MIAMSIBURG — A new data center won’t be coming to one Montgomery County community anytime soon.
Miamisburg’s city council unanimously passed a moratorium on Tuesday night on new centers within city limits.
News Center 7’s Cody Butler was in Montgomery County, where he explained how the moratorium will give the city more time to develop regulations.
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City leaders want to make it clear that there is no proposal for a new data center in Miamisburg.
However, developers are marketing an old power center as a potential location.
Tim Gaffney of Miamisburg said, “I was glad to see it happen.”
Jana Vedantam of Miamisburg said, “I feel very relieved that the city decided to do a nine-month moratorium.”
Miamisburg is joining a growing list of communities not allowing new data centers to be built, even temporarily.
Miamisburg City Manager Chris Fine said, “It’s trying to be proactive, so we don’t get caught off guard by an application that comes in that we’re really not prepared to handle.”
It’s a controversial issue in Ohio as companies like Meta are building hyperscale data centers. The pause is to allow the city to create zoning rules.
“We realized we really aren’t prepared for any type of a project like that. We don’t have any development regulations that would accommodate something like that,” Fine said.
“It’s a good starting point. It gives the council, and it gives the community time to learn more about this issue and make our own assessments,” Gaffney said.
The Ohio Consumer Council said there are more than 200 data centers in the state, making Ohio No. 5 in the country.
Vedantam said she is trying to get a charter amendment limiting the size of data centers on the ballot.
“It’s about the people who live here are most impacted by it being able to say what they want the land use to be for in our little compact city,” Vedantam said.
News Center 7 did talk with developers about the proposed site. They said it’s too soon to tell if a company will actually put a data center on the site. It’s getting a lot of interest from manufacturing, energy, and other industrial sectors.
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