Cleveland officials are already declaring that there will be no data centers at The Midline, the ambitious initiative announced this week to turn 350+ acres of long-vacant East Side industrial property into shovel-ready land for future development.
Standing at a key spot within The Midline’s footprint, near East 55th Street and Longfellow Avenue, Council President Blaine Griffin and Mayor Justin Bibb told Weekly Chatter last Wednesday that data centers are not welcome here.
Griffin said council’s pending legislation will set up zoning guardrails to prevent big data facilities in parts of the city near neighborhoods and areas intended to spur job creation. Bibb said there is a big difference between small data centers and “hyperscale” centers that are being proposed in Cleveland and across the state.
“We are not putting them here in The Midline,” he said.
Similarly, Christine Nelson, vice president of Project Management and Site Strategies for TeamNEO, a private nonprofit economic development organization involved in The Midline, said the project is targeting high-tech manufacturing.
At the moment, there are no companies ready to call The Midline home, and the initiative still needs to raise millions of dollars to complete the cleanup of old properties.
Data centers are on everyone’s mind because the city was caught by surprise by a permit application to build a $1.6 billion data center in Slavic Village. The city rejected the permit late last week, though the issue is likely far from settled. Filed May 5, the permit landed ahead of settled legislation introduced by Cleveland City Council that would block any new data centers until May 2027, to give the city time to figure out a plan for managing them.
Forestry manager cut down — for now
Jennifer Kipp, who has been Cleveland’s manager of Urban Forestry since 2013, has been placed on paid administrative leave pending an undisclosed internal investigation.
Bibb administration spokesperson Tyler Sinclair said he can’t elaborate.
“This is a personnel matter that’s under review,” he said. “ Additional information may come forward, so we’re unable to elaborate any further out of respect to allow that process to play out.”
Kipp could not be reached for comment.
Recently killed high-speed fiber optic deal was never actually signed
Signal Cleveland first reported this week that the City of Cleveland pulled the plug on a 30-year agreement with SiFi Networks, a private company that promised to lay fiber-optic internet cable across the city at no cost to taxpayers. The deal, approved by Cleveland City Council 2023, had several skeptics on council, who believed it was too good to be true. As it turned out, it was.
The city now says the company failed to start the work so the Bibb administration decided to kill the deal, which had given the company exclusive rights to build the network that it hoped to lease to internet service providers.
But the city wasn’t paying enough attention to the deal on several levels. In trying to end it over SiFi Network’s inaction, the city discovered that the agreement with the company was never actually signed.
Cleveland Chief of Innovation and Technology Elizabeth Crowe, who has only been in her role for three months, said she doesn’t know exactly why the ball got dropped. She said there was a “flurry” of initial conversations with the company and then staff changes on the city side before interactions just “sputtered.”
Crowe said SiFi Networks has signed an agreement ending any partnership. She said the city still wants to find a company to create a fiber optic network to enhance the city’s options for fast, market-rate fiber internet. But she said the city is starting over.
“We honestly don’t have a full plan in place,” she said. “This is step zero for us.”
