Local Politics: The small-time data center resistance

Until recently, a petition to ban data centers in Ohio was getting excitedly passed around in media outlets and online forums. The petition needed to reach 413,000 signatures by July 1 in order to make it onto the ballot for the 2026 general election. And, if it did, and if it passed, it would lead to no more new large data centers anywhere in the state.

That’s something that a lot of people want. Critics say that data centers have been shown to spike electric bills, tank water quality, pollute the air, and swallow up the land.

Ohio is already home to more than 200 data centers, and 139 of them are in Columbus. As of January, it was the state with the sixth most data centers in the country. So, banning them is on a lot of Ohioans’ minds. 

But last Wednesday, the organizers of the petition, ConserveOhio, announced that they wouldn’t be submitting this year. 

“The July 1st deadline was our best case scenario for the quickest possible action. Internally, we set that as our ideal target and it just didn’t pan out,” the group wrote in its announcement. “We are not going to be submitting this year. … Based on our progress so far, we feel confident in making the deadline for the 2027 general election. And we will continue to grow the right way: with each other, for each other, bipartisan, real.”

But during the time until the 2027 general election, which is about 500 days away, corporate and political efforts to build data centers will likely only intensify in the state. And so, in the meantime, volunteers have turned to small-scale data center petitions.

“People are starting to do township charters and very small-scale petitions,” Andrew Gula, a member of the committee representing the ConserveOhio petitioners, said in a phone call. “Our volunteers started coming up with it. They know that we need such a large amount of signatures, and we’re still going to get that, but they’re also now trying to just get a charter in, for example, Sunbury, and say, ‘Okay, no more data centers in Sunbury.’”

The Sunbury City Council, in Delaware County, has already passed a moratorium on a specific Amazon Web Services data center in April. Separately, however, residents are actively collecting signatures for a petition to “allow Sunbury voters to decide whether to prohibit the construction of large-scale data centers.” Their city council will discuss and potentially vote on it in a special meeting on Thursday.

ConserveOhio has approximately five such active petitions in local communities throughout the state, Gula said. These petitions are adopting the language from the original statewide petition adjusted for specific locations and a smaller scale, so that they would have the same bounds and effects. A number of towns in the state have also independently passed moratoriums on data centers – earlier this month, Grove City joined their ranks. 

Ohio Data Centers, an independent tracker of data center projects across the state’s 88 counties, lists Franklin County as “very high” risk for data center production, largely due to its power availability. The Hilliard City Council, for example, is in a legal battle to stop Amazon and AEP Ohio from installing fuel cells at an existing Amazon data center and turning it into the second largest fuel cell installation in the entire world.

So, though it’s not as immediate as putting the petition to a vote, Gula hopes continuing to gather signatures might prevent more projects from getting started before the next chance to put the issue on the ballot.

“Our goal is next year,” he said. “We feel really good about next year. And the thing is, if we collect enough signatures and get it submitted by October, then every developer who is thinking about building in Ohio has to consider for the next year, ‘Well, maybe this will be illegal to build in a year, so we shouldn’t do it.’ It’s going to put a real chilling effect on data center development and construction in Ohio, I think, if we can get it submitted before the end of this year. And judging by our numbers and our momentum, it looks pretty good. People are still motivated. It’s still in their backyards.” 

At time of writing, ConserveOhio has collected a total of 83,742 signatures, with roughly 5,000 coming from Franklin County. 

As the petition continues in the background, local political communities across the state are fighting back. Is it possible that, with this much simultaneous anti-data-center organizing, elected officials might propose a ban on their own? 

“ I think it’ll be far-fetched to think that the politicians will start listening to us,” Gula said. “The good guys are just the regular everyday people, and we’ll be the ones to kick ’em out.”