I don’t know how or IF this fits together but these are BOTH publicly accessible documents. Someone sent me the federal court record was sent to me and it has a similar name in it is on the data center application???
Whiteland Holdings LP.???
Are they talking about the same property? Apparently they are? So I don’t know what to do with all of that, but it made me go look at the property records and I found something else interesting.
What did I find? That was interesting how about a New York address now for Green Fig?
So they were described to us as being from New Jersey, but it’s really New York? Maybe I misheard? Take a look at this link and you will see the guy that spoke at the data center planning commission meeting.
Join them Monday at Penn State Great Valley at 6 PM Monday March 9th for the planning commission meeting! Auditorium of the Conference Center at Penn State Great Valley, located at 30 East Swedesford Road, Malvern, PA 19355.
In addition to in-person attendance, the Township has arranged for the meeting to be livestreamed via the Township website. https://www.eastwhiteland.org/
Public comment for those unable to attend in-person may be submitted via email to bcarosello@eastwhiteland.org. Please submit comments by 12:00pm on Monday, March 9, 2026.
In order to help residents understand how ODD the whole data center process has been in East Whiteland, I will load in documents taken off of the township website.
So back before COVID when data center stuff started being floated, it was a smaller plan. Much smaller like 78,000 square feet and it was going to have a solar field to assist self-sufficiency.
I didn’t rust that then. Why? Because the name we always hear with Green Fig the most, Charles Lyddane, was a financial services professional for decades prior to this. Research indicates he started at Xerox and moved onto financial services at Merrill Lynch and Legg Mason. Translation: that background = money driven, fees and commission driven, correct?
And then all of these Democrats think he’s wunderbar? Do they know how he ran as an endorsed Republican School Board candidate circa 2013? Allow me to quote and old Patch almost press release post as in not a regular article:
Local Republican Committees Jointly Endorse GVSD School Board Candidate Charles Lyddane
Great Valley – On March 9, 2013 Republican committee people representing Republican voters living in Great Valley’s School Board Region II (parts of Republican Areas 9 and 10) endorsed Charlie Lyddane for School Board…After an open process soliciting community input and prominently posting a notice in Malvern Patch seeking interested and qualified candidates for Great Valley School Board, the committee representing Republican voters in Region II met the candidates and caucused, endorsing Charlie Lyddane by a two -thirds vote.
According to Bill Tickner, Committee member and Willistown community leader, “Charlie Lyddane is the businessman we need to represent the Great Valley School community on the School Board. I am proud and pleased that Charlie a pro-education Great Valley parent with a strong background in finance and business development has stepped up to put those skills to work on our behalf. We need someone like Charlie who’s willing to steward scarce taxpayer resources into classroom education first..Mr. Lyddane has lived in Great Valley School District for 15 years and has graduated two children from the District. A graduate of Union College in Schenectady, NY, Mr. Lyddane has a BA in History and also attended the Business School at Union. He started his career at Xerox. He was Vice President of Merrill Lynch and Legg Mason in West Chester for 23 years. As a real estate developer and investor in Chester County for the past 9 years, Mr. Lyddane has significant experience in budget development and implementation, as well as achieving strategic goals in a timely and cost efficient manner. He also has significant experience in Property Management.
According to Mr. Lyddane, “When you are managing shareholder’s money, you must produce a product that is beneficial to those shareholders.
Boom there it is – “you must produce a product that is beneficial to those shareholders.”
That tells you what you need to know, doesn’t it? It’s not about community, or the environment or anything altruistic, just good old fashioned green backs right?
Before I go back to the data center of it all, one more article from his life before Green Fig which makes you wonder is this just like another stock pick? Is this why all of the back and forth?
…Some brokers almost cringe at the term “stock-picker.” It can conjure up visions of reps with frayed nerves and churned accounts.
Not Charlie Lyddane.
“I’m not ashamed to admit that I pick stocks,” says Lyddane, a soloist at Legg Mason in West Chester, Pa. “It’s what a broker is supposed to do. My clients like that kind of help.”…Apparently so. Lyddane reports $1 million in production and $120 million under management. He’s been a broker for 19 years and has never been part of a team.
