future applications.”

“Now, I won’t say it’s a race to see what happens, whether we get a SALDO amendment in or they revise their application—you can bet he’s going to file another application. And he’s going to address the issues that were put out by the planning commission when they rejected it,” he continued.

“Now, if Linde’s application is accepted by the planning commission as a completed application before we pass this amendment, Linde’s in. If he doesn’t, then, he may not be,” he concluded.

The revised draft of the SALDO amendment is available at www.clintontwpwayne.com. 

The zoning discussion

While the township is going ahead with amending its SALDO, Bugaj emphasized that a SALDO amendment has limits to the amount of protection it can offer. 

Bugaj said that, while has put as much protection as he can into the SALDO amendment, some of the points he has tried to regulate through SALDO are more appropriately handled through zoning. Because of this, he has included a severability clause in the ordinance, so that if one section gets successfully challenged, the rest remains in place. 

Township officials talked about zoning as something that has been controversial, but that may be worth looking into, with officials discussing some kind of referendum or survey to get the public’s thoughts on zoning. 

“My biggest internal struggle with zoning is, ‘Who am I as a supervisor to tell you what you can and cannot do with your own property,’” said supervisor Brian Non. “That being said, coming around now with this situation we’re in kind of converted me to think, maybe zoning isn’t telling you what you can and cannot do, but protecting our way of life.”