The Mind of the Economic Developer
Vol. III, No. 317 - The Second in our Series on Data Centers In Ohio
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 second story in this series.
There is a moment that happens inside local government when a major corporation comes to town. It does not matter if the community is struggling or thriving. The moment a billion-dollar company signals interest, something shifts. Elected officials and economic development staff stop asking whether the project is right for the community and start asking how to get it over the finish line.
Pat Garofalo of the American Economic Liberties Project has a name for it: economic development brain. “They get into this mindset where their job is to complete the deal, not to be the best steward of public resources,” he said. In places that have been hollowed out by plant closures and population loss, that shift can happen inside of a single meeting.
This is not a character flaw. It is a structural problem. And data center developers have learned exactly how to exploit it.
By the time a developer makes formal contact with a local government, the land is often already being assembled. NDAs have already been signed. Shell corporations have already filed paperwork. The developer arrives not with a proposal but with a timeline, a law firm, and a pre-drafted development agreement written entirely on their terms. The community is being asked to respond to a deal, not shape one.
In Adams County, the economic development director signed two NDAs and began connecting developers with utility companies to explore electrical capacity before a single public meeting was held. Emails obtained through public records requests showed him coordinating with JobsOhio on potential grants and positioning county sites for energy-intensive development. By fall 2024, the commissioners had brought in outside counsel to model tax incentives. “Everyone was doing triage,” said Austin Baurichter, the attorney who eventually left his law firm over his firm’s role in drafting these agreements. “Everyone was trying to understand where in the process things were.”
In Piqua, the City Commission moved at what observers described as breakneck speed to approve legislation for a 607-acre data center campus while residents sat in public meetings asking questions the city could not — or would not — answer. The family whose property sat in the project’s path had already been pressured out before the public vote.
These are not isolated failures. They are what happens when local governments engage with these projects one at a time, without preparation, without regional coordination, and without the policy tools already in place before the developer arrives.
The communities that have handled this better did one thing differently: they slowed down before they had to.
At least 15 Ohio communities have enacted moratoriums on new data center development. Jerome Township in Union County passed a nine-month pause specifically to update its zoning code before approving any new projects. A moratorium is not a rejection of economic development. It is a refusal to negotiate from ignorance. It buys the time needed to understand what is actually being proposed, what it will cost in infrastructure and services, and what the community can reasonably demand in return.
Zoning is the second tool, and it is more powerful than most local officials recognize until it is too late. Data centers are not office parks. They are large-scale industrial operations that consume extraordinary amounts of water and electricity, generate significant noise, and produce industrial wastewater. Restricting them to heavy industrial zones — away from residential neighborhoods, schools, and agricultural land — is legally defensible and practically essential. It forces the conversation about land use to happen before the agreement is signed, not after.
Stormwater and water withdrawal protections written directly into local development codes are the third layer. The Ohio EPA proposed a general permit in late 2025 that would allow data centers to discharge wastewater into rivers and streams under a streamlined approval process rather than the individual permits currently required. Environmental groups have warned this increases pollution risk in already stressed watersheds. Communities that rely entirely on state-level oversight for these protections are betting on an agency that has already shown it will accommodate industry pressure when local governments don’t push back.
None of this works if communities act alone. A developer turned away by tough zoning in one township simply moves to the next one. The real leverage — for Troy, for Tipp City, for every Miami County community watching this unfold in Adams and Brown counties — comes from coordinated standards. Shared moratorium language. Aligned zoning ordinances. A regional framework that prevents developers from playing one community against another in a race to offer the most accommodating terms.
Adams County Commissioner Kelly Jones put it plainly: “This company is a billion-dollar company, and if they want to come here, they need to pay us.” That is the right instinct. But a single commissioner in a rural county without zoning authority, negotiating alone against Amazon’s legal team, is not a fair fight. The only way to make it fair is to not fight it alone.
The offer letters are already circulating in communities that don’t know it yet. The shell corporations are already in property records. The time to build the policy framework is now, before the economic development brain kicks in and the deal becomes the only thing that matters.
This is the second story in a three-part series on data centers in Ohio. Part 3 publishes Saturday: the constitutional amendment, the ballot fight, and the harder question of who gets to decide.
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