Data centers are coming to Ohio, and cities and towns wary of the projects should try to win concessions from developers, Gov. Mike DeWine said this week.
DeWine offered that advice to local governments during a conversation with reporters on the sidelines of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Big Bets for America summit in Cleveland on Tuesday. At the summit, DeWine talked up the advanced manufacturers and technology companies that have settled in the state, particularly Columbus.
“I know it’s been controversial,” DeWine said in response to the question from Signal Cleveland about whether data centers should be included in the state’s high-tech portfolio. “Here is my message to any community that is not — is worried about data centers: Cut a good deal. The deal is in your hands.”
In DeWine’s telling, communities have a right to insist that data centers conserve water and pay for their own electricity. Local governments should “be aggressive” in seeking a deal and “don’t just take what they give you,” he said.
“But we can’t throw them completely out and say, ‘Oh no, we don’t — we want to close the walls of the state of Ohio and we don’t want any data centers to come in’ any more than we can do that to any other business,” he said. “It’s just where the future is. This is now, and we have to be, we have to be part of it.”
The governor made the comments as his administration is reconsidering Ohio’s own deal with data centers. In May, DeWine paused a sales tax exemption for new projects. As Signal Statewide reported, that exemption had cost $1.6 billion, far more than expected.
DeWine said that Ohio will let the tax exemption “pause for a while,” although he still expects data centers to open in the state without it. If the state needs to restart the tax exemption later, it can do so, he said.
As DeWine spoke in Cleveland, the state legislature in Columbus was preparing a slate of proposed data center regulations.
Cleveland City Hall has weighed the data center question, too. Mayor Justin Bibb’s administration rejected a permit application from a developer for a data center in the Slavic Village neighborhood.
City officials said they also don’t want data centers to open in The Midline, a stretch of vacant industrial land on the East Side that Cleveland plans to redevelop.
Ohio voters may get the chance to weigh in on the issue. A group of data center opponents is collecting signatures to put on the ballot a constitutional amendment banning the projects in the state.