“I’ve never had the opportunity to have or need a partnership,” Lyddane says. “Besides, I like doing things on my own. No one will care about my clients like I do.”
He thinks it’s wrong to hand off client service. “My clients pay to deal with me,” Lyddane says. “I craft stock portfolios of blue chips with a bent toward technology. I’m their single source, and I like being responsible.”
He is responsible – literally.
With 400 clients and 1,000 accounts, Lyddane uses discretionary account management as a time-saving technique….Although he does his own thing, Lyddane appreciates the help he gets from the firm. “Legg Mason supports a number of teams, but I’ve found them to be very supportive of what I do. I have a great arrangement.”
Anyway, the solar field idea disappeared and then they wanted these box things they called pods. Then I think those disappeared because of maybe crypto currency concerns?
I heard a while back that PECO said something like that data center would be like the second largest site next to the City of Philadelphia and if so, how crazy is that?
Someone I know wrote today:
The Limerick Nuclear plant generates about 2300 MWH (megawatt hours) of electricity per day (with two reactors) enough for 2 million homes
The new proposed data center in town is expected to use about 100-600 MWH.
Or 8% to as much as 48% of the ENTIRE OUTPUT of a single reactor. For one data center. The equivalent of 500,000 homes.
It could actually be MORE than the energy equivalent of 500,000 homes, couldn’t it be?
We have a weak and problematic power grid already – when we have outages they will be first served (residents will get pushed down the grid) and all those diesel generators right? And then you just have to wonder HOW MANY TIMES IS EAST WHITELAND GOING TO LET THIS GUY TRY TO TWEAK A PLAN THAT ALWAYS SEEMS TO HAVE SIGNIFICANT CHANGES WHICH MEANS WHY NOT AN ENTIRE NEW SUBMISSION?
I’m not against responsible development, But when you’re talking about new kinds of technology and new kinds of factories, basically, you need the most updated [municipal] codes available, and our current codes are out of date…We don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past.
The past I was in part thinking of is the lithium contamination etc. that was Foote Mineral. Foote was an EPA site. There was a review of the site in 2024, but well, the whole data center of it all wasn’t supposed to be that ginormous yet was it?
After ceasing operations in 1991, the Site owner at the time, Cyprus Foote Mineral Company, arranged for the removal of equipment and for demolition of remaining buildings down to their foundations. In 1998, Frazer Exton Development, LP (FED) purchased the original Property (Parcel 42-3-130) and assumed responsibility for cleaning up the Site. FED also installed a single cap over both the North Quarry and South Quarry as part of cleanup activities. In December 2016, Whiteland Holdings, LP (WH), the holder of the first mortgage on the Property, foreclosed and acquired the Property from FED. In a deed recorded on August 15, 2019, WH sold parcel 42-3-130.2 to Green Fig Land LLC, and on January 31, 2022, WH sold parcel 42-3-130 to Green Fig 11.33 LLC2. At the time of this FYR’s October 2023 Site inspection, the 42-3-130 and 42-3-130.2 parcel owner had, on several occasions, permitted a local electric company to use some uncapped areas of the Site as a laydown space to store lumber. The area is not in constant use. The current 42-3-130 and 42-3-130.2 parcel owner intends to redevelop parcel 42-3-130.2 as the location for a data farm facility. In 2024, construction activities for the data farm facility were initiated on parcel 42-3-130.2.
(2For clarity purposes, Green Fig Land LLC and Green Fig 11.33 LLC are owned by the same individual.)
And of course there is a sneaky bill getting fast tracked through Harrisburg as we speak. HB5121. If you google it before reading it, benignly it is described as “which aims to assist Pennsylvania municipalities in regulating data centers through a model zoning ordinance.”
