Granville village residents will head to the polls on November 3 to decide whether to amend their village charter and prohibit the construction of data centers with peak loads greater than 25 megawatts — even though no such project has been proposed anywhere in the village. A yes vote supports changing the charter to ban large data center construction, while a no vote opposes the change.
The proposal traces back to resident Tracee Laing, who initiated the charter amendment and collected 168 signatures from fellow residents to get it on the ballot, according to NBC4 WCMH-TV. Laing has said Granville residents are worried about the utility use, emissions, and possible chemical and noise pollution tied to data centers, even as the village itself has none on the drawing board. She has also pointed to Licking County, where she said there are 49 data centers.
That number tracks with reporting from The Reporting Project, which found Licking County hosts at least 49 of central Ohio's 125 active or proposed data centers and 240 statewide, with the heaviest concentration clustered around New Albany and the so-called Silicon Heartland growth corridor. The outlet reported that Laing herself has acknowledged the Granville measure is largely symbolic, since no data center is currently proposed within village limits — the vote is meant to signal concern to state lawmakers rather than block an active project.
A Statewide Wave Rooted in Licking County
Concerns over development in Licking County trace back to 2022, when Intel announced a $28 billion manufacturing facility that drew tech companies to scout the area for additional projects, according to NBC4. New Albany is now home to several dozen data centers as part of that Silicon Heartland corridor. Data centers have operated in Ohio for more than a decade; the state has nearly 200 active or proposed data centers, per the same NBC4 report.
Public frustration has followed the buildout. A Bowling Green State University poll of 1,000 likely voters in September found 75% opposed building a data center in their own community, NBC4 reported, with Ohioans citing rising utility costs and worries about developments landing close to neighborhoods or schools. Ohio now has 21 of the 39 data center ballot issues nationwide according to Ballotpedia, as cited by the station, with three of those measures concentrated in Licking County alone — Granville, Sunbury, and Pataskala are all considering matching bans.
The ballot language used in Granville came from Conserve Ohio, the grassroots group behind the push to ban large data centers statewide. Conserve Ohio had been gathering signatures for a proposed statewide constitutional amendment for the November 2027 ballot, collecting about 130,000 of the 413,487 signatures required, a figure calculated from 2022 turnout and subject to change after the 2026 election, according to the Toledo Blade.
Nine Ohio Towns, One Shared Petition
Granville is one of nine Ohio communities with local-ban measures on their November 3 ballots, alongside Conneaut, Defiance, Pataskala, Piqua, Sunbury, Trenton, Urbana, and Upper Sandusky, according to the Toledo Blade. The measures are not all matching 25-megawatt bans: The Brockovich Report distinguishes outright bans from 25-megawatt threshold bans, placing Oregon among the latter and describing Piqua and Upper Sandusky as outright bans. Ohio had 21 measures across 18 jurisdictions, while voters in seven states were set to decide 35 local measures, according to The Brockovich Report.
The scale driving that anxiety is substantial. AEP Ohio told state regulators in February that it has 17,861 megawatts of contracted data center projects scheduled to come online through 2035, compared with a historical peak demand of 8,000 to 10,500 megawatts across its entire customer base, per AEP Ohio. That demand curve has only steepened: in October, PJM Interconnection filed a study agreement with federal regulators to evaluate SoftBank Group's proposed 10-gigawatt AI data center complex in Ohio, a project that includes 9.2 gigawatts of gas-fired generation estimated to cost $33 billion and three new 765-kV transmission lines to be built by AEP Ohio, according to Utility Dive.
Regulators and Lawmakers Try to Get Ahead of the Costs
State regulators have already moved to shield ordinary ratepayers from footing the bill for this buildout. In July 2025, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio approved a specialized Data Center Tariff for AEP Ohio requiring new large data center developments to execute binding contracts paying for at least 85% of their requested power capacity regardless of actual usage, according to the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. A proposed measure would extend those tariff protections statewide by requiring large-scale data center projects to sign long-term minimum billing contracts and barring utilities from recovering data center infrastructure costs from general ratepayers, per the Statehouse News Bureau.
Granville's data center question won't be the only item voters weigh that day. Village and township residents will also decide a 1-mill, five-year greenspace property tax renewal levy, estimated by the county auditor to raise $362,731 annually, or $21 per $100,000 in market value, to preserve open space by having the township buy land or pay landowners in exchange for preservation, according to the Licking County Board of Elections. The levy has been renewed every five years since it first passed in 1998, funding township purchases or payments to landowners to keep land out of development — a decades-long local conservation effort now running alongside a newer fight over how, and where, Ohio's data center boom gets built.
The data center question joins a growing list of similar measures across Licking County this fall. Hoodline previously reported that Heath residents rallied signatures for their own ban on centers drawing over 23 megawatts, and that voters in Grove City and other central Ohio communities face comparable charter questions this November.
