Data Centers Would Need Your Vote Under New Statehouse Bill
Vol. IV, No. 75 - But Will House Bill 983 Actually Go Anywhere?
Earlier this week, State Representatives Jennifer Gross (R-West Chester) and Michelle Teska (R-Clearcreek Township) introduced House Bill 983, the Data Center Accountability and Citizen Protection Act. The bill’s headline provision is simple to state and radical in practice: before a large-scale data center or its associated power plant can be built or expanded anywhere in Ohio, voters in every city, village, or township within five miles of the site would have to approve it at the ballot box.
That’s not a public comment period. That’s not a planning commission hearing squeezed into a Tuesday agenda. That is a citizen vote, with a simple majority required, held at the next available election at least 90 days after the request is certified. If voters say no, the developer has to wait two years before trying again. If a local official approves permits without that vote, HB 983 makes it misconduct in office.
The bill doesn’t stop there. It directs Ohio Enviornmental Protection Agency to write data-center-specific rules for air emissions and wastewater discharge, including newly regulated PFAS, glycols, and metals used in cooling systems. It requires independent, publicly posted testing twice a year. It makes data center owners financially liable, dollar for dollar, for any drop in local water pressure or supply within five miles of a project. It bans future property tax abatements outright. And it requires future data centers to generate their own power rather than lean on the grid the rest of us pay into.
Two other pieces deserve attention closer to home. HB 983 would void the confidentiality protections currently shielding development and supply agreements, making them public record “without exception,” and it would retroactively void any existing data center agreement signed before the bill’s passage, reopening those files to public records requests. That’s a direct shot at the nondisclosure agreements that have already shaped deals in places like Piqua and Mount Orab, where residents learned who was really behind a project only after investigative reporters traced shell-company filings back to a hyperscale tech company.
Representatives Gross and Teska both represent suburban Warren and Butler County districts sitting squarely in the corridor between Cincinnati and Dayton, exactly the ground data center developers have been targeting. Warren County has its own fight underway: a resident group calling itself Protect Our Way of Life Warren County has retained legal counsel to challenge a data center tax abatement after residents said they were shut out of the approval process. That pattern, communities finding out about megaprojects only after the ink is dry, is the exact grievance HB 983 is written to address.
Here’s the sober read: a bill introduced this late in the General Assembly’s second-year summer recess, in an election year, faces long odds of a floor vote before November. But don’t assume this dies quietly. The House is not secheduled to meet again before Election Day and there will be a lame-duck calendar running into December. If HB 983 gets any committee traction this fall, the lame duck could be seen as a place where this legislation is debated and voted upon.
The other tell is the fight it’s already picked. The Data Center Coalition, the industry’s lobbying arm, has called the bill a signal that “Ohio is closed for business”. That reaction alone tells you HB 983 touches something real. Whether it becomes law or not, it has put a number on the table, five miles, and a question every township trustee and city council member in a data center’s path will now have to answer: are you willing to let voters decide?
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