BULLSHIT. This is that thing they talked about in 2025 that would remove rights from municipalities rendering them helpless in certain zoning situation. It does a band aid slither into the municipalities planning code so there is zoning on data centers. Data Centers can pop up anywhere. It arrives just in time for the Governor to announce his re-election bid. Essentially Johnny Frackenstein (AKA Governor Josh Shapiro) wants to remove local control for communities to reject this. State run and controlled everything and aren’t we experiencing enough of that at present in Washington DC in general? This is a bad bill that has data center developers and operators all wet at the prospect (sorry, yes that’s gross but true.)
Anyway, it’s up to people to turn out in East Whiteland until this thing is for the people and not at the expense of the people. And if you care, look up who is on HB 5121 and give them a ringy dingy and say WTF (just politely.)
Let’s be clear about the data center here. What was originally approved and allowed by East Whiteland you’re not going to cancel that BUT given the size and the expansion they want to do on something that is not yet open and proves it needs. It is like a whole other plan and shoukd be treated as such, right??
Now the data center developer wants to upgrade some technology and move some stuff around. If that is hypothetically beneficial to his plan and would be beneficial to the residents that’s one thing but that does NOT mean the developer should just get a gimme supersizing prize of a half built project not up and running, does it?
And I hear that East Whiteland is putting a live stream on for this very heated topic. Their reticence with that is they don’t want to be hacked again (happened with Zoom) and have to see porn but you know what? how many other municipalities still do Zoom every week? Maybe their Internet safety protocol isn’t strong enough? The planning commission is but the opening salvo here.
Anyway as per East Whiteland’s website:
The Applicant for the proposed Data Center on Swedesford Road will attend the upcoming Planning Commission meeting on Wednesday, January 28, 2026 at 7:00pm (Livestream Available via Link Below)
The Applicant for the proposed Data Center on Swedesford Road will attend the upcoming Planning Commission meeting on Wednesday, January 28, 2026 at 7:00pm to present an Amended Plan for the project. In addition to in-person attendance, the meeting will be available to Livestream via the Township Website using the link below. Public comment may be submitted via email to bcarosello@eastwhiteland.org. Please submit comments by 4:00pm on Wednesday.
People need to make sure that they tell every single supervisor and Township staff (politely) if they don’t want this. And they can’t just do it on social media. You have to zoom into the meetings, go to the meetings, send emails. Call media you know to cover it. Residents and those concerned need to make the time, not excuses.
If residents had paid more attention around 2022 when this whole thing was going through initial approval process, maybe we wouldn’t be here today but we will never know as that ship sailed. What hasn’t sailed is the developer does not have the Divine Right of Kings to make his project bigger, does he? That wasn’t what was approved, and it has to go through a whole new planning process from top to the bottom or it should right? I mean a 629,830 square foot increase is not smidge larger is it? “1,026,800 s.f. to 1,656,630 s.f. (along with related increases in building coverage and impervious coverage)” is quite a bit larger, yes?
And people from East Whiteland are contacting East Whiteland about the 55+ development that was approved years ago unavoidably in West Whiteland. Again, that ship sailed. I told people here and people told people other places about all those meetings, and the residents did not pay attention. And the problem with that project is under the Municipalities Planning Code so it was approved. And until that weighty outdated tome in Harrisburg is comprehensively updated to protect our communities, they are going to be targeted by developers for whatever is going to make them the most money in that minute and that is the truth isn’t it?
Also to be noted is there are many many West Whiteland residents who are concerned about the potential supersizing of this data center. They had to deal with this developer when he wanted to put a hydrogen hub right next to their park right in the same area. And that didn’t happen because the residents and supervisors stood up and took action.
In my humble opinion, the supervisors in East Whiteland need to be on the same page as the residents when it comes to data centers. If that developer wants to improve technology, that is mutually beneficial to all or tweak design on plan size approved, that is one thing, and it’s something they should want to do for their bottom line in the future, right? But we are already seeing changes in our power grid from data centers. We run the risk of having well water polluted by these data centers. There are other ways it is harmful to the environment and then there is the sheer noise. So East Whiteland approved a data center and it’s not up and running yet so there is no actual proof that is supersizing is needed at this juncture, is there? It is a developer want, it is not a developer need in my opinion and I’m allowed to have that.
