Residents packed Monday night’s Rossford City Council meeting to oppose proposed zoning changes that could open the door to a data center on Lime City Road. The council is considering Ordinances 2026-68 and 2026-69, which would reclassify parcels on Lime City Road from planned industrial to M2 heavy manufacturing — a change speakers warned could permit large facilities, including a proposed data center.

Speaker after speaker urged the city to slow down, calling for traffic and drainage studies before any vote, and pointed to a citizen petition to ban large data centers. The petition drive is part of the statewide Conserve Ohio effort pushing for a constitutional amendment capping new data centers at 25 megawatts. Ten Ohio communities passed local 25-megawatt caps on Nov. 3, and the statewide campaign reports more than 150,000 signatures toward a November 2027 ballot.

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Data center server room, photo by BalticServers.com via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).