Why we're collecting signatures to put data centers on Ohio's November ballot

You may have seen us at the farmers' market, at festivals, local coffee shops, or wherever people gather, with a sign proclaiming “ban mega data centers” and with our clipboards at-the-ready. We're gathering signatures for the Conserve Ohio petition; it is formally known as the Ohio Prohibition of Data Center Construction Amendment. It needs 413,488 valid signatures from at least 44 of Ohio's 88 counties by July 1, 2026 to get on the November ballot. If it passes, the state would no longer be allowed to permit new data centers with a peak load above 25 megawatts.

Here's why we're putting in the work, and why we'd like you to sign...

And yes, we know: this blog is sitting on a server in a data center somewhere right now, and your phone is talking to a few of them just to load this page. We aren't asking for the cloud to disappear. We're asking who's paying for it, what it's being used for, and who actually got a say.

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Franklin Furnace happened under an NDA

In January, the three Scioto County commissioners (one of whom you can vote out in exchange for a Democratic candidate this November) voted to give Google a 75% property-tax abatement for fifteen years on a $1 billion data center in Franklin Furnace. The deal had been negotiated under a non-disclosure agreement; residents didn't know who the "Fortune 100 tech company" was until the vote was already on the table. The first phase is 500,000 square feet. Filings on the wetland permit show the full plan is closer to 1.7 million square feet on 792 acres along the Ohio River, with about 50 permanent jobs.

That isn't an isolated occurrence. It's the local version of a story playing out across all 200 of Ohio's data centers, and thousands more across the country. The Conserve Ohio amendment exists because the people who live next to these facilities are the last ones to find out they're coming.

The EPA won't help us

On Wednesday, May 6, the Ohio EPA held a public hearing at Green High School in Franklin Furnace on the wetland permit for the Google project.

Gary Edwards, a Franklin Furnace homeowner, told WSAZ afterward: "Such a beautiful place, that's what we all bought homes over there for. It was never zoned to be a commercial area." Barbara Hand, who owns Holiday Point Marina, was more blunt: "I felt like it was going to put us out of business, and I'm still thinking it's going to put us out of business." She also brought up bald eagles nesting in the back of the bowl.

Residents quickly learned that the EPA would only address the wetlands permit. Concerns about nearby schools, road drainage, and air quality were not in scope. They stated different permits will address those, in different proceedings, on different schedules. They almost seemed gleeful to say "not our department."

The state's draft general permit for data-center wastewater, released last December, explicitly states that "a lowering of water quality of various waters of the state … is necessary to accommodate important social and economic development in the state of Ohio." That's the literal language in the public notice. Ohio's environmental regulator has already decided, on paper, that economic development outranks water quality before any specific permit is reviewed.

EPA staff also confirmed they have not denied a data-center permit yet. Edwards' plea at the hearing: "I just hope that this will be their first rejected permit."

This is part of why a ballot question matters. Inside the existing review process, no single hearing has the authority to weigh a project as a whole. The "economic development" finger is on the scale before the meeting starts. Ballot initiatives, like the one sponsored by Conserve Ohio, is the only mechanism that lets the majority of Ohioans have a say. It lets citizens evaluate hyperscale data centers as a category, instead of being sliced up into wetland impacts, air-quality studies, and a dozen other categories, with each agency saying "that's not in our scope."

The math isn’t math-ing

Ohio data centers have collected about $2.5 billion in state and local tax incentives from 2017 to 2024, with most of that flowing to AWS, Google, Cologix, and Meta. The structure is familiar: a state sales-tax exemption, a Job Creation Tax Credit, and a 75% local property-tax abatement for fifteen to thirty years. The Scioto County deal fits the template exactly.

Other states are further down this road and the numbers got ugly fast. Virginia's data-center sales-tax exemption cost the state $1.6 billion in fiscal 2025; that’s sixteen times original projections. Texas blew past $1 billion the same year after originally estimating $130 million. Good Jobs First, the watchdog group tracking this nationally, calls it the most out-of-control category of state spending in the country.

These breaks are sold as job magnets when every measure clearly states that they aren't. A typical hyperscale campus runs with 25 to 50 permanent staff once it's built. The Scioto County agreement promises about 50 permanent positions for a $1 billion facility. University of Michigan researchers concluded that data centers "do not bring high-paying tech jobs to local communities."

Most of us have a higher tax rate than the Silicon Six

The Silicon Six (Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Netflix) paid an average effective corporate tax rate of 18.8% on $2.5 trillion in profits between 2015 and 2024, well below the U.S. statutory rate over that period. For those unaware, the statutory rate is the rate corporations are supposed to pay on their profits before any deductions, credits, or loopholes get applied. The Fair Tax Foundation puts the resulting "tax gap" at around $278 billion. In 2025 alone, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla reported $315 billion in U.S. profits and paid 4.9% of it in federal corporate income tax, a roughly $51 billion benefit relative to the 21% statutory rate.

The four biggest hyperscalers are on track to spend over half a trillion dollars in capital expenditures this year, most of it on data-center buildout. Their tax bills, in dollars and as a share of profit, are smaller than what most of you reading this paid.

The bill is being shifted to US

When a hyperscaler shows up, the local utility has to build new generation, new transmission, and new substations to feed it. That tab gets folded into the rate base. In Virginia, residents have watched Dominion add roughly $13–16 a month to a typical bill while data centers request 70,000 megawatts of future capacity, almost triple the state's peak winter usage. Carnegie Mellon researchers project data-center growth could push electricity bills 8% higher nationally and as much as 25% higher in some regional markets.

