Governance & the local record

Findlay’s data-center question has three governments in it, and the useful finding is a negative: as of this reading, none of them has an adopted rule that reaches the 150 MW already contracted.

The county’s instrument bars large wind and solar and is silent on load. The City of Findlay’s moratorium reaches data centers and stops at the corporation line. Allen Township — where the hub and the take-or-pay actually sit — had no zoning at all until 2026-05-11, and the resolution that took effect that day does not contain the phrase “data center” once in seventy-seven pages.

Zoned by wind, amended for compute

The fight that made Allen Township zoned had nothing to do with data centers. In late 2023 One Energy was planning additional turbines to serve a Whirlpool plant; residents asked about zoning; the trustees were sued twice over how they went about seating a zoning commission. 2026-Ohio-405^rec affirms both open-meetings violations and the prospective injunction — and affirms the refusal to unwind the zoning commission, because the December 2023 resolutions had been rescinded, which “breaks any causal link.” The opinion’s own line: “This Court declines to enjoin the use of common sense.” [verified]

The resolution the trustees adopted on 2024-09-09 then sat for twenty months. A first referendum passed in May 2025 and was undone over abbreviated ballot language. The second, on 2026-05-05, carried 503 for / 221 against (69.48%), 724 of 732 ballots cast, certified 2026-05-11 — the same date the zoning book gives as its own effective date. [verified]

Go to the certified canvass. The widely reported unofficial figure was 502–221. One vote changes nothing about the outcome and everything about whether the record can be trusted on detail. And read the canvass carefully: this Board of Elections prints each contest title below its own results, so a naive top-to-bottom read misattributes every block.

What the electorate approved, and what absence means

An enumerated-use scheme — “no building or land shall be used and no building shall be erected except for one or more of the following specified uses” — across nine districts, with no mention of data centers anywhere. Four weeks before the vote the commission chairman asked township counsel whether the pending resolution would permit a data center. The minutes record the answer in one sentence: “Cindy stated that a data center would not be permitted.” [verified] Three weeks after it took effect, the same counsel recommended drafting data-center language.

In an enumerated-use code, absence is the rule: what a zoning book does not list, it does not permit. Counting to zero across seventy-seven pages is a finding.

A 10 MW cap over a 150 MW site

On 2026-07-28 the zoning commission adopted Resolution 24-04-124M, 5–0, proposing a new Section 1521, DATA CENTERS: conditional use in I-1 and I-2 only; maximum 10 MW total facility load at any single site; an anti-aggregation rule counting phases as one site where they share “electrical infrastructure, substations, or utility interconnections”; no groundwater wells and a 100,000 GPD ceiling; and “all data centers shall be air cooled (dry cooling),” with evaporative, once-through and closed-loop liquid systems expressly prohibited. [verified]

The disclosed facility is 150 MW contracted with 30 MW energized. The proposal is an order of magnitude below the contract, three times below what is already running, and its aggregation rule is written against precisely the architecture of a shared megawatt hub.

The county’s SB 52 restricted area prohibits “economically significant wind farms, large wind farms, and large solar facilities” — it does not reach data centers, or load of any kind. The instrument that looks like a siting control restricts supply and leaves demand untouched. And the city’s Ordinance 2026-42, the twelve-month moratorium, cannot be read: findlayohio.gov returns HTTP 403 to automated requests, American Legal’s library does the same, and findlay.legistar.com resolves to an unprovisioned tenant. It is held only as two newspapers describe it, and one hedges its own roll call mid-sentence — which is why that roll call is not published here. An access failure is not a denial; the response is an R.C. 149.43 request, drafted and sitting in the corpus.