BETHEL, Ohio — Inside the walls of Bethel's Ben Franklin shop, Jo Wilson has made a small table and chairs a megaphone for her mission.
Wilson is advocating for Conserve Ohio, a grassroots campaign to get data center restrictions on the November ballot this year.
The campaign is working to get just over 413,000 confirmed signatures to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot. The proposed amendment would ban the construction of data centers that consume more than 25 megawatts of energy a month, according to the website.
That ban would only take place if the signatures are obtained, and then voters would have to approve the amendment.
“We Ohioans do not want this. We need data centers, but not the mega, large-scale data centers," Wilson said.
I was with Wilson as a local couple added their names to the petition.
Watch to see how a local advocate is calling for data center regulations:
“From what I understand about this stuff, they're going to use a lot of water, a lot of electricity," said Larry Schreiner, a Tate Township resident.
Wilson has been collecting signatures since April.
“My concern is the water; if the one goes through Mount Orab, it will use thousands, thousands of our water," Wilson said. “Another thing that concerns me: they’re using our electrical grid."
Thursday morning in Columbus, representatives from four major tech companies — Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft — testified in front of the Ohio House and Senate's Select Committee on Data Centers.
Each executive opened with their company's different use of data centers throughout the state before committee members asked questions to the group.
Topics included impact on water, jobs and energy. This is what two of the representatives had to say about the impact on local water.
“We’re looking at different ways we can minimize water; those are still efficient evaporative cooling system opportunities," Thor Underdahl from Meta said.
“Things have come an incredibly long way from the way the data center industry looked about 20-25 years ago to today. Where, at AWS, we can operate our data centers in Ohio, with what I mentioned earlier, using only 3% of the year," Amazon Web Services' Craig Sundstrom said.
The testimonies from corporate executives came just days after residents across Ohio spoke in front of the same committee of state lawmakers, expressing their thoughts and concerns on data centers.
Wilson said that the group currently has about 50,000 signatures. They need about 413,000 confirmed signatures by July 1. If they are unsuccessful in obtaining the necessary amount by next month's deadline, they can roll over the signatures and try to get the proposed amendment on the November 2027 ballot.
"We’re on a mission. When you have the drive of something that you believe in so strongly, you get the energy to do it," Wilson said.
