08/17/2026
Six public meetings about data centers in Penn Forest since September. My opponent attended zero.
Does Doyle Heffley support local control? Let's check his record.
My opponent wants Carbon County to believe he's been fighting for local control on data centers all along. But when we look at his record, the timing tells a different story.
This issue has been playing out in Penn Forest for almost a year. There was a special meeting last September. Then four straight months of meetings from December through March, a special meeting, a public hearing, and a regular monthly meeting among them, all moved to Penn's Peak because the township building couldn't hold the crowd. A zoning hearing board meeting in May over legal challenges to the ordinance.
For months, residents asked for his help and asked his office directly to send him to our hearings and meetings. He never showed up to a single one.
On April 13, with residents packing meetings about water for four straight months, my opponent voted no on HB 2150 on the House floor. This is the bill that would have required data centers to report their water and energy use to DEP every year, with actual penalties for the ones that don't comply. Reporting serves as the foundation for planning and standards.
This bill, aimed at transparency and accountability, passed anyway, 133 to 68, with more than 30 Republicans voting yes. He wasn't just following the Republican Party. He was making an intentional choice. And he didn't choose what was clearly best for Carbon County.
Just five weeks later, voters in the May 19th primary put me on the November ballot through a write-in campaign. That's when everything changed.
His office mentioned data center concerns publicly for the first time in late May. On June 17, he published a full op-ed about "preserving local decision-making authority" and protecting Penn Forest from "clear-cutting mountainsides." The next day, he held a town hall, on his own terms, at Penn Forest #1, scheduled for 4:30 to 5:30 on a weekday afternoon while most of the county was still at work. Turnout was thin. Residents had spent months begging him to come to meetings and hearings. He made them come to his town hall instead.
Within days, HB 2359, which strengthens transparency and public accountability for data centers receiving tax benefits, and HB 2496, which gives municipalities a temporary pause to update data center zoning, came to the House floor. He rightly voted yes on both.
Now his campaign is running paid graphics crediting himself with what he's calling "House Bill 21 of 2026," saying it gives DEP oversight of data center water and energy use. There is no "House Bill 21 of 2026. "He's referring to Act 21, which began as Senate Bill 146 and became part of the Fiscal Code that passed with the state budget, 188 to 14. In other words, 187 other legislators voted exactly the way he did. He's presenting a near-unanimous budget vote as though it were his own accomplishment, while staying quiet about HB 2150, the standalone bill on the same subject where his vote actually mattered, and he used it to vote no.
When you look at the record, he has a habit of working against local land use control. In 2012, my opponent voted for Act 13, the Marcellus Shale law that stripped every municipality in Pennsylvania of the right to keep gas drilling out of residential neighborhoods. Not restricted. Stripped. Townships lost the authority to decide what got built next to people's homes, and the gas industry got a statewide guarantee. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court threw those zoning provisions out as unconstitutional.
So where was the concern for local control then? Where was it when he voted to hand one industry the keys to every township in this state?
Fourteen years later, he's discovered local control right on schedule. Every vote that makes him look good on this issue happened after a write-in campaign put him on notice. The vote that came immediately prior, when saying yes actually cost him something, he voted no. And every meeting where his own constituents were actually working through challenges to local control, he skipped.
I've been at all of them. I'll be at the next one.
