Falls Township PA curative amendment on data centers (2026)

Falls Township, Pa. (Bucks County) — Board of Supervisors action declaring PORTIONS OF THE TOWNSHIP'S OWN ZONING ORDINANCE 'SUBSTANTIVELY INVALID', resulting in a CURATIVE AMENDMENT to draft updated regulations targeting data centers, and expressly undertaken to SHIELD THE TOWNSHIP FROM ZONING CHALLENGES related to data center development. THE MECHANISM IS THE POINT AND IS PENNSYLVANIA-SPECIFIC: under the Pennsylvania Municipalities Planning Code, a landowner may bring a SUBSTANTIVE VALIDITY CHALLENGE accompanied by a curative amendment proposing its own cure; where the challenge succeeds the challenger ordinarily obtains site-specific relief, meaning the DEVELOPER writes the fix and secures approval on its own terms. The MPC also permits a MUNICIPALITY to declare its own ordinance substantively invalid and initiate a curative amendment process itself, which forecloses landowner challenges on the same ground while the municipal process runs. Falls Township therefore CONCEDED THE DEFECT IN ORDER TO CONTROL THE REMEDY \u2014 a defensive use of an offensive tool. STRATEGIC CONTRAST WITH THE REST OF THIS DATASET: a moratorium buys time but invites attack as arbitrary (see NJ developer litigation against municipal data center bans (2026), where New Jersey developers plead exactly that, and Garfield Township MI data center and crypto mining ban (2026), where officials chose a zoning-amendment route because ad hoc moratoriums 'are being challenged and losing in court'). A municipal curative amendment instead removes the vulnerability the challenge would exploit. EXPRESS LIMIT: the action DOES NOT INTERFERE WITH the AMAZON WEB SERVICES data center APPROVED MARCH 2025 \u2014 the same vested-rights boundary recorded across this dataset. COMPANION ACTION, same report, not separately indexed: MORRISVILLE BOROUGH council adopted a SIX-MONTH WAITING PERIOD and stated it planned to write new zoning laws. REGIONAL CONTEXT: these actions reflect broader debate across BUCKS AND MONTGOMERY COUNTIES; Pennsylvania separately adopted statewide data center requirements by executive order (Pennsylvania EO 2026-05 data center restrictions (2026)).