By Doug Kelly:
Coshocton County, Ohio, has spent the past decade plus watching its industrial foundation collapse, one anchor at a time.
In December 2015, after 150 years in the community, the WestRock paper mill closed ten days before Christmas, putting more than 200 people out of work. Five years later, in May 2020, American Electric Power shut down the last unit of the Conesville Power Plant after 62 years of operation. At its peak, the plant employed 600 workers. River View Local Schools depended on it for 10 percent of the district’s annual budget.
For the decade in between, the Coshocton County Port Authority did heroic work, but the county still struggled to attract major investment and expand its tax base.
Then in July 2025, Aligned Data Centers announced a multi-billion-dollar campus on the exact 197-acre footprint of the dead Conesville coal plant. A single announcement created more private investment than the county had seen in a generation. The first building broke ground in October. Three more are in the pipeline.
That’s how data centers can breathe new life into struggling communities.
But a proposed state constitutional amendment this November would shut down this type of community comeback story. The measure would permanently prohibit any data center drawing more than 25 megawatts, a threshold so low it essentially bans every modern facility.
How reckless is the amendment? One of the amendment’s lead organizers has admitted he is not sure whether the ban would apply to projects already under construction, meaning the phased expansion in Coshocton is exactly the kind of project his ambiguity threatens. And every future Coshocton across rural Ohio would be foreclosed from the same chance.
Reasonable people can disagree about data center policy. Water use, electricity costs, tax abatements, noise, and the pace of permitting are all legitimate concerns. The General Assembly, the Public Utilities Commission, and local zoning boards can address every one of them through normal legislation, and they do for every other industrial development. That is how Ohio government is supposed to work.
A constitutional ban is different. Once 25 megawatts is written into the state constitution, it cannot be adjusted by lawmakers, by the governor, or by the courts. It can only be removed by another statewide vote. It is the bluntest possible instrument applied to a question that has nothing to do with the constitution and everything to do with energy policy, zoning, and economic development.
That is what makes it so dangerous. Many distressed rural counties do not have a Plan B. Coshocton did not get to choose between a data center and an auto plant. There was no semiconductor fabrication plant competing for the Conesville site. When the work to revive a dead industrial site finally paid off, what showed up was a data center.
Coshocton is not alone. Pike County, scarred by the 2001 shutdown of the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, just landed a $10 billion SoftBank data center on the same federal land that could expand to a $33 billion investment. Erie County is welcoming a $200 million Aligned campus on a former General Motors (GM)/auto-supplier brownfield, with 300 tradespeople working seven days a week to build it. Trumbull County is converting the shuttered GM Lordstown plant into one of America’s largest artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure projects through the Stargate project.
Dozens of similarly distressed communities are watching, hoping for their turn. These are the places that lost their paper mills, their power plants, their auto suppliers, or other major employers over the last generation. Data centers are the largest capital investment many of them have seen in decades.
If the amendment gets on the November ballot, the real choice in front of Ohio voters will be whether the counties that have already lost the most are allowed to rebuild on the foundation available to them, or whether a permanent ban will tell them they cannot.
It matters which country builds the future of artificial intelligence. It matters just as much which Ohio counties get to be part of that future. Coshocton found its growth spark on the exact site of a coal plant that died after decades of service. Ohio should think hard about what it wants for its economic future, and what a permanent ban would foreclose.