Windsor Township could enact data center zoning Tuesday

Windsor Township could become the next Berks County municipality with data center zoning on the books. The Board of Supervisors holds a public hearing at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 11 at the township building, 110 Haas Road, Hamburg, on an amendment that writes data centers into the township's 2009 zoning ordinance. The township's legal notice says the board will then consider enacting the amendment at the regular meeting that follows at 7 p.m.

A data center is a large building full of networked computers that store and process data for cloud and artificial intelligence services. Their electricity and water demands are the concern that runs through every one of these drafts, and most Berks zoning codes written decades ago never mentioned the use at all.

What Windsor's amendment does

The published notice summarizes the ordinance in three main moves. It adds data center definitions to the code. It revises the list of uses allowed by conditional use in the Limited Industrial (I) district. And in the ordinance's compliance and performance standards article, it "adds, deletes or revises" Section 521, the section relating to data centers.

A conditional use is a use the zoning code allows only after the elected board holds a public hearing on the specific application and can attach conditions to it. That path means any actual data center proposal in Windsor's industrial district would come back for its own hearing before the supervisors, not the appointed zoning hearing board.

The full ordinance text is not posted online. It is available for inspection at the township building during office hours and at the Berks County Law Library at the courthouse in Reading, per the notice, which was scheduled to run in the Reading Eagle on July 28 and Aug. 4. The posted agenda for the 7 p.m. regular meeting covers routine business and does not list the ordinance as a separate line item; the hearing notice is the document that says enactment will be considered Tuesday night.

Five more municipalities are moving too

Windsor is not acting alone. By our count this is the third wave of data center zoning work in Berks, and it is concentrated in the townships around Hamburg:

• Perry Township's supervisors meet at 7 p.m. the same Tuesday, and the solicitor's report on their agenda includes a "Zoning Ordinance Amendment- Data Centers." The meeting is at the township building, 680 Moselem Springs Road, with a Zoom option listed on the agenda.
• Upper Tulpehocken Township's board meets at 6 p.m. Tuesday at 6501 Old Route 22, Bernville, with "Data Center Ordinance" under old business. The same agenda lists a sewer capacity item and carries "Core5 Development/ Sewer lines" on the engineer's open-matters list, with no further detail.
• Tilden Township held a special meeting July 28 "for further discussion on the Ordinance for Data Centers," per its posted notice. Its regular meeting is Wednesday, Aug. 12 at 7 p.m.; that agenda had not posted as of Monday night.
• Upper Bern Township's agenda for Thursday, Aug. 13 asks the board to review its draft data center and solar ordinances and possibly authorize the solicitor to advertise them for public hearing and adoption. That meeting starts at 9 a.m., not evening; the township alternates morning and evening meetings by month.
• Wyomissing Borough Council, at its 7 p.m. Tuesday meeting, considers authorizing its solicitor to draft an ordinance establishing data center use criteria. The same agenda includes advertising a zoning amendment for the C-1 overlay that covers the Berkshire Mall property and an architect search for the borough hall renovation funded by a state RACP grant.

Counting these six, at least 17 of the county's 72 municipalities have taken up data center rules this year. The first wave included Reading, which adopted a 180-day pause that runs to roughly early January 2027; the earlier rounds are covered in our first report on the zoning rush and the six-township second wave.

The push traces back to the Berks County Planning Commission, which has told municipalities to prepare for data centers the way they prepared for warehouses. Its advice sheet recommends defining the use, allowing it by conditional use only where power and water capacity exist, and offers sample standards like a 55-decibel noise limit at the property line and a 1,000-foot buffer from homes.

If you live in these townships

Tuesday's 6:30 p.m. session in Windsor is a public hearing, which means residents can speak on the ordinance before any vote. The other boards listed above take public comment at their meetings. If you are not sure which municipality you live in or when your board meets, our guide to finding your local meeting schedule walks through it.

We will report what Windsor's board does Tuesday night, and track Tilden's and Upper Bern's ordinances as they move toward hearings.