Why Pataskala Residents Are Opposing a New Data Center
Residents in Pataskala voice concerns over a proposed data center, sparking a debate about community values and economic benefits.
A standing-room-only planning and zoning meeting. Residents who drove out on a weeknight, waited in line, and lined up at the microphone one after another. That's not a routine community meeting — that's a signal.
In Pataskala, Ohio, a proposed data center has sparked a debate playing out in dozens of communities across the country, but rarely this visibly. The residents showing up aren't confused about what a data center is. They're not technophobes. They're people who moved to a small Licking County city for a reason — and they're not convinced a large-scale digital infrastructure facility fits into that reason.
What's Being Proposed
The specifics of the project follow a familiar template: a large parcel of land, a data center facility, and a developer presenting the project to local planning and zoning boards as a straightforward approval process. Ohio has become a magnet for data center investment over the past decade, driven by relatively cheap land, access to power infrastructure, and state-level tax incentives that make it one of the most attractive markets in the Midwest.
Data centers don't drop into communities like retail stores or warehouses — they fundamentally reshape the infrastructure around them, from the power grid to local water systems.
Pataskala sits in the path of that expansion. The city is close enough to Columbus to benefit from regional growth, but still suburban enough that residents have strong feelings about what development looks like. For many who attended the zoning meeting, the proposal crossed a line.
What Residents Actually Said
One of the most telling moments came from a resident named Franklin, who made clear that his opposition wasn't about this particular project's details — it was categorical. "There's no version of a data center," Franklin said, that he would support. That kind of blanket opposition is worth paying attention to because it tells developers and local officials something important: this isn't a negotiation over setbacks or landscaping. For at least a portion of Pataskala's population, the answer is simply no.
That sentiment echoed through the room. Standing-room-only crowds at zoning meetings are relatively rare. When they happen, they usually mean one of two things: residents feel like they weren't consulted early enough, or they feel like the decision has already been made and they're being managed rather than heard. Sometimes both.
The packed meeting room wasn't just a protest — it was a referendum on how much say residents expect to have over the physical character of their community.
Community resistance to data centers tends to cluster around a few predictable concerns: noise from cooling systems running 24/7, the visual footprint of industrial-scale buildings in residential or semi-rural areas, water consumption, and traffic from construction and ongoing operations. Electricity demand is increasingly part of the conversation too, as residents in other Ohio communities have learned that a large data center campus can strain local grid capacity and complicate utility planning.
The Economic Argument — And Why It Doesn't Always Land
Developers almost always lead with jobs. It's the first line of the pitch deck, the first slide in the planning presentation, and the first thing local economic development officials repeat when the project hits the press.
The problem is that data centers are among the most capital-intensive, least labor-intensive major infrastructure investments you can make. A facility that costs $500 million to build might employ 30 to 50 full-time workers once operational. Those are real jobs, often well-paying, but they're not the kind of employment base that transforms a local economy. The construction phase creates more jobs, but those are temporary by nature.
Ohio's data center tax exemptions — which can cover both sales tax on equipment and property tax abatements — mean that the direct fiscal benefit to a host community is often smaller than residents expect. The state benefits more broadly from the investment and the economic activity it signals. The township or city hosting the facility bears the infrastructure burden.
That math doesn't mean data centers are bad deals for communities. But it does mean that when a developer walks into a Pataskala zoning meeting and leads with economic benefits, they need to be specific. Vague references to "job creation" and "economic development" don't move a crowd that's already skeptical — they harden the opposition.
Local Governance Under Pressure
Planning and zoning boards in smaller Ohio cities were not designed to evaluate hyperscale infrastructure proposals. They're typically composed of volunteers with backgrounds in local business, real estate, or civic service — not people who spend their careers analyzing power procurement agreements or data center cooling systems.
That creates an asymmetry. The developer comes in with consultants, attorneys, and engineers. The residents come in with Google searches and genuine concern. The board sits in the middle, trying to apply zoning code to a use case that the code probably didn't anticipate.
This is where data center opposition often turns into something more consequential: a demand for better frameworks, not just a "no" on a single project.
Pataskala's planning meetings represent the kind of moment where local governance either rises to the occasion or gets steamrolled. Communities that have handled similar situations well tend to have done a few things right: they engaged residents before the application was filed, they hired independent technical consultants to advise the board, and they negotiated specific community benefit agreements rather than accepting developer promises at face value. Communities that didn't do those things often found themselves approving projects they later regretted — or rejecting them in ways that invited legal challenges.
What This Means for Ohio's Data Center Trajectory
Ohio isn't going to stop attracting data center investment. The fundamentals are too strong — power availability, land costs, fiber connectivity, and proximity to major Midwest population centers all make the state a logical landing spot for hyperscale operators and colocation providers. Columbus, in particular, has emerged as one of the top-tier data center markets in the country, and that gravitational pull extends to surrounding communities.
But the Pataskala meeting is a data point in a larger pattern. Resistance is growing. Residents in communities adjacent to major metros are becoming more sophisticated about what these facilities actually involve, and less willing to accept the standard economic development pitch without scrutiny. Some Ohio municipalities have begun exploring zoning overlays specifically for data center development — designating areas where the use is appropriate and, implicitly, areas where it isn't.
That's a more mature approach than either rubber-stamping every proposal or reflexively opposing them. It requires local governments to do the harder work of comprehensive planning before a specific application forces the question.
For infrastructure developers, the lesson from Pataskala is direct: community engagement isn't a box to check after the plans are drawn. It's a prerequisite. Projects that move through planning and zoning smoothly in 2025 will be the ones where developers spent 12 to 18 months building relationships, answering hard questions, and demonstrating — with specifics, not talking points — how the project serves the community that has to live next to it.
The residents who filled that meeting room in Pataskala may or may not stop this particular project. But they've already changed the conversation about what data center development looks like in communities that still have a choice about their future.
Call to Action
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