Ohio's top court takes a data-center measure off the ballot

The Supreme Court of Ohio ruled on 18 September that a citizen-written zoning ordinance will not go in front of Wilmington, Ohio voters on 3 November. The case is State ex rel. Kidd v. Clinton County Board of Elections, 2026-Ohio-3663, reported by Court News Ohio and WCPO Cincinnati. Petitioners Quintin Koger Kidd and Susan Croutwater filed in July. The county board confirmed the signatures, then voted in August not to certify, after the city law director objected to one provision. The ordinance, the majority wrote, "purports to create a new cause of action and therefore is not within the municipality's power to enact."

The number

Engineering News-Record's project accounting supplies the dimensions: about 471 acres off U.S. Route 68, nine buildings totaling about 1.92 million square feet, announced at $4 billion, carrying at least 100 permanent jobs on an $8 million payroll. At least 100 is a floor, so the division gives a ceiling, not a value: no more than about $40 million of announced capital per permanent job, and no more than about $80,000 a year in wages per job. None of the coverage read for this article ran that division. Employment is not the main thing the city is buying. Tax base is.

How the money actually moves

Zoning first. The land was Rural Residential and had to become Light Industrial, which council did by emergency ordinance on 3 September. The emergency clause makes an ordinance take effect the day it passes instead of after the usual waiting period, and it narrows the window for forcing a referendum. Both are why it gets used. Attorney Joshua Engal is suing over that declaration, and in State ex rel. McNamara-Smith v. Grube this August the same court held that an emergency declared without specific stated reasons leaves a measure subject to referendum.

Infrastructure second. AWS committed to build and fund at least $25 million of public works: about 3.5 miles of sewer trunk, about 2.5 miles of water main, a 1-million-gallon tower, and road work on U.S. 68 and State Route 730. The city ends up owning public infrastructure it did not pay for out of taxes. Engineering News-Record puts estimated water use at 6 million gallons a year, the annual figure as published, which sits oddly beside a million-gallon tower and goes unexplained in the record.

The tax side nobody has printed. No assessed value, no payment-in-lieu terms, no abatement length, no split between city, county and school district appears in the ruling or the coverage. Those sit in the county auditor's valuation once buildings exist, and in any tax agreement the city and the school district approve.

Site plan third, and frozen. A federal judge ruled on 14 July that public notice before the rezoning, data-center-use and generator-noise ordinances was insufficient, and barred the planning commission from acting until all three are re-passed with proper hearings. WCPO reports what those hearings must allow: a resident can question the other side's witnesses, bring an expert, and bring a lawyer. Public notice is a box on a checklist until the day a judge actually reads it.

The blocked measure was a fourth route around all of it: standards on noise, lighting, emissions, generators, water and heat, fines of $5,000 to $10,000 a day, and a right for any resident to sue. The standards were not the problem. The right to sue was.

Who this touches here

Ohio's line binds Ohio: a local measure can set standards, not create a right to sue. The notice defect was a federal judge's finding on this record, not a statement about New Jersey or New York notice rules. When 471 acres converts from residential to light industrial, that acreage is gone for the warehouse or contractor yard someone else wanted.

The part the coverage left out

Wilmington's economy was built around the Wilmington Air Park, and DHL announced on 10 November 2008 that it was ending its North American air and ground operations there. Job-loss counts from that period vary and no outlet in this cycle's coverage carried them, so none appears here. A town that lost an air hub's anchor operation in one announcement is now weighing a project promising at least 100 permanent jobs.

What to watch

3 November: four data-center rezoning referendums remain on Wilmington's ballot, untouched by this ruling. Before then, whether council re-enacts the three ordinances with corrected notice, because the planning commission cannot move until it does. Then whether the petitioners refile a version that drops the right to sue and keeps the standards the opinion left alone. Engal told FOX19 NOW that "the fight is not over."