Mako's Voting Record

Just because you're FROM a community doesn't mean you're FOR a community.

The proposals on AI data centers rapidly mounted.So did the concerns.

It was Spring 2026 and more than half a dozen data center projects were in talks, on the table or appeared possible across the Lehigh Valley. One proposal in the Macungie area had just ended, another in the Bangor area was about to emerge: the spectre of the region becoming a hub for fueling artificial intelligence reached from one corner of the Valley to another.

Data centers, at unknown cost to quality of life, were proposed for cities and suburbs and farms. They were proposed for fresh fields and old industrial sites. And the proposals could be big – or enormous.

In Pa. House District 183, the Prologis Hyperscale Project called for converting a million-square-foot warehouse outside of Northampton borough into a hyperscale data center.

Across the Valley Spring 2026

Allen Township · House District 183
Prologis Hyperscale Data Center
Existing 1.01 million-square-foot warehouse conversion
South Whitehall Township
Project Atlas
410-acre campus proposed near Parkland High School; three data center buildings totaling about 1.5 million square feet.
Allentown
Emaus Avenue
13.7-acre South Allentown site; proposed 247,000-square-foot warehouse conversion and expansion.
Allentown
Allentown Flex Center
13.6-acre industrial site; proposed 146,000-square-foot, 100-megawatt data center with an on-site substation.
Lower Mount Bethel Township
Technology Center
Roughly 239 acres near existing Lower Mount Bethel power plants proposed for a data center campus.
Upper Mount Bethel Township
Slate Belt / Talen Campus
754-acre campus concept with as many as 23 buildings totaling roughly 4.6 million square feet.

Source: Morning Call

Projects like Prologis raised massive concerns among residents, community leaders and elected officials. How much electricity and water would the facilities consume? What would it mean for utility rates? How much noise would they make? What would happen to farmland and the character of the communities? What will the data center insist on, or even be, in five years? Would they be safe? The real question is what do we gain, if anything, by allowing them in our space?

House District 183 is one of the least commercial and industrial areas in the Valley: there's a lot of open green spaces and agricultural land. Data centers are not yet known to be a smart use of land; they are, after all, like Iron Mountain, just big storage facilities of information. They employ relatively few people once built. They aren't places where people gather, shop or eat. They don't generate the activity that draws other businesses around them. Nor do they preserve the beauty of our farming or our open spaces, including hiking trails, scenic sites, and other nature-based draws to our land.

Zach Mako is the State Representative for House District 183, and the spring offered him and fellow legislators a chance to deliver the type of help on data centers that municipal leaders and residents were clamoring for.

Four data center bills reached the House floor in the span of 34 days. Two addressed water use and planning. Another established statewide rules intended to keep data centers from straining the electric grid or shifting their energy costs onto ordinary Pennsylvanians. Mako voted against all three.

The fourth directed the state to help develop a model data center ordinance – the very ordinance that municipalities in Lehigh and Northampton Counties were asking for help to develop. Mako voted against that bill, too.

Four more data center bills to limit data center reach were presented on the House floor in June. Mako voted against two of them.

In all, Mako voted six times against the type of data center limits and guardrails that his constituents were scrambling to install. Only two state representatives voted against the data center limits and guardrails more often than Mako did.

The legislative record

6 out of 8

Mako voted no to six out of eight AI Data Center bills to reach the House; here's how he voted.

Bill	What it did	House vote	Mako
HB 1834	Regulated commercial data centers and established utility, consumer-protection, energy and disclosure requirements.	104–95	No
HB 2150	Required annual reporting of data-center electricity and water consumption.	133–68	No
HB 2151	Directed the state to develop model data-center ordinance assistance for municipalities.	124–77	No
HB 2246	Added covered data centers to state water-resource planning and reporting requirements.	116–84	No
HB 2496	Created a temporary local zoning-consideration period for data-center proposals.	201–1	Yes
HB 2650	Created enforceable infrastructure-development standards tied to data-center tax incentives and certification.	134–68	No
HB 2198	Changed Pennsylvania's tax treatment of data centers, including repeal of the existing equipment incentive program.	197–5	Yes
HB 2359	Revised eligibility and certification rules for Pennsylvania's computer data-center equipment incentive program.	171–31	No

Source: Pennsylvania General Assembly final-passage records. Bill summaries are working editorial shorthand and should receive the final copy pass before publication.