Setting the Record Straight
September 9, 2026 — Protect Grove City
We heard the complaints about the Community Consent Amendment. Over four weeks in August we sat down with Councilman Omar, Councilwoman Burroughs and Director of Law Stephen Smith and produced seven revisions, cutting seventeen pages to five. Out came the impact study, the public meetings, the noise and light standards, the monitoring, the reporting, the performance bond, the decommissioning fund, the township protections, and penalties that dropped from a schedule escalating to $500,000 a day to a flat $1,000. We signed a withdrawal of our own petition and put it in escrow, ready to take our measure down the moment Council put the compromise version on the ballot.
On September 3, Council added that ordinance to the agenda four votes to three. It was not on the published agenda, so no resident could sign up in advance to speak to it, and no one on the dais asked us to explain it. Council members then raised questions about the new version, and concern that the public had only had hours with it. Councilman Omar had emailed the draft to every member of Council on August 27, and the final version on Monday, August 31, three days before the vote. The people who had not had time to read it were not the people voting on it, and at no point that evening was there a way for anyone to answer a single question about a document we had spent four weeks writing.
Passing it in time to get it on the November ballot required suspending the thirty-day waiting period, which takes five votes. It only got four. Council members Berry, Sturm, Holt voted no, and each gave a reason. The ordinance was withdrawn because there was nowhere left for it to go. Council then voted seven to nothing to put the original amendment on the November ballot, as the Director of Law advised they were required to do, and seven to nothing on a resolution from the Mayor’s office opposing it.
So the version Grove City votes on in November is the one certified in July, unchanged. Everything below is about that original version.
Underneath all of it is one question, and it is not just about data centers. Who decides?
Right now the answer is seven people. They decide what gets built here, how big it is, how much water it draws, how many megawatts it pulls, and what the city gets in return. Residents get to comment. The City’s own mailer says so. Under the heading Current Ways to Engage, it tells you that residents can voice questions and comments prior to a vote at Planning Commission and City Council meetings.
Prior to a vote. THEIR VOTE.
That is the whole argument against this amendment. “Trust us. Leave these decisions with the people who already make them.”
If a development is large enough to reshape this city, the people who live here get to vote on it.
The amendment sets three lines: fifty acres, twenty megawatts of electrical demand, or five hundred thousand gallons of water a day. Cross any one of them and the project goes on the ballot.
The mailer that arrived in Grove City mailboxes this weekend says the amendment would apply to any project meeting a threshold, not only to data centers, and that it reaches schools, churches, parks, hospitals, and residential and commercial development. No argument from us on this point. We did not specify data centers.
The amendment assigns coverage decisions to the Law Director, with an appeal to Council, and some of us read that as leaving room for judgment. The case for this amendment does not depend on that reading though, so for the moment assume there is no discretion at all.
On that assumption, a three-hundred-acre data center campus crosses the acreage line six times over, and so would a three-hundred-acre anything else. A defense manufacturer wanting to put a drone plant here would go to a vote. So would a regional distribution complex, a large shopping development, or a fifty-acre residential subdivision. That includes projects some of you will want, and it probably includes the next big subdivision. It also means the ordinary business of a growing suburb goes on exactly as it does now. A restaurant, a dentist’s office, a tire shop, a hardware store, a daycare, a medical building, a new strip of retail. None of those come anywhere near fifty acres, twenty megawatts, or half a million gallons of water a day, and nothing in this amendment touches them. Neither does a small data center that crosses none of the three lines, which is the other half of what the mailer says and is equally true.
The measure is scale, not industry, and there are three reasons for that.
First. Defining which industries count means arguing about labels, and a label is the one thing a developer can change. Call it a technology campus, a data warehouse, a logistics center, a research facility. Acreage, megawatts and gallons cannot be renamed.
Second. A rule written against one industry is the easiest kind to challenge, and communities that have tried it are finding that out. Simpson County, Kentucky passed an ordinance last December requiring data centers to obtain a conditional use permit and to locate in heavy industrial zoning. The developer sued in January, and the county was still in court over it in August. Andover Township, New Jersey banned data centers in May after weeks of resident opposition, and the developer sued in July to overturn the ban. Gibraltar, Michigan adopted a one-year moratorium, and the developer went to federal court asking a judge to declare it invalid and order the city to approve the project.
Each of those communities is now paying lawyers out of its own budget against a company with more money than the community has. And a rule that names one industry hands that industry its argument. It can stand up in court and say it is being singled out, with the text of the ordinance as the evidence.
None of these situations happened because the residents were wrong. They happened because the rule was written about a business instead of about something measurable.
Third. Data centers are the threat in front of us today. Nobody knows what it will be in ten years. What we know is that we want a seat at the table when it shows up.
A project big enough to change the water system, the power draw, the traffic and the skyline is a project we want a voice in, whatever is inside the building.