Ohio has started pushing back, but only halfway. AEP Ohio's PUCO-approved tariff requires new data centers to commit to paying for at least 85% of the energy they say they'll use over a 12-year contract, and the industry has already appealed it to the Ohio Supreme Court. It’s better than nothing but still not enough. The remaining 15% of grid investment gets shifted onto residential bills if a hyperscaler over-projects its load and walks back, and the tariff only covers electricity. This does nothing about the water draws, nothing about the property-tax abatements, nothing about the schools collecting 75% less than they otherwise could. If these companies were paying their full freight, communities wouldn't be running constitutional amendments to stop them.

With great power comes great responsibility

This is the part that tends to get hand-waved past. Some AI is genuinely good. Radiology systems catching tumors human readers miss. Real-time captioning and translation. Protein folding. Search across legal records that used to take a paralegal a week. The accessibility uses alone justify a real industry.

That isn't most of what's getting built right now. Most of what's eating gigawatts is:

• Sora and Meta's "slop machine" feeds: short-form AI-generated video is designed to drown a phone in synthetic content the way the previous decade drowned it in viral memes, but this time it’s raising our utility bills and harming the environment.

• Copilot pop-ups in Notepad. AI summaries that bury actual search results. Microsoft has reportedly started scaling back Copilot entry points in 2026 because almost nobody was using them.

• "AI-powered" features stapled onto Salesforce, Notion, and Adobe to justify 6% to 30% price hikes. Users don't want them. Hacker News has a recurring thread titled "I'm drowning in AI features I never asked for and I hate it."

• Chatbots replacing the customer-service rep you used to be able to actually reach.

• AI ad copy. AI Christmas commercials. Coca-Cola pulled one after viewers called it "soulless" and "AI slop."

  
  

That's what the gigawatts and the $2.5 billion in Ohio tax breaks are actually fueling: not a cure for cancer but a water cannon of low-effort content nobody asked for, replacing work people used to be paid for. More than 6,500 artists signed an open letter calling AI training on copyrighted work "mass theft." You can support useful AI and still believe the people whose work was scraped without consent should be paid.

Unregulated AI is its own problem

There is no comprehensive federal framework regulating AI in the United States. Deepfake fraud cases jumped tenfold between 2022 and early 2023. In 2024, a single deepfake video call cost the engineering firm Arup $25 million. Non-consensual intimate imagery, AI-generated child sexual abuse material on major platforms, voice clones used to defraud grandparents: none of this is hypothetical. The TAKE IT DOWN Act helps at the margins but doesn't give victims a private right to sue.

Tech is supposed to give you something back

The original promise was that machines would do the boring work so we could spend more time on what matters. When the actual delivery is funneling public money to four companies, raising what it costs to keep the lights on, replacing illustrators with cheap imitations of their own work, and shoving AI features into apps users want left alone, the deal isn't what was advertised.

There are plenty of fixes that would work, if the people with the authority were willing: end the open-ended sales-tax exemptions, make hyperscalers cover their own grid upgrades, ban NDAs between local officials and developers, pass federal AI rules with a private right to sue, license training data at the source. None of those levers are in ordinary citizens' hands. They sit with the General Assembly, Congress, PUCO, and federal courts.

What is in our hands is a ballot question. So we're using it.

The Conserve Ohio amendment stops hyperscale construction. Anything above 25 megawatts of peak load, much like Google's $1 billion Franklin Furnace project, Meta's planned campuses, the next NDA-shrouded "Project Whatever" pulled together in another commissioners' meeting would no longer be permitted in Ohio. 

Existing facilities aren't affected. Smaller server rooms aren't affected. Hyperscale, the size and category that drives the rate hikes, the water draws, the giant tax giveaways, and the secrecy, is what gets stopped.

It’s blunt by design and it's also one of the very few real tools any of us have right now.

How to sign, host, or help us get the data center petition on the ballot

We don't have a headquarters at this time. Members of our party and other organizations are out collecting signatures around the county whenever we can… find us at events, on weekends, and wherever a few people get together. If you want to sign, we'll come to you.

If you're willing to host signers at your church, business, weekend get-together, or front porch, we want to hear from you. Even a couple of hours of foot traffic in the right spot can be the difference between getting on the ballot and not.

• Email — sciotodems@gmail.com

• Website — https://sciotodems.org 

• Message us on social — https://facebook.com/scdpf https://instagram.com/sciotodems

• Come to our meetings: We meet on the 4th Thursday Each Month, 7pm at the New Boston Community Center.

Tell us where you are and a couple of times that work. We'll bring the petition.

The amendment is a volunteer effort and non-partisan on purpose, which means anyone you know, Democrat, Republican, independent, none-of-the-above — can sign. The Franklin Furnace deal happened under an NDA. The next one will too, unless we change the rules. July 1 is six weeks out.

Sources & further reading

• Good Jobs First, Cloudy with a Loss of Spending Control — the foundational national report on data-center subsidies.

• Signal Ohio, "Data centers have claimed $2.5 billion in tax breaks since 2017."

• WSAZ, "Google's request for tax abatement on proposed data center approved" (Scioto County, January 2026).

• Scioto Valley Guardian, "Scioto County data center moves closer to construction."

• ITEP, "Four Big Tech Companies Avoid $51 Billion in Taxes" (February 2026).

• Inside Climate News, "Virginia Regulators Approve New Dominion Rates" (January 2026).

• Harvard Gazette, "Why are communities pushing back against data centers?" (April 2026).

• WSAZ, "EPA hosts data center public hearing in southeastern Ohio" (May 7, 2026).

• Government Technology, "Ohio EPA Considers Letting Data Centers Dump Wastewater" (December 2025).

• Ballotpedia, "Ohio Prohibition of Data Center Construction Amendment (2026)."