Ohioans Bet On Ohioans
Vol. III, No. 320 - Residents all across the Buckeye State are fighting back against Data Centers -- and they need your help
Publisher’s note: Over the past week, a few stories in the media have really caught my attention. There was this piece at cleveland.com that talked about some of the tactics used by data centers to wedge themselves into smaller communities throughout Ohio. Then there was this piece at dayton247.com that took a micro look at this issue with a family in Piqua.
The stories need more than just one day of attention. Rather, we are going to have a series of stories this week trying to synthesize what is happening with data centers in Ohio. How do these data centers come to town? How can local governments respond? And finally, how are residents pushing back? Today is our final story in this series.
Austin Baurichter spent years drafting legal agreements for one of Ohio’s most prominent law firms. He knew how NDAs worked. He knew how development deals got structured. He did not work on the data center agreements directly, but when residents in southern Ohio started naming his firm as the legal muscle behind deals that locked communities out of their own decisions, he started asking questions internally.
Those questions fell on deaf ears.
Late one night, something clicked. He quit. He drove to Adams County and started helping residents file public records requests, draft local petitions, and understand what had already been done to their community without their knowledge. Then he did something more consequential. He helped write a proposed amendment to the Ohio Constitution that would ban data centers larger than 25 megawatts of power consumption — a threshold that would effectively block every hyperscale facility Amazon, Google, or Meta would want to build in the state.
“What I would like to do is bet on Ohioans,” he said. “Let their voices be the ones that dictate the future of the county.”
The Ohio Ballot Board certified the amendment’s title and summary in March 2026, clearing it for a signature drive. Backers need roughly 413,000 valid signatures from at least 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties to place it on the ballot. The timeline is tight. The opposition will be well-funded. And the question the amendment raises is one that goes beyond data centers.
It is a question about who decides what gets built in Ohio, and on whose terms.
The case for the amendment is straightforward. The current system is not working. Communities are being approached through shell corporations. NDAs are being used to prevent public deliberation on projects that will reshape the electrical grid, consume millions of gallons of water, and permanently convert farmland that took generations to build. Ohio has handed out more than $2 billion in tax incentives to data centers since 2017 and now ranks fifth in the nation with more than 200 facilities. The public did not vote on that strategy. Most residents did not know it was happening until the letters started arriving on their neighbors’ doors.
The case against is also serious, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a dismissal. Data centers are real infrastructure. They support banking, health records, communications, and the basic digital functions that American life now runs on. Greg Lawson of the Buckeye Institute warned that turning against data centers could leave the United States dependent on foreign facilities for critical systems. Ohio’s building trades unions — sheet metal workers, electricians, pipefitters — want these projects because they produce union construction jobs. Sen. Bill DeMora, a Columbus Democrat, said flatly that labor is on the side of building.
A flat 25-megawatt cap is a blunt instrument. It does not distinguish between a developer that negotiated transparently with a community and one that spent three years assembling land through shell corporations while local officials signed NDAs. It does not reward the communities that did the work of building strong zoning codes and moratoriums. It treats the symptom — the size of the facility — rather than the disease, which is the absence of a fair and transparent process.
What Ohio actually needs is not necessarily a ban. It is a set of rules that make secrecy illegal and local input mandatory. Prohibiting NDAs in transactions that involve public land, public utilities, or public tax incentives. Requiring disclosure of the actual corporate entity behind any land acquisition above a certain acreage threshold. Mandating a minimum public comment period before any development agreement is signed. Giving regional planning bodies real authority to coordinate standards across township and municipal lines.
None of that is on the ballot. The amendment is.
And here is the uncomfortable truth about that. The amendment exists because the Ohio General Assembly has not acted. The governor vetoed a proposal to eliminate a data center tax break and declined to be interviewed for a major investigative series on the industry’s tactics in his own state. The Statehouse does not have a clear consensus on what guardrails, if any, should exist. In that vacuum, residents are doing what Ohioans have done before when their government would not move — they are going directly to the ballot.
John Bays, the Adams County farmer who threw away letter after letter from shell corporations trying to buy his land, is not naive about his county’s economic situation. He watched the coal plants close. He knows what 700 jobs and $8 million in tax revenue disappearing in a single year does to a community. He is not against development. He is against being treated like a problem to be managed rather than a person with a legitimate stake in what happens to his land, his water, and his county.
“This area has been sold a bill of goods by corporate interests in this nation’s history before,” Baurichter said. “Did that bill of goods pan out? Did those businesses and industries yield generational wealth and prosperity?”
That is the right question. And it deserves an answer from every elected official in Miami County — and across Ohio — before the next letter arrives.
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