Michael McGovern is the president of Innovation Ohio, a progressive advocacy and research nonprofit.
Driving across Ohio, you can quite literally see the landscape changing in real time as new, massive data centers spring up across the state.
These hulking structures are shifting Ohio’s political landscape: no topic is doing more to drive the narrative heading into November as the tax breaks for big tech companies and Ohioans’ electric bills both continue to grow.
Republicans are responsible for the policies that created this mess. Ohioans shouldn’t let the GOP convince them otherwise.
The polling is staggering.
And who can blame them? As a report from Innovation Ohio laid out earlier this year, your electric bill could jump by $70 a month because of unregulated big tech.
What makes this a uniquely potent issue is that the anger isn’t partisan or geographic – it’s everywhere.
Rural Ohioans are leading an anti-data center ballot initiative. Cleveland residents just organized to stop one in their city. This is a populist brushfire, and it’s spreading.
The data center water is hot
So, who lit the match?
Republicans in the state legislature handed data centers a free pass on regulation. Gov. Mike DeWine is considering letting them dump whatever they want into Ohio’s water supply, after inadvertently gifting them more than $2 billion in tax breaks based on a secret deal from another Republican governor.
Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio, was a cheerleader for massive tax giveaways to big tech companies. And then there’s billionaire Republican gubernatorial nominee and vulture capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy – so deeply invested in the very big tech companies building these facilities that he gets richer every time a new data center goes up in Ohio. Would he prioritize Ohio or himself when addressing data center policies?
Now both Husted and Ramaswamy are beginning to mouth support for some kind of regulation now that they’ve realized how much hot water they’re in. GOP legislators went so far as to try to rush through a half-baked bill with almost no debate so that they could give themselves cover.
Voters should see this for what it is: desperation.
These are the same politicians who built and supported the regulatory vacuum that big tech exploited, delivered billions in corporate giveaways, looked the other way while Ohioans’ electric bills climbed, and cashed in. A last-minute conversion on the campaign trail isn’t leadership, it’s damage control.
The solutions to the data center issue aren’t complicated: end the needless tax breaks, make data centers pay their full electric bills, restore real local control – all while protecting jobs.
As a recent statehouse summit by Policy Matters Ohio demonstrated, we don’t have to choose between the good union jobs these projects can create and reasonable rules to protect communities: we can do both. The question is whether we hold accountable the politicians who spent years refusing to prioritize Ohio communities – or let them take a victory lap for finally catching up.
Ohioans deserve leaders who won’t sell out their communities to the highest bidder – and no amount of campaign-trail repositioning changes who was holding the door open for big tech and out-of-state billionaires when it counted.
Michael McGovern is the president of Innovation Ohio, a progressive advocacy and research nonprofit.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Republicans lit fire big tech used to play Ohioans. Now they’re desperate | Opinion
Reporting by Michael McGovern, Guest Columnist / The Columbus Dispatch
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Michael McGovern, Guest Columnist | USA TODAY Network
