Douglass Township is poised to withdraw from the eight-municipality Pottstown Metropolitan Area Regional Planning Commission after North Coventry Township secretly commissioned a $4,000 study analyzing Douglass's zoning suitability for data centers — without ever notifying Douglass officials. The study, which concluded that roughly 250 acres in Douglass were suitable for data center development, contained significant errors that Douglass says it could have corrected had anyone simply asked, since several identified properties are deed-restricted farmland, under contract for senior housing, or already approved for townhouses. When the study surfaced publicly, Douglass residents flooded township offices with concerns, sparking a contentious regional planning meeting and prompting Douglass to cut off all communication with North Coventry pending a Right to Know request. A Douglass exit would be doubly damaging: it would strip the remaining seven towns of the zoning protection that Douglass's data center designation currently provides them, and it could derail a nearly completed regional comprehensive plan that took months to draft and requires unanimous adoption by all member municipalities.
Source: Pottstown Mercury; 5/14/2026 & 5/19/2026