Wednesday, September 16th, 2026

Welcome to Wednesday’s edition of The Pennant. To listen to this newsletter, click the “Listen Online” link in the top right corner of this email.

On this date in 1988, Cincinnati Reds pitcher Tom Browning threw a perfect game against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Top of the Fold: Chillicothe council clears the way for a data center at the former paper mill site, plus Ohio honors Dolly Parton's literacy program with an official day.

And unions, desperate to boost their ranks, launch a recruiting blitz targeting non-union electricians, plus the Pennant weighs in on Ohio's levy wars amid falling passage rates statewide.

Chillicothe Council Clears Way for Data Center at Former Paper Mill

CHILLICOTHE — City council overturned its data center moratorium Monday, allowing U.S. Paper Mill Company to build a data center at the former Pixelle mill site. Councilman Richard McQuirt said the project emerged after promised federal glove contracts stalled, with manufacturing in China and Malaysia undercutting costs. The mill closed in 2025, costing 800 jobs, before USPM planned to make PPE there. Plans have since expanded to include research, aerospace design and the data center.

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Gov. Mike DeWine has declared Aug. 9 "Dolly Parton Day," honoring the country star's Imagination Library literacy program. Parton will visit Columbus for a private luncheon with First Lady Fran DeWine, livestreamed for the public. The program, which mails a free monthly book to children ages 0-5, launched statewide in 2019 and rebranded under Parton's name in July 2022. More than 30,000 Ohio children are currently enrolled.

COLUMBUS — Ohio State's Moritz College of Law will move into the historic Huntington National Bank Building at 17 S. High St., part of a public-private partnership with the city, Huntington Bank, and Downtown Columbus, Inc. The 30-year lease includes a future purchase option. Officials say the downtown move will connect students with nearby law firms, courts, and policymakers. Ohio State expects to open the new location in fall 2029.

COLUMBUS — The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers is bringing organizers from across its six-state Fourth District to Columbus this month for a "job blitz," canvassing active construction sites to recruit non-union electricians with offers of same-day placement with union contractors.

Non-union, or "merit shop," workers vastly outnumber union members in construction nationally — nearly 89% of the roughly 9 million U.S. construction workers were non-union in 2025, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, giving unions a large pool of potential recruits to target. 

Merit shop advocates point out that their wages and benefits have largely kept pace with union contracts in recent years, while workers remain directly employed by their company rather than paying union dues and a percentage of gross wages to a third-party hall.

The plan, first described publicly by Dorsey Hager of the Columbus/Central Ohio Building & Construction Trades Council, comes as the union struggles to keep up with demand. Central Ohio building-trades hours have surged from about 4 million a year a decade ago to more than 18 million in 2025, driven largely by data center construction. 

When local union halls can't fill job calls fast enough, they typically turn to "travelers" — members from other locals brought in from out of state to cover the gap — making local non-union electricians an increasingly attractive recruiting target instead.

A similar blitz in Dallas-Fort Worth this spring drew roughly 500 applicants and led to nearly 100 hires in a single night. Ohio's plumbers and pipefitters union and the Ohio State Building Trades are watching the Columbus effort before deciding whether to run their own. No dates or specific sites have been publicly announced.

Property tax questions trail only data centers in reader response here at the Pennant, and it's not close. Across Ohio, levies have been failing more than they're passing this cycle. Just 24 of 66 school levies passed statewide this past May — about 36%, down from 64% in May 2025 and 52% in May 2024. That's a trend colliding head-on with rising property valuations, and voters are noticing.

We've spent a big chunk of the summer communicating with people on both sides, including anti-levy voices from a northeastern Ohio district coming off a failed levy — one that has since shifted strategy entirely, moving away from a property tax levy toward a local income tax increase instead — and a central Ohio district with one of the state's stronger track records at the ballot box. What separates that district isn't luck.

Research on Ohio levy campaigns points to the same handful of habits again and again: proactive, two-way communication with residents well before a levy ever reaches the ballot, regular reporting on how prior levy money was actually spent, and consistent messaging built on community input rather than a campaign built from scratch the moment the district needs money. Districts that do this tend to earn trust before they ever ask for a vote.

We also talked to an elections consultant who works almost exclusively on campaigns for levy passage — informational conversations, not advocacy on our end.

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