I also of the opinion that we cannot depend on the planning commission to say no to this. I don’t think they have the knowledge necessary to do anything other than pass it along with a rubber stamp. In my opinion, I think they are all going to say unless people turn out and protest that “oh it’s OK. It’s better for people. It’ll bring lots of business and tax revenue” or whatever platitudes get blown up people’s rear ends and there’s no proof that it will do any of those things, but that’s what they’re told isn’t it?
This is who is on the planning commission:
Deborah Abel, Chair Todd Asousa, Vice Chair Bob Logan Bill Wrabley John Laumer Tim Kelly Jaime Damiani
Go to https://www.eastwhiteland.org/ for more information on this project and for telephone numbers and email addresses, etc.
This was a superfund site – EPA- Foote Mineral. The planning commission should know that you can’t just come in with a resubmission like this- it has to start the clock again with a resubmission- where is the impact study? What is the complete feasibility? Planning needs to restart the clock if the developer wishes to expand, isn’t that a truism? Who inspects? Who is the monitoring agency? So many variables.
I just saw this photo (minus the X) posted elsewhere. I feel compelled to address it because it’s the kind of messaging that is counterproductive to protecting our communities and the environment.
It’s the kind of messaging we get from some politicians talking out both sides of their mouth, and from the industry itself, giving false assurance that they won’t pollute or deplete our resources because there are strict environmental regulations in place.
It’s false.
We don’t HAVE anywhere close to adequate rules in place to protect our air and water from this buildout of AI data centers and power plants to fuel them – not to mention protect climate and communities.
Workers? These hyper scale data centers create very few jobs once built – and the intent is to eliminate workers.
And we have a Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection that has a history of turning a blind eye to violations by certain industries. And it’s led by a Secretary who has been engaged in backroom dealmaking with these corporations and has promised to deliver Amazon with the “highest level of service, accountability and urgency to meet their project needs”. (See letter in comments obtained through a RTK request.
Let’s not pretend the situation in Pennsylvania is anything different.
And what Ginny said was similarly said by a dear friend today who keeps asking Harrisburg WHO is responsible for watching Data Centers? WHO is the monitoring agency? I mean those who live with the PA DEPs inconsistency in their communities know this is a problem. WHO watches and who watchdogs the entities who are supposed to watch?
Also from Ginny:
Oh, and my opinions are bought to me by the First Amendment. They haven’t repealed that yet as far as I know.
Sorry folks, it has been a busy day. Received official word from East Whiteland regarding the data center of it all. After that I will share the article that prompted this:
In response to recent articles in the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily Local News, where the Township was asked to provide comments and a status update regarding recent data center proposals, below is a statement from East Whiteland Township:
To date, no land development application has been received by the Township and there have been no revisions to the previously approved Zoning Hearing Board application to permit the data center usage at the properties located along the south side of Swedesford Road near the border with West Whiteland Township.
Also, it is important to note to our residents and businesses that the Board of Supervisors of East Whiteland Township has no interest in entertaining a proposal for a hydrogen power plant within our Township. We are aware of the zoning activities in our neighboring Township and will continue to monitor the situation.
Scott Lambert, Chair of East Whiteland Township Supervisors
So to West Whiteland Supervisor Raj Kumbhardare, is a bit of a puzzle here. Supervisor Raj should have more to say more than his evasiveness in The Daily Local News about carts and horse, right? Supervisor Raj as a day job is in database administration so is there anything in this for him? Not being mean but does he care about all of his constituency equally? After all this issue is bigger than computer and database type professionals being excited that the data center is coming, right? And then there is the wondering if he really understands the zoning and how zoning doesn’t exist in a little bubble or vacuum and these changes could potentially have far-reaching changes for the township he is supposed to serve equally to his best efforts so??? I am not saying he’s not a good guy I am asking reasonable questions. I am also wondering how is feeling about carts and horse right now??
And my favorite angry lame duck supervisor is mums the word on this? Why? Rather odd considering….she’s always so pithy, yes?
Anyway, East Whiteland is not being shy about how they seem to be feeling, do they?
Also do not forget this hopeful piece from September, 2022:
