New Britain Township supervisors voted unanimously on Tuesday, Aug. 4, to launch a six-month process to write zoning rules for data centers, a preemptive move to keep control over where and how the massive facilities could be built before any developer files an application.

Staff has never met with a prospective data center developer, and Township Manager Nick Valla stressed the move should not be read as an invitation for development. At a July 16 supervisors meeting where the process was first presented, Valla said the township wants to establish regulations so that if a data center were ever proposed, officials could dictate exactly what it would have to look like to meet local standards.

The Aug. 4 vote formally declares the township's zoning ordinance "substantively invalid" because it does not define or regulate data centers as a land use. That declaration triggers what Pennsylvania law calls a curative amendment, giving officials a protected six-month window to study other municipalities' ordinances and draft regulations covering location, size, setbacks, noise limits, environmental buffers and utility infrastructure.

Township Solicitor Randy Flager told supervisors the legal stakes are real. Without defined regulations, a developer could challenge the ordinance as exclusionary, and a court could strip the township of its say over placement.

"A developer cannot challenge the township zoning ordinance during the six-month period," Flager said at the meeting, according to Central Bucks News. "This is significant because if it is determined that the New Britain Township Zoning Ordinance does not provide for data-center use following a challenge, a data center could theoretically be placed anywhere in the township."

Zoning Officer Doreen Curtin, who spent months attending seminars on data center impacts, identified three primary concerns at the July 16 meeting: electricity demand, water consumption and noise. Curtin told supervisors that noise from cooling systems, generators and battery storage is the hardest issue for local governments because it is not regulated by water authorities or utilities. She recommended the township eventually hire an acoustical engineer to develop objective noise standards.

New Britain joins a growing list of Bucks County municipalities taking similar action. Doylestown Township began its own curative amendment process in July, as did Falls Township and Morrisville Borough. In Falls Township, hundreds of residents packed a July 14 town hall to protest an Amazon Web Services data center campus approved in 2025 that plans to draw up to 4.4 million gallons of water daily and run nearly 300 backup gas generators.

The New Britain Planning Commission will hold public meetings over the coming months to draft the proposed ordinance before it returns to supervisors for a final vote around early February 2027.