Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. tsuddes@gmail.com.
One thing lost in the data center fight – in which voters in some counties want to limit, even ban, the kilowatt-glutton tentacles of Big Data – is Ohio’s historic tradition of community home rule.
True, constitutionally guaranteed home rule applies officially to Ohio’s 247 cities and 684 villages, but to a far lesser degree, to Ohio’s 1,308 townships and 88 counties.
Still, Ohio voters added the city- and village guarantees to the Ohio Constitution in 1912 in response to corporate highbinders trying to bypass local votes, typically but not just, over electric-, gas-, streetcar- and telephone franchises.
Municipal home rule in Ohio, and how it applies, is complex; decisions, interpretations, and rulings are all over the map. But this is incontestable:
Voters in an Ohio neighborhood can forbid, or permit, the sale of alcoholic beverages, whether a beverage is consumed where sold, or sold for carry out.
Liquor licensing, assuming voters OK it, is acceptable everywhere in Ohio, ever since Prohibition ended in the Buckeye State just before Christmas 1933.
Hot and bothered over water, land
Despite the fact of everyday life in Ohio communities, some bystanders, including a few General Assembly members, are getting hyped – “Ti’s unheard of!” – over proposals that could let votes ban power-and-water guzzling data centers in suburban or rural Ohio.
True, free-booting capitalism – the Robber Baron’s capitalism– abhors social or environmental responsibility. But to hundreds of thousands of Ohioans, their land, and what’s on it, is likely their single biggest asset – and, in rural Ohio, sometimes historic parts of family legacies.
The question is why Ohioans should risk spoiling otherwise irreplaceable land via pollution so coastal fat-cats can live it up.
Sure, for the right price, some Ohioans may want to sell their land so, say, Amazon, can keep closer tabs on who buys what kind of gadget, and where, and when, and for how much.
But then there’s the question of whether data centers, like public utilities, would have the right to “appropriate” (grab) private property for data centers’ sites and the huge power lines required to operate them – or – and this isn’t sci. fi. – small, on site, nuclear power packs.
That’s not beyond belief in an Ohio whose incumbent state government lets frackers burrow under irreplaceable state parks.
What about jobs?
Should petitioners reach the statewide ballot with an anti-data-enter proposal, don’t be surprised if it turns into a national story, because the perils feared by some suburban and rural Ohioans are also the vivid concerns of many landowners elsewhere. And that doesn’t even begin to consider how such oceans of data can be used to manipulate the American consumer – or voter.
While these data barns do produce construction jobs, their operating crews, once a center is operating, is scanty; these are, after all, high-end computers that would be managed by small crews or, passably, remotely. For rank-and-file Ohioans, that’s not jobs ‘n’ progress. That’s smoke, and mirrors, and economic colonialism. But for data center owners – and the developers in their advanced guard – the good times will roll.
So, natural beauty risked for fracking; rural meadows cropped with data: That ‘s not a formula for prosperity; that’s a Tomorrow Land of blighted beauty – and of an Ohio owned out of state by the speculators of casino capitalism.
TERM LIMITS: Demonstrating yet again that General Assembly term-limits are the gateway to amnesia, several Republican state senators are musing whether Ohio “needs” its own Department of Energy in the governor’s Cabinet, cleveland.com’s Anna Staver reported.
One of those legislators is Sen. Brian Chavez, of Marietta, an oil-and-gas operator; another is state Sen. Jerry Cirino, of Kirtland, chair of the Senate’s budget-writing Finance Committee.
Trouble is, Ohio had a Department of Energy until mid-1983, when it was broken up, with units folded into the state Development Department and other Cabinet agencies.
What’s changed? Not much.
The oil-and-gas lobby still has a chokehold on the legislature but would likely find it more convenient to focus on one executive branch regulator, not several.
Change No. 2, Statehouse amnesia spawned by legislative term-limits, promoted by insiders who wanted – and got – voters to hog-tie themselves on Election Day, leaving lobbyists, Capitol Square’s real lawmakers, in charge of almost 12 million Ohioans, and how much it costs them to live.
Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. tsuddes@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Rural Ohio shouldn’t be forced to power Silicon Valley | Opinion
Reporting by Thomas Suddes, Contributed Commentary / The Columbus Dispatch
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