Setting the Record Straight
September 2, 2026 — Protect Grove City
In the spring, Headwaters pulled its annexation request. It took Grove City off of its website. The moratorium passed and the story around town was that the data center company had moved on. We had won!
It did not move on.
Protect Grove City has learned and confirmed that Headwaters extended its letters of intent to purchase the properties for an additional 18 months. The purchases are contingent on the land being annexed into the City.
So here is what actually happened. They stopped asking publicly and kept the deal alive privately. They withdrew their requests for annexation, took our name off their website, and then they sat quietly… They are waiting out the moratorium. And when it lifts, they come back to the same table, for the same land, with a City that has spent the summer being told there was nothing to worry about.
The deal is not dead. It is waiting. And what it is waiting on is a decision by Grove City Council.
Annexation is a Council action. Applying a zoning classification to annexed land is a Council action. Nothing gets built on that land until Council votes. The only question the Community Consent Amendment asks is whether the residents of Grove City get a say when that vote happens.
This Thursday night, Council decides whether you ever get asked.
Council has scheduled a special meeting for Thursday, September 3. Of course that’s because they chose to table the second reading and vote at the last meeting because the administration wanted to see if the Trenton verdict would give them a way out. More info on this below, but spoiler alert…it did not! The Ohio deadline to certify a question to the November 3 ballot is Friday, September 4. There is no second chance and no next meeting.
The version attached to the posted agenda is the original seventeen page amendment we filed, the one more than 1,500 of your neighbors signed, the Franklin County Board of Elections certified, and that has been posted in full on our website since early June.
For the past several weeks we have been negotiating in good faith with the City on a shorter, narrower version. That work produced a five page document. We are publishing it below, in full, because the city did not attach it to the agenda and no resident has had the chance to read it.
Council has three options Thursday.
One. Place the original certified amendment on the ballot. It is already on the agenda. It is already certified. Council can simply vote to send it to the voters.
Two. Place the negotiated version on the ballot. This requires three separate votes: a motion to amend the agenda to add it, a vote to place it on the ballot, and a vote on an emergency clause so it takes effect in time to certify by Friday. All three have to pass with a supermajority (5 of 7 votes). Any one of them failing kills it.
Three. Do neither. Vote both down and let the deadline pass. The law requires them to pass it and Mr Smith has repeatedly advised council of this fact… anything else would really just be a delay tactic. They know they would lose this case (Mr Smith has said this multiple times), but of course…they only need one day of delay to push us off the November ballot. Unfortunately, as Trenton has shown, that just ends up in a special election that the CITY then has to pay for (see below).
Options one and two respect the signatures. Option three does not. We’ll see what the city decides and respond accordingly.
The original amendment ran seventeen pages. The negotiated version runs five (FYI: this silly file viewer fusses with font size and margin so it looks like 7 pages, but it’s 5 on my desktop).
It covers a development that meets any one of three thresholds:
If a project is that big, the zoning ordinance authorizing it goes to the voters. That is it. That is the amendment.
We also removed all responsibility for any business already operating in Grove City. No vote, no limits, no reporting, and that holds even if they expand on the land they are on today. They are already part of the fabric of our city and we agreed to leave it that way in the compromise. If they buy new ground and build something new on it, the amendment applies to that, the same as it would to anyone else. You can see this exemption in section 10.
We made that change because the objection was a fair one. That is what negotiating in good faith looks like.
We have heard that some people are unsure whether the original amendment would actually come off the ballot if a compromise is placed on it. So let us state it plainly and on the record…again.
The withdrawal of the original petition has been signed. It has not been filed, and it will not be filed until a compromise version is on the ballot and certified to the Franklin County Board of Elections.
We are not going to withdraw our amendment and then find out the replacement never made it. And we are not going to put two competing questions in front of Grove City voters. One question goes on the ballot. Which one is up to Council.
On September 1, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of residents of Trenton, Ohio.
Trenton residents had petitioned to amend their city charter to restrict large data centers. The Trenton City Council refused to certify the petition. The Court found that the council improperly refused to certify the charter amendment and disregarded applicable law, and ordered the city to certify the petition and send it to the Butler County Board of Elections.
In an unsigned, unanimous opinion, the justices said there was clear and convincing evidence that the council disregarded applicable law.
Here is the part Grove City should pay attention to. The court said that because it was too late for the question to appear on the November ballot, the Court ordered that a special election be held so voters can decide, within 60 to 120 days of the council certifying the petition. That would be no later than the beginning of January…buying just 2 months of delay, because they can’t stop it…they can only slow it down.
