Open letter to Upper Merion Township Board of Supervisors:

Hospitality Workers Union Opposes Data Centers

At an Upper Merion Township Planning Commission meeting in May, developer Brian O’Neill bragged that his five proposed data centers in the township would be “union buildings.” Our union, UNITE HERE Local 274, represents 4,000 hospitality workers in Eastern Pennsylvania, from the Lehigh Valley to South Philly. We work at hotels, stadiums, restaurants, and cafeterias. We serve the food, hold the door, carry the bags, clean the rooms, and wash the laundry. And we strongly oppose the plan to build massive data centers in Upper Merion Township. These data centers are bad for Upper Merion, and they’re bad for working-class people across the region.

In a recent interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, O’Neill complained about “scrutiny from people outside the township.” Let’s get this out of the way first: our union is no outsider to Upper Merion. For many years, we have proudly represented the workers at the Sheraton Valley Forge hotel in King of Prussia. Some members of our union live within a ten-minute drive from O’Neill’s proposed data centers.

Union members’ needs don’t stop the minute they clock out at work. Just as they have a right to fair wages, benefits, and working conditions, they also have a right to safe and healthy neighborhoods. They have a right to clean air and water. Recent research shows that “waste heat” from data centers can raise air temperatures in nearby neighborhoods by as much as 4 degrees, and land surface temperatures by as much as 16 degrees. Just last month, Philly experienced a deadly heatwave that claimed the lives of seven people. O’Neill is promising not to power his data centers with energy from the municipal grid. But how does he plan to do it instead? With natural gas. At a time when we urgently need to decrease our greenhouse gas emissions, these data centers promise to do the exact opposite.

Amid all the controversy around these proposals, there has been little reporting on what may be the most important question about these data centers: where is the money coming from? There’s a lot we don’t know about the finances behind O’Neill’s project. But here’s what we do know.

A large part of the land included in O’Neill’s data center plans is owned by a subsidiary of a company called ACRES Commercial Realty. Based in New York, ACRES is a real estate investment trust with billions of dollars in assets under management. In March, shortly after the plans for the data centers were filed, ACRES loaned $26 million to its subsidiary that owns the land on Renaissance Boulevard.

Our union knows a thing or two about ACRES Commercial Realty. The company also owns the Hilton Garden Inn Center City, the only union hotel in Philly’s downtown core that has refused to sign a fair contract with its workers. While other hotels have reached new agreements with substantial raises, significant improvements to pension and access to dependent healthcare, and more, management at ACRES’s hotel walked away from the table in March. They have since laid off longtime staff, eliminated the guarantee of an eight-hour day and overtime pay after eight hours of work, and increased workload requirements for housekeepers.

Upper Merionites should ask themselves if they think ACRES Commercial Realty has the best interests of their community in mind. Better yet, they should ask a worker at the Hilton Garden Inn.

We strongly urge the Board of Supervisors to vote no on the data center proposals at Thursday’s meeting.