Grove City is not being asked to ban anything. It is being asked whether the people who live with the traffic, the water draw, the lights and the noise should get a vote before it goes in the ground. A project that is good for this city wins that vote. Residents here are not going to turn down a hospital or a school or a good employer. They are going to turn down a bad deal.
Here is what our opponents are claiming. A project that cannot win a vote in Grove City should be built in Grove City anyway, and the people currently in power should keep making that call for the rest of us. They had a full evening at the microphone on September 3, and not one of them said a large project would win that vote. They said having to ask would be inconvenient. “Trust us.”
The weekend after Council voted, a mailer arrived in Grove City households.
The front carries the City’s logo, the words Important Voter Information, and a QR code pointing to grovecityohio.gov. It went Presorted Standard on Grove City permit 83. In small type at the bottom it says the information was produced by the City of Grove City and is intended to help residents understand the ballot measure.
Turn it over. The second side says the amendment negatively impacts business growth. That when companies leave, so do jobs and tax dollars. That it would likely cause declining city revenue and, as a result, less money for emergency services, roadways and parks. It prints the Grove City Area Chamber of Commerce’s official statement opposing the amendment. It prints a chief executive’s quote opposing the amendment. There is no statement anywhere on the card from anyone who supports it.
That is a campaign mailer. It is headlined The Facts Matter, For All of Us, and it was produced and mailed at public expense.
We have asked our attorney whether that is legal. We do not have an answer yet. What we can tell you is the sequence. Residents circulated a petition. More than fifteen hundred verified Grove City voters signed it. Council was legally required to put it on the ballot. Then the City used its own logo, its own website and its own bulk mail permit to argue against it, to the same residents who signed.
Read the mailer closely, because it argues against itself. It states that the thresholds are fifty acres, twenty megawatts of electricity, in parentheses, none in Grove City, and five hundred thousand gallons of water a day, in parentheses, none in Grove City. Directly beside that it runs a quote from the CEO of American Nitrile saying the amendment sweeps up community anchors like his and puts his operations in the crosshairs. American Nitrile sits on roughly thirty acres. By the mailer’s own numbers, it crosses no threshold at all.
That is the quality of the argument being made with public money.
There is also the timing. The mailer tells residents the measure is expected to appear on the November ballot, pending certification by the Franklin County Board of Elections. That sentence was written before Council voted. A piece this size does not move from design to print to the postal stream overnight, which means the City was producing a campaign against the original amendment while the compromise version was still on the table.
The compromise version would have exempted existing Grove City businesses from the amendment entirely. It did not advance. Days later the City mailed residents a card warning that existing Grove City businesses are at risk, and chose a thirty-acre manufacturer as its example.
That card was designed, printed and mailed at public expense to say what every opponent of this amendment has been saying since May. “Trust us.”
The City knows the difference, because it did the other thing within days. Discover Grove City is the City’s official magazine and it goes to the same households. The current issue runs a column by the City Administrator on the history of the charter, alongside a short box describing this amendment and its three thresholds. We do not read every line of that box the same way the City does, but the tone is right. It describes and stops. No claims about jobs leaving, no Chamber statement, no quote from a chief executive. It reads like an attempt to educate rather than to influence.
That is what informing residents looks like. The card in your mailbox was a choice.
Before that, at the September 3 meeting, seven people signed up to speak against the amendment. Five gave addresses in Columbus. They spoke for a statewide construction trades foundation, the regional economic development organization, the Columbus Chamber of Commerce, a fourteen-county contractors’ association, and the Central Ohio homebuilders. They came to Grove City to explain to Grove City residents why Grove City residents should not get a vote on what gets built here.
Two different groups are lined up against this and they should not be treated the same way.
The building trades are not our opponents. Electricians, pipefitters, cement masons, roofers and laborers built this city and many of them live in it. Their concern is whether there is work.
There is no shortage of work in Central Ohio right now. There is a shortage of workers. Google’s three Central Ohio data centers alone generated roughly six and a half million work hours for building trades members last year. The local electricians’ union has grown from around four hundred fifty members in 2020 to more than three thousand, one of the fastest growing locals in the country. Nobody in the Central Ohio trades is sitting home waiting on Grove City.
There is a cost to the rest of us in that. Those same electricians and pipefitters build data centers, schools, hospitals and water plants, and data center money moves them. The head of Central Ohio’s non-union contractors association, which is partnering with Meta on a training academy, says the regional shortage is near crisis level and that data centers are pulling away the workers needed to build hospitals and schools. When a school district or a city puts a project out to bid, it is bidding against that, and the prices come back higher.
There is also a difference in whose interests are at stake. The trades organizations that spoke represent members across the entire state. If a campus goes to Groveport or Licking County instead of here, Central Ohio locals build it either way and those work hours happen either way. Their interest is regional. If it is built in Grove City, the power draw, the traffic, the water and the noise stay in Grove City, right next door.
The Chamber, One Columbus and the Columbus Partnership are a different matter. Their argument is that Grove City needs to stay attractive to very large investors, and that requiring a public vote makes us less predictable. Whatever the merits, look at what they are asking of you. They are asking you to set your own family’s needs aside and worry, ON BEHALF OF BILLION-DOLLAR COMPANIES, that those companies might find this city inconvenient.
