Industrial developers aren’t coming to McKean County and rural Pennsylvania because we’re uniquely suited for their projects. They come because they’ve learned something about us — something uncomfortable, something we don’t like to say out loud.

They come because we are unprepared — and they know it.

Not malicious or corrupt, just unprepared. Structurally, procedurally, administratively unprepared for the scale and sophistication of the companies now knocking on our doors.

When a 3,500-acre industrial solar project permit in the middle of the massively valuable Pennsylvania Wilds can be approved with no independent review, no consultant reports, no legal analysis, no environmental documentation, no internal correspondence, and no administrative record beyond a binder the developer handed over, that isn’t just a paperwork gap. It’s an open invitation.

If a township has no questions, a corporation will have no answers.

If a township has no process, a corporation will supply one — the one that benefits it.

If a township has no expertise, a corporation will happily fill the vacuum with its own.

This isn’t about being anti-solar or anti-wind or anti-anything. It’s about being pro-transparency. Pro-community. It’s simply insisting that decisions affecting thousands of acres, millions of dollars and decades of land use deserve more than a three-ring binder.

Developers do not target communities with strong ordinances, trained supervisors and a documented review process. They target the places where the path of least resistance is also the path of least oversight.

Right now that’s us.

We have volunteer boards trying to evaluate industrial‑scale projects with no staff, no solicitor guidance, no planning expertise and no expectation that they should have any. Townships don’t know what they’re allowed to ask, what they’re entitled to require or on what protections they should insist.

Meanwhile, the companies coming in have teams of attorneys, environmental consultants, land agents, public‑relations staff, engineers and model ordinances written to their advantage.

This is not a fair fight — it’s not even a fight. It’s surrender disguised as cooperation.

The cost of that surrender doesn’t show up immediately, but years later — in forever altered ecosystems, strained emergency services, damaged roads, degraded watersheds (that we have worked so hard for so many years to finally restore), tax disputes, decommissioning battles and communities left holding the bill for decisions made without the information needed to make them responsibly.

The solution isn’t to shut the door on development. It’s to stop leaving it unlocked.

Townships need training, legal guidance and planning support. We need ordinances written for the world we live in now, not the one we lived in 50 years ago. Because if we don’t prepare ourselves, someone else will prepare the terms for us.

They already are.

(Sara Eddy Furlong is managing editor at The Bradford Era. She can be reached at s.furlong@bradfordera.com.)