By the way, it would be a special election that the taxpayers of Trenton (and in our case, Grove City) will pay for.
The attorney for the Trenton petitioners put it directly: to save the taxpayers the expense of a special election, Trenton City Council should immediately pass an ordinance placing the charter amendment on this November’s ballot.
That is a lawyer in another city, telling the Trenton council the same advice that will apply to us on Thursday. Pass it now and save the extra cost to the city…or delay and use tax payer funds to pay for it. We’ll see how conservative this council is I guess.
Trenton is not the only one. The Ohio Supreme Court has also allowed a referendum against a data center project down the road in Ashville to move forward. Grove City would be the third case heard by the supreme court…and the data center/city council teams are 0-2.
One more thing worth knowing, and we would rather you hear it from us. The Court denied the Trenton residents’ request for court costs and attorney fees. They won unanimously at the Ohio Supreme Court and they still pay their own legal bills.
Understand what that means. Sending residents to court is not a neutral procedural outcome. It is a strategy, and it works by being expensive. The people who signed pay their own lawyers, the taxpayers pay for a special election, and the calendar does the rest. Delay, deflect, try to run the petitioners out of money and avert the will of the people…that’s the potential game plan.
Trenton’s council chose that road and lost unanimously. Grove City does not have to find out whether ours would lose too. Council can settle it Thursday for the price of a vote.
By the way…the Protect Grove City effort is completely made up of folks like you and I. We just work our asses off for things we believe are right…like not letting our utility bills climb if we can help it, not funding massive corporate give aways of our tax revenue to companies with billions in the bank, keeping our air and water clean, and making sure our children have a healthy place to live. If you believe in those things too and you’d like to pitch in, here is the link to completely citizen funded effort…https://www.gofundme.com/f/protect-grove-city-from-data-center-overdevelopment
We have been told by business leaders that the Stage administration is encouraging Council members to vote no on the original amendment, on the theory that a court fight afterward would push the question past November and buy time to defeat it.
We want to be precise about something, because it matters. The Mayor and his administration do not place anything on the ballot. They cannot. The City’s own website says it plainly: the Mayor attends all Council meetings with the right to participate in debate, but not to vote. All he can do is influence, but he’s skilled at exactly that. We can not underestimate him.
In the end, only Council can put a question on the ballot. Grove City has seven elected Council members, one from each of the five wards and two at-large, and only their names will be next to Thursday’s vote.
So this is not a question about the administration. It is a question about seven people who will sit at that table Thursday night and decide whether 1,500+ certified signatures reach a ballot. We think they’ll do the right thing. We are hopeful they’ll prove us right.
We will also say this. The Wednesday negotiation meeting was canceled. The Thursday agenda was posted without the version those negotiations produced. Given how things work around here, we are not surprised that so much of this is happening behind closed doors.
Thursday we hope the city will discuss it in public. We know how the school board was infamous for taking these types of hard conversations out of the spotlight. This back-room dealing is part of the reason there is so much distrust of the city government already. And we would have told you that for free and saved the city $8k for the PR firm in June.
We believe every resident is entitled to watch that conversation take place. Make sure your council person knows your thoughts on this as well…
Read the five page version. Its posted up above, It takes ten minutes. Do not take our word for what is in it and do not take anyone else’s.
Then call or email Council before Thursday. Ask them to do three things:
If they will not do that, ask them to place the original certified amendment on the ballot instead. Either one honors the signatures. Neither one commits anyone to voting for it in November.
You can reach the Clerk of Council at 614-277-3065 or tkelly@grovecityohio.gov with questions about the agenda or the process.
Then show up Thursday, September 3.
Nobody is being asked to decide whether a data center is good or bad for Grove City. That decision comes later, and we believe it belongs to all of us.
Thursday is about something smaller and more basic. PGC predicted the games being played by Headwaters and their data center project. We cobbled together an amendment and then fifteen hundred plus residents followed the rules, gathered signatures, and earned a place on the ballot. Now Headwaters is sitting on extended letters of intent, waiting for the moratorium to end and an annexation vote.
The only question Thursday is whether you get to weigh in when that happens.
We negotiated in good faith. We shortened the amendment. We fixed the objection existing employers and business leaders raised. We signed the withdrawal. Now we wait…
Council decides the rest…
Protect Grove City
#PeopleOverPolitics
