Map of Franklin County, Ohio, highlighting Grove City
This fall, it looks like Grove City residents will face a referendum they've been told is about data centers. It isn't.
If you walk away believing this is only about the Headwaters Development south of Rensch Road, then the people behind it have done exactly what they set out to do.
You may have noticed people with clipboards at the farmers' market and other community events, asking for your signature. The pitch is friendly: sign here, stop the data center. But read the actual document, and you'll find it does much more than that.
Last week, in our America 250 essays, we explained how a republic works and how the United States is a democratic republic. The short version is that you elect people to make the hard calls, and if they get it wrong, you vote them out. Your city council and your mayor run Grove City that way every day.
This amendment takes that power away. Certain big decisions can no longer be made by the people you elected. Instead, every one of them has to go to a citywide vote.
Good luck with that.
Think about what that does to your city manager or development director. Their whole job is to bring in good projects and keep the city moving. Under these new rules, they're stuck. A company calls, wants to build, wants to hire — and the answer becomes, well, we'll get back to you sometime after the next election.
These rules aren't anti-data center. They're against the way business works, and that should worry everybody. The triggers are written so broadly that a major employer like Walmart or FedEx could get swept in. A distribution center that's operated here for years could suddenly owe the city quarterly reports on its power and water use, and if it ever slips out of compliance, face fines that climb into the hundreds of thousands of dollars a day — the kind of rules you'd expect in California, not suburban Columbus. Companies of that size don't stick around to fight city hall for the privilege of staying. They take a second look and then just move somewhere else.
And when those larger companies — the ones that employ a lot of Grove City residents — move on, they take their property taxes with them. The same property taxes that fund your schools and your police department.
Here's the part that should really trouble Grove City residents. The document is written to travel. It's polished, heavily lawyered, and built to be cut and pasted into the next town and the one after that, with the city's name left blank to fill in. There is nothing "grassroots" about it. A handful of neighbors meeting over coffee at the Panera didn't create a document ready for a statewide rollout.
Remember stranger danger? We taught our kids to be careful about what a friendly stranger was offering, no matter how nice the smile. The grown-up version is waiting at the farmers' market with a clipboard. The neighbor holding it may mean every word, but the document in their hand was written somewhere else, by outside influences who won't have to live with what it does to Grove City. You'll know exactly who they are once the campaign finance filings are released.
If you take the time to read it, notice how often the word "democracy" comes up. It's in there to make you feel good about trading a system that already lets you vote for one that grinds every decision to a halt. There is nothing democratic about a rule designed to freeze your town in place while outside interests write the script.
So, picture where this goes. Job creation slows. The tax base flatlines while costs keep climbing. Good land sits empty because no serious company wants the headache your "grassroots" movement created. Neighbors turn on each other at the ballot box, year after year.
And you thought your June city council meeting was out of control. Just wait and see what your community turns into if this passes.
Grove City, look in the mirror and decide what kind of community you want to be. This is the opening shot — the Fort Sumter — of an outside movement that wants to remake Ohio's towns one referendum at a time, using local hands to do it. We're not kidding. You've been warned.
If you're a Grove City resident and this editorial makes you angry, don't blame the messenger. Read the document.
Questions, comments and letters to the editor are welcome. Email [email protected].