If you live on Acorn Drive or anywhere in the Oak Ridge townhomes, you already know the wooded lot behind the treeline off Mantua Road. There has been a communications tower back there since 1965, tall enough to clear the roofline but easy enough to ignore once you got used to it. Earlier this year, a company most residents had never heard of tried to turn that same six-acre parcel into something else entirely: a 4-megawatt data storage facility, roughly the footprint of a Walgreens, with generators and cooling equipment sitting less than 100 feet from some of those Acorn Drive backyards.
It did not happen. American Tower Corporation withdrew the application on June 9, 2026, and East Greenwich Township followed with an ordinance banning data centers in every zoning district in town. Most of the coverage since then has told that story as a straightforward win: neighbors organized, officials listened, the project died. That much is true. What got less attention is how the fight actually worked, and it matters for anyone living near infrastructure they've long since stopped noticing.
What showed up on the agenda
The property at 114 Mantua Road is zoned R-10, a medium-density residential designation meant for townhomes, condos, and apartments. Data centers and warehouses are not listed as permitted uses under that code. Yet in early 2026, American Tower filed for preliminary and final major site plan approval along with a conditional use variance to put a roughly 16,000-square-foot data storage building on the back portion of that lot, land that runs nearly 1,500 feet deep toward Mantua Creek.
The specs were not small for a residential backyard. The proposal called for close to 4 megawatts of power, a structure standing about 21 feet tall, and close to 3,500 additional square feet of supporting equipment for power and cooling. The site sits directly behind the Oak Ridge community, and site plans showed some rear windows on Acorn Drive sitting roughly 50 feet from the property line.
The loophole nobody had noticed
Here is the part that outside coverage mostly skipped. American Tower already had a legal foothold on that parcel, and it came from paperwork nobody thought to revisit. Back in 2008, the township's zoning board approved a variance allowing Clearwire to add cell antennas to the existing tower. The written resolution from that hearing explicitly found the use would generate no noise, require no water, and need no municipal services. That finding made sense in 2008. A cell antenna genuinely doesn't need any of those things.
Opponents digging through the new application found that American Tower was leaning on that seventeen-year-old finding as a starting point for something categorically different: an industrial facility with round-the-clock cooling systems and a direct tie into the town's water supply. The tower's quiet, no-impact history was being used to open the door for a use that had nothing quiet about it.
This is the detail worth sitting with if you live anywhere near an older cell site in Gloucester County. American Tower's own public materials describe a national strategy of converting existing tower properties into what the company calls Edge data centers, smaller facilities built quickly on land it already owns or leases. Industry reporting on the withdrawal noted the company has identified more than 1,000 such plots across the country for exactly this kind of build-out. Mount Royal was not a one-off target. It was one candidate on a list.
The paper trail that actually beat it
Public turnout mattered here. A petition opposing the project gathered more than 5,800 signatures, and hearings in the spring drew standing-room crowds. But the details that carried real weight with the planning board came from residents who read the application documents line by line.
Organizers found a direct contradiction between American Tower's own environmental filings. A 2017 assessment of the property stated there were no wetlands and that it sat outside any flood zone. The 2026 site plan told a different story, showing a 50-foot wetland transition buffer pending state review and placing part of the rear property in FEMA Zone AE, the highest flood risk designation, along Mantua Creek. Any construction there would require a state flood hazard permit that was missing from the application.
The rest of the objections were just as specific:
- A noise study performed entirely with modeling software, with no field measurements taken at the site, projected that five of nine nearby homes would sit at the legal maximum nighttime noise limit
- The plan called for a direct tap into East Greenwich's municipal water supply for cooling, with no water consumption estimate included anywhere in the filing
- Backup generators and fuel storage were positioned close to homes and near a neighborhood playground
- An active state wetland delineation review on the property had not been resolved before the hearing was scheduled
None of that required an outside expert to compile. It required residents willing to read a stack of engineering reports against each other and flag what didn't line up.
What changed, and when
American Tower had gone before the combined Planning and Zoning Board on April 21, 2026, seeking approval, with a follow-up hearing pushed to May 19. While that review sat pending, the township committee moved on a separate track and advanced an ordinance prohibiting data centers as a permitted use anywhere in East Greenwich. A special hearing had been scheduled for June 30 to continue the application review. It never happened.
"In response to concerns raised by residents and the evolving understanding of data center development, the Township Committee also took proactive steps to evaluate the long-term impact such facilities may have on our community."
That's how Mayor Jim Philbin described the process in a statement announcing the withdrawal. American Tower pulled its application on June 9, 2026, once the zoning ground had shifted under it, and East Greenwich became one of the first municipalities in South Jersey to adopt an explicit, township-wide data center ban. As of the most recent public tracking of municipal data center policies, that ban remains in place, and no new application has been filed for the Mantua Road site.
Why this reaches beyond Acorn Drive
Mount Royal's fight was part of a wider pattern across South Jersey through 2026. Logan Township, Monroe Township in Williamstown, Millville, Pemberton, Waterford, and Andover Township all banned or moved to ban data centers this year, and Cherry Hill's mayor stated publicly that none would be built there. Not every town landed the same way. Monroe's ban is now the subject of a lawsuit from the developer behind a separate Black Horse Pike project, seeking more than $300 million in damages. Vineland, in neighboring Cumberland County, approved a large AI data center that is currently under construction.
The lesson from East Greenwich's version of this fight is that a township-wide ordinance is a stronger shield than any single withdrawal. A developer walking away from one application doesn't change what's legally allowed on the next parcel over. Closing the zoning code does.
A town that was never just a data point
Mount Royal has been called something else before. Colonial-era records referred to it as Sandtown, named for the sandy soil that runs through this stretch of the township, and it shows up in Revolutionary War accounts of British troops crossing Berkley Road to repair a bridge over Mantua Creek in November 1777. The Swedesboro Railroad ran a freight line through the area starting in 1869, and portions of that line still carry freight today.
None of that history changes zoning law, but it's a reminder that this is a place people have been paying attention to for a long time, long enough that a data center fight is just the latest chapter, not the whole story. If you want a lower-stakes reason to end up in Mount Royal on a weekend, the Mt. Royal Inn earned a mention in a 2026 roundup of New Jersey's best wings, on top of having been a finalist in the state's Best Bar Showdown back in 2019. Some things in this town have nothing to do with megawatts.
If you're keeping an eye on what's happening in your own corner of East Greenwich Township, whether it's a zoning notice, a proposed variance, or just wanting to understand what a project like this could mean for your street, Pat Settar and her team follow local development closely across Gloucester County. Reach out anytime you want a straight answer about what's actually on the table near your home.
