The permanent check.
Not just a moratorium.

The Answer The thresholds are set high on purpose: 50 acres, 20 megawatts of power, or 500,000 gallons of water a day. Restaurants, offices, ordinary retail, small manufacturers... none of them come close. American Nitrile sits at about 30 acres. The Meijer development is about 28. Both are well under the line, and neither would be touched. And nothing here blocks a project that does cross a threshold. It asks the company to make its case to the people who live here and win their vote. Grove City stays wide open for business. A project the size of a small town should need community consent.

The Answer The task force and the amendment do completely different jobs, and Grove City needs both. The task force works within the existing system, recommending standards that City Council can adopt by ordinance. That’s valuable work. But ordinances can be amended or repealed by a future Council with different priorities. The amendment is a permanent floor that no Council can touch. It takes another vote of the people to change it. The task force decides how high to set the bar. The amendment makes sure there’s a bar at all.

The Answer NIMBYism is “I don’t want that near me, period.” This is something completely different: “We’re willing to consider it, but the people who live here get to decide.” The amendment doesn’t ban anything. If a developer makes a compelling case and Grove City residents agree, the project moves forward. That’s not NIMBYism. That’s how democracy is supposed to work.

The Answer It’s long. We’re not going to pretend otherwise. But the length is the how, not the what.

Most of those pages are the machinery: how a project gets measured, what the developer has to put on the record, what happens if they build more than what was approved, who can go to court if the city doesn’t enforce it. That part is long because a rule with nothing behind it is a press release. We’d rather hand you something that works than something that reads easily.

What you’re deciding on November 3, 2026 is one question: should a project big enough to permanently change Grove City … 50 or more acres, more than 20 megawatts of power, or more than 500,000 gallons of water a day … have to get residents’ approval before it’s built? Everything else in those pages exists to make sure that answer sticks.

Two things Issue 28 does not do. It doesn’t approve or reject any particular project, because none is on this ballot. And if a project is ever approved at one of those future votes, that approval isn’t a blank check: what residents approved is what gets locked in, and a company that wants to go beyond it has to come back and ask again.

The Answer No argument from us that the measure is written broadly. We did not name data centers and we did not name industries. Naming an industry is the weakest way to write this: it invites the argument that the city is targeting one company, and it goes stale the moment the next technology shows up. So the measure is scale.

We do read the amendment as leaving room for judgment in how a project gets measured. Acreage has to be aggregated across phases and related parcels, and power and water are projections at the application stage rather than meter readings. The amendment requires the Law Director to put that determination in writing and lets the applicant or the public appeal it to Council within 30 days. You don’t build an appeal process for arithmetic.

But assume we’re wrong about that. Assume there is no discretion at all and anything crossing a line is captured. The answer doesn’t change. Fifty contiguous acres under one project is roughly 38 football fields. American Nitrile sits at about 30 acres. The Meijer development is about 28. Ordinary development here is nowhere near the line. And nothing already operating in Grove City faces a retroactive vote on what it is doing today. Facilities already at threshold scale do register a baseline with the Clerk and stay under the amendment’s reporting and impact standards, which the FAQ walks through in full. What’s left is the rare new project big enough to permanently reshape the city. For those, residents get a vote. That was always the point.