Local leaders and representatives from the building trades have urged Ohio lawmakers to tweak but not block data center development. Although some speakers highlighted shortcomings in current policy they said data centers are a net benefit to their communities.
From the local government perspective, data centers boost the local tax base without making many demands for services, officials testified.
To the trades, data centers represent a reliable source of good-paying jobs, representatives said. The bulk of that work is in the initial construction, but with servers and chips becoming obsolete every few years, the demand for workers has a long tail, they said.
State lawmakers said they plan to introduce legislation and move it through an Ohio Senate committee in a matter of days.
“Even though it wasn’t our intention when we started this committee to do legislation, we think that we have enough information to get some legislation through before we go on recess,” Ohio state Sen. Brian Chavez, R-Marietta, told reporters.
Chavez declined to elaborate on what’s in the proposal.
Local leaders
To New Albany Community Development Director Jennifer Chrysler, managing data center development comes down to a math problem.
“The city created a formula that calculates a minimum payment for the data centers in New Albany that are in the amount of what that property would have generated if it had been developed as either corporate office or advanced manufacturing.”
Data centers first showed up in the city in 2010, and in the years since, revenue from those developments has helped the local school district avoid going to the ballot for funding, she said. Chrysler said one data center alone generated $3.9 million in local tax revenue.
“If you use our 2% income tax rate,” she said, “that is the equivalent of a company with a payroll of over $165 million.”
“All of that with not as many impacts to our safety services and traffic on the roads,” she added, “Yet we were able to get value from these data centers because of this formula that we developed.”
Johnstown Mayor Tiffany Hollis is far more skeptical of big tech development, but she doesn’t want to see lawmakers block data centers or eliminate a costly sales tax exemption.
Hollis recalled the secrecy surrounding the arrival of Intel in her community.
Land acquisitions began before the project became public, she said, and no one could get straight answers.
“What I watched happen in Johnstown in those early days was entirely preventable,” she said. “When people don’t have information, they fill the vacuum with fear. Rumors spread faster than facts.”
Still, she told lawmakers a one-size-fits-all approach would be wrong. A moratorium on data centers would only help communities outside Ohio competing for new investments. Getting rid of the data center sales tax break would be bad, too.
“That exemption is not a favor to a company,” Hollis said. “It’s the chip local governments use to get investment to the table and keep it there. Take it away, and you haven’t protected anyone.”
Instead, she pushed lawmakers to focus on policies that ensure transparency.
Chrysler, on the other hand, defended nondisclosure agreements. She stressed that New Albany only signs onto NDAs the city drafted, rather than agreements written by the companies.
That approach allows cities to balance public disclosure with protecting information like trade secrets.
“We will severely limit our ability to do economic development if we don’t have the ability to sign NDAs and do them and implement them in the right way,” she said.
Labor perspective
Matt Szollosi is an unabashed cheerleader for data center development in Ohio. The head of the Affiliated Construction Trades of Ohio Foundation said the industry is pushing employment in the trades to new heights.
“Our collective intent here today is to cut through the BS that data centers in Ohio do not create jobs,” he said.
Demand for workers and applications to apprenticeship programs? Skyrocketing, he said. Wages and benefits? Szollosi said those are increasing, too.
“Don’t fall prey to the false reality, being perpetuated by social media influencers that data centers don’t create jobs,” Szollosi said. “This is the reality. In 2025, the building trades have thousands of members working on or in data center plants across the state of Ohio.”
You won’t find those workers on social media, he said, because they don’t have time for that: “Our members work.”
Bryan Stewart added that the opportunities for ongoing work on data centers is significant. The CEO of electrical design firm Superior said his company grew from 300 people 15 years ago to more than 3,000 today.
He explained working on one data center often means working on the next building a company is developing on that site, extending work over several years.
Once a building is up and running, there are opportunities for service and maintenance, as well as retrofitting a few years down the road.
“So, we’re coming back in constantly in cycle working in that facility,” he said. “Because technology changes, so the electrical infrastructure may need tweaked or changed dramatically, and we may be back in building one two years later, and then we’re constantly providing service activities.”
Stewart warned that sweeping action against the data center industry won’t actually harm the big tech firms investing in Ohio — they can just move on to some other state — but it would be devastating for the Ohio companies that have sprung up to serve them.
The way Szollosi put it, “guardrails” to protect local communities are fine.
“We want them to get every penny,” he said, “That’s easy for us, because our members live in those communities.”
“We just don’t want to see any disincentives put in place that cause projects to go elsewhere.”
This story originally appeared at ohipcapitaljournal.com.
