STATE COLLEGE — The Penn State Board of Trustees on Friday voted to approve the sale of two closing campuses to private development firms.
The 12.7-acre Penn State Shenango campus in Mercer County will be sold to JCL Development for $1 million, and the 57.3-acre Wilkes-Barre campus in Luzerne County will be sold to HGC Development for $5.25 million.
The decision marks the first real estate action taken by the university to sell any of the seven commonwealth campuses slated for closure in 2027. The other campuses are DuBois, Fayette, Mont Alto, New Kensington, and York. The board in May 2025 voted to close the campuses due to budget constraints and declining enrollment.
The buyers of the Shenango and Wilkes-Barre campuses plan to pivot both properties toward commercial and community redevelopment, according to Sara Thorndike, the university’s senior vice president for finance and business.
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JCL Development, based in Sharon, proposes transforming the Shenango campus into a hub for education, workforce training, economic development, and cultural enrichment. Texas-based HGC Development seeks to redevelop the Wilkes-Barre footprint into a multiuse site for a golf club, an event and conference venue, and for educational uses, according to Thorndike.
On Friday, all trustees voted in favor of the sales except three ex officio members: Cynthia Dunn, Russell Redding, and Carrie Rowe. The secretaries of the departments of Conservation and Natural Resources, Agriculture, and Education, respectively, abstained without providing public comment.
During Thursday’s meeting of the board’s finance committee, Thorndike acknowledged that the purchase prices for the Shenango and Wilkes-Barre campuses fell below the appraised values of the properties. When asked for the specific appraised values, university spokesperson Wyatt DuBois told Spotlight PA that Penn State is not sharing that information.
Despite the lower purchase prices, Thorndike argued that unloading the properties, along with their utility infrastructure, immediately offsets substantial long-term operating costs.
“The university considered a variety of factors when evaluating the financial offers that we received, including the benefits to the community and their needs, appraised values, deferred maintenance, and ongoing operating costs if we would have a need to retain the campus longer than June 30 of next summer,” Thorndike told the finance committee.
Trustee Mary Lee Schneider said at Thursday’s meeting that she supported that trade-off, saying that while a “small delta” exists between appraised values and sale prices, the savings from shedding deferred maintenance and other expenses “eclipses by a multiple what that delta is.”
Trustee Rob Fenza also endorsed the sales during the committee session, calling JCL Development a “capable local developer” with established roots in Sharon and praising HGC Development for bringing “imagination” and investment to the Wilkes-Barre site.
Addressing the university’s community engagement efforts, Thorndike told trustees on Thursday that “with Shenango and Wilkes-Barre, we connected with the potential buyers very early on in the process — and because of this, there were not as many meetings in these particular communities as some of the others.”
Municipal leaders in Sharon and Lehman Township previously told Spotlight PA that the university provided zero communication regarding prospective buyers or the specific terms of the real estate transactions.
However, officials in Lehman Township — home to the Wilkes-Barre campus — confirmed to Spotlight PA on Friday that HGC Development's commercial vision appears compatible with local plans.
“It appears to be a pretty good fit,” said David Sutton, assistant secretary to the Lehman Township supervisors. “It will have a low impact for the municipality. We’ll actually probably gain a little tax revenue — Penn State paid none. Now it’s going to have an actual owner.”
Officials in Sharon, home of the Shenango campus, did not immediately return email requests for comment on Friday.
The sales of the campuses mark the first tangible outcome of a legislative move in July, when state lawmakers eliminated statutory deed restrictions across the seven closing commonwealth locations.
For decades, those restrictions protected the public’s investment by requiring the land be returned to state control if Penn State ever ended its educational operations there.
But because those protections applied to specific parcels within each campus — such as roughly 4.5 acres housing the science building and utility infrastructure at Shenango and less than an acre containing the library at Wilkes-Barre — Penn State was blocked from offering commercial buyers a clean title to full property footprints.
As such, Penn State lobbied state lawmakers and Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro’s office to erase the restrictions across all seven locations, according to DuBois.
The statutory change was an amendment to a broader real estate package that cleared the state Senate in a 46-4 vote on July 12 before returning to the House, where it passed on concurrence in a narrow 105–97 vote.
As attention turns to the other closing campuses, Thorndike emphasized Thursday that each remaining campus is on its own timeline, with active discussions ongoing across all sites.
“Our goal is to find a positive path forward — again, even though that may be different for each campus,” Thorndike said. “Several campuses and their communities have opted for more public processes. Some have leaned into local organizations to help advance the process.”