People here are watching grocery bills and gas prices and their kids’ rent climb. They are watching subdivisions go up full of houses they could not qualify for. We think being asked to worry that a corporation with more money than this city’s entire annual budget might take its project elsewhere if it has to ask permission first is an insult to every working family in this city.
The people who own the land, hold the capital and sit on the boards are telling the people who live here that a public vote is too much to ask. Nobody is asking them to give up a project. They are being asked to make their case to their neighbors, and they are treating that as an imposition. At the same time they keep the right to decide what counts as growth here, what counts as progress, and what Grove City ought to be grateful for. That is the haves telling the have-nots to sit down and be quiet. We’re not OK with that anymore.
Alison Chester, a Grove City resident, spoke on September 3 and pointed out that she was an actual resident rather than a business owner or someone from Columbus. On the argument that the moratorium means there is no urgency, she said:
You don’t install sprinklers when there’s a fire. You install them before they happen.
The moratorium is temporary and Council can end it whenever it chooses. The task force can be dissolved. Every protection Grove City currently has against a project like this exists at the pleasure of seven people and can be undone by four of them on any Monday night. “Trust us.”
A charter amendment cannot. Once it is in, only the voters can take it out.
We are told to trust the people in those seats. Consider what the Council President said on the record the day before the vote.
On September 2, Ted Berry told Axios that the amendment would destroy the city, that our willingness to negotiate a compromise version was “almost like a blackmailing technique,” and that his own polling showed the measure failing. He said the tide had turned and that we did not have the support to pass it. The next night he voted against putting the compromise version on the ballot. That weekend, a card arrived in your mailbox, paid for by the City, arguing against the one that was left.
Randy Holt has a record too. In July 2023, when Council voted five to nothing against the annexation that would have brought the first data center campus here, Holt told the room he had spent an entire career in data centers. He said the residents’ position made no sense to him, and warned them they would regret getting their way. He voted with the majority that night. On June 1 of this year, with residents filling the chamber and spilling into the lobby, Council passed the twelve-month pause on data centers six to one. Holt was the one. Then in September he also voted against putting the compromise version on the ballot.
We are not asking you to distrust anyone. We are asking you to notice that every protection Grove City has right now depends on who happens to be holding those seats.
Locking this into the charter cuts both ways, and it should. If the numbers turn out to be wrong, or a provision turns out to be clumsy, this can be fixed. A charter amendment can be changed by another charter amendment, by petition or by Council putting one directly on the ballot at a future election. What it cannot be is quietly undone by four votes at a Monday meeting. Every change goes back to the same people who approved it.
We want to get this right, and we will keep working at it. But waiting for a perfect version means having no voice at all in the meantime. If you watch Ted Lasso, you have heard the Mark Twain line about steady improvement being better than delayed perfection. That is exactly what the charter is built to allow.
That is the design. Not that this amendment is perfect. That the people who live here get the final word on it, in November and every time after.
In our negotiations with the City over the compromise version, we gave up the impact study, the standards, the monitoring, the reporting, the bond, the decommissioning fund and almost all of the penalties. Four things were not negotiable. It had to live in the charter, where Council cannot undo it. It had to keep the three thresholds. It had to end in a vote of the people. And it had to be on the ballot in November. Without those four there is no amendment, only a longer list of rules that Council can rewrite whenever it wants.
And if Council wants the compromise version, it exists. Seven drafts of it, worked through with the City’s own Director of Law. Council could have put it on this ballot and chose not to. They can still put it on a future ballot any time they want. There is even another election coming in May 2027.
The Community Consent Amendment is Issue 28 on the November 3, 2026 ballot. That was the goal when this started, and it is done. More than fifteen hundred verified Grove City voters signed to put it there.
Council has formally opposed it. The administration has formally opposed it. The Chamber of Commerce, the regional development organizations and the statewide construction associations have all announced they will campaign against it. They have lawyers, lobbyists, money and, apparently, a bulk mail permit.
What they do not have is a vote that counts more than yours.
Every argument they have made comes back to the same request. “Trust us. Leave it with the people who are already making these decisions, and we will tell you about it afterward.” A no vote in November is a vote to keep it that way.
Council spent September 3 explaining what it does not like about this amendment. On November 3 the decision belongs to you instead.
Read the amendment before you vote. The full text is on our website with plain-language explanations of every section. Read what the City sends you too, and check it against the actual text. We are asking you to do the same thing to our materials.
One practical note. To vote on Issue 28 you need to be registered in Grove City proper, wards one through five. A Grove City mailing address is not enough. You can check your registration and find your ward through the links on our site.
We are not asking you to “trust us.” We are not even asking you to agree with us. We are asking you to decide one thing: whether you want a say when these big projects come to town. If you do, vote YES on Issue 28.
Protect Grove City
#PeopleOverPolitics
