Van Wert City Council votes Monday, May 11, on whether to rezone nearly 900 acres of the city's long-designated Mega Site for a proposed $10 billion data center. Before we talk about what is at stake, it helps to understand where Van Wert has been.
Van Wert sits on the historic Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental road in America, stretching from New York's Times Square to Lincoln Park in San Francisco. Railroads arrived in 1853. On January 1, 1901, Van Wert dedicated the first county library in the United States. It had manufacturing. It had a downtown worth driving to. It had the kind of civic pride that featured the Miracle on Main Street every Christmas, and Memorial Day tributes that left you with a tear in your eye.
Since 1932, the town has held the Peony Festival. They will do it again next month, complete with the crowning of the queen. But still, the city isn’t what it once was.
First came the bypass. Then came the big box retailers. Then came the decades of deindustrialization that hollowed out northwest Ohio the same way it did hundreds of small American cities. By 2019, Van Wert's downtown core contained 116 buildings, only three of which were fully utilized.
To their credit, Van Wert's civic and business leaders never gave up. Local investors, foundations, and a home-grown vision began rebuilding downtown block by block. That work is ongoing, and it deserves respect.
But downtown restoration alone does not rebuild a tax base. It does not fund schools. It does not pay police and fire departments. For that, you need jobs. Real jobs. Construction jobs. Permanent jobs. The kind of jobs a $10 billion investment brings.
A few weeks ago, The Pennant published two editorials examining who is really behind the push to stop data centers in Ohio. We looked at the funding, the organizing, and the messaging. Conserve Ohio, the group circulating petitions at the Van Wert hearing last week, presents itself as a grassroots citizen movement. Grassroots groups don't typically organize petition drives across all 88 Ohio counties. They don't dispatch activists to hearing after hearing across the state.
One anti-data center speaker at Monday's Van Wert hearing had a GoFundMe page seeking bus fare and rideshare money to attend council meetings from Van Wert to Stark County to Perry County to Pennsylvania. As of Tuesday morning, not a single person had donated. That tells you something about how organic this movement really is.
We have looked hard at the environmental objections. They deserve real answers, not a door slam. Modern data centers use closed-loop cooling systems that recycle water internally. What leaves the system is disposed of under EPA guidelines, the same as any other regulated industry. The vapor is steam. The same thing that rises off a pot of boiling water. You can protect the environment and still build a data center. You just have to be willing to look for solutions instead of demanding surrender before the conversation starts.
And while we are on the subject of aesthetics, here is a fair question. Is a data center on a designated industrial site more of an eyesore than the wind turbine farms stretching across miles of Ohio farmland? We have raised the idea of brownfield redevelopment in communities like Portsmouth, where vacant industrial land sits idle while tax bases quietly shrink. The opposition is not interested in those conversations. They are interested in “no.”
That kind of unconditional resistance has a cost. City managers and economic developers whose entire job is to bring opportunity to their communities are being boxed in by misinformation and outside pressure. This Mega Site has been designated for large-scale industrial development for nearly 20 years. When that investment finally arrives, the response should not be a petition from someone who needed Google Maps to find the state of Ohio.
Van Wert schools need funding. The police and fire departments need funding. Construction workers need jobs. A $10 billion project with 250 permanent positions and more than 1,000 construction jobs does not find its way to a small Ohio city very often. Portsmouth knows that. Grove City knows that. Wilmington knows that.
Monday's vote is not just about a data center. It is about whether Ohio's smaller cities have the courage to develop, or whether they will keep handing that decision to people who don't live there, don't pay taxes there, and won't be around when the opportunity is gone.
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