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At a May 2024 zoning hearing in Salem Township, Solicitor Anthony McDonald offered residents a number meant to reassure them: once the tax discount period ended, the township alone would collect about seven million dollars a year from the Amazon campus, on top of whatever the school district and county collected separately. It was the biggest figure in the room that night, and it was true. What went less examined was the other half of the sentence — once the discount period ended, ten years from the hearing.
Thirty Cents on the Dollar, for a Decade
The board had already approved a Local Economic Revitalization Tax Assistance break for Amazon before that hearing: a 70 percent discount on the increase in assessed value, running ten years. Amazon pays the remaining 30 percent during that window. The pre-existing land assessment continues to be taxed at the ordinary rate — LERTA only touches the value added by new construction, which is also the only part of the deal anyone advertises.
The zoning vote that carried this arrangement into a 1,600-acre Special Data Center Overlay District passed 3–0, more than a year before Governor Shapiro stood at the Jackson Mansion and called the project the largest private investment in state history. The tax framework, like the land itself, was arranged before the public ceremony announced it. And the jobs number attached to Salem specifically — 600, according to later reporting — is less than half the 1,250-job figure Shapiro used statewide the week of the announcement. The revenue promise and the jobs promise both shrink the closer you get to the actual parcel.
A Statewide Pattern, Documented Elsewhere
LERTA is not unique to Salem Township. Pennsylvania's 1977 enabling statute lets any local taxing body offer the same discount on any qualifying improvement, anywhere in the state. An audit of Erie's own LERTA program found that nearly half of its approved projects delivered no actual benefit to the developer or the public, because there was no assessment increase to abate in the first place — the incentive existed on paper without doing anything in practice. It cuts the opposite direction here: Salem's abatement is doing exactly what it was built to do, which is defer a real number for a full decade while the marketing describes the deal in the present tense.
Whether the public can actually verify these numbers as they accumulate is a separate question, and Pennsylvania's own Office of Open Records has already answered it once. A resident requested records from the Hazleton Area School District showing the projected or actual tax revenue reduced by LERTA agreements tied to data centers within district boundaries. The district said the only responsive records were board minutes already public, and that any further analysis was protected as internal predecisional deliberation. The Office of Open Records denied the appeal. The number McDonald gave residents in 2024 remains, five years later, essentially the only public figure attached to the deal — sourced to a solicitor's estimate at a hearing, not to any fiscal analysis anyone outside the township has been able to obtain.
Falls Township's Older, Larger Version
The Bucks County side of the twenty-billion-dollar announcement runs on a different instrument entirely, and one with a longer history. The Keystone Trade Center site — the former U.S. Steel Fairless Works property where Amazon's second flagship campus now sits — was designated a Keystone Opportunity Investment Zone running from January 2021 through December 2035, a fifteen-year window of tax abatement layered on top of the property years before any data center existed there.
The designation itself was not automatic. It required reviving a zone status the site had lost, through a Fiscal Code amendment that then-State Representative John Galloway and State Senator Steve Santarsiero pushed through in late 2020, specifically to make redevelopment of the old steel site financially viable. Santarsiero later stood beside Shapiro at the ribbon-cutting for the Amazon facility built on the ground his own legislation had made cheap to develop years earlier — and Falls Township's supervisors chairman, Jeff Dence, called the project an engine of innovation without mentioning the tax architecture underneath it.
The pattern repeats once the campus was under construction. Only after the project was more than half built, and a petition against it had collected over 3,800 signatures, did Amazon begin distributing money to the surrounding community — $150,000 across twenty-two local groups, announced in July 2026. Falls Township's own supervisors moved that same month to declare part of their zoning code invalid and give themselves six months to rewrite it, a decision that explicitly does not touch the Amazon project already under construction. The order of operations is consistent across both flagship sites: the tax framework and the zoning get settled first, the community benefits and the local rule tightening arrive only after the land is already gone and the backlash has already built.
What Salem defers for a decade, Falls Township defers for fifteen years by a different mechanism, engineered by name years in advance. Both numbers get quoted in the present tense at ribbon-cuttings. Neither is collectible yet.
Sources: Citizens' Voice/Republican Herald (Bob Kalinowski, May 2024); Data Center Dynamics; Pennsylvania Office of Open Records, Docket AP 2025-1990; PhillyVoice; LevittownNow.com; Lower Bucks Times; Patch/Levittown.
