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COLUMBIANA -- With an increase in data centers coming to the state, the city may want to take a proactive approach to whether they should be allowed to operate locally, a member of council said recently.
Council President Skip Liston broached the subject during the Sept. 1 council meeting.
He said that while he doesn't believe the city will be "threatened" by any big data centers it could potentially be approached by someone interested in a smaller data center.
"I think we need to start having some discussions on this," he said.
Liston provided council members with several articles he found pertaining to data centers and said they need to be thinking about whether to allow them, and if so, what regulations or restrictions should be necessary.
"You're going to have to weed through these things and figure out what's right and what is wrong. It's a political football now. Right, wrong or indifferent, we need to figure it out for ourselves and if the subject does come up we need to make the right decisions," he said.
Council member Dan Dattilio agreed, noting that from an infrastructure standpoint, he isn't sure how much the existing infrastructure could support.
"Do we need zoning to prevent it? If someone shows up to planning commission and they want to build a data center in town, rather than react, we can be proactive," he said.
Ohio is currently ranked in the top in the United States for data centers infrastructure, according to the Ohio Consumer's Counsel data center fact sheet.
Specifically, Ohio has more than 200 data centers, with most located in central Ohio, the OCC states.
Data centers require a lot of electricity and water to operate with a large data center using as much electricity as 100,000 homes, according to the fact sheet.
"What do we need to do? What we do we want to allow? What kind of risk do we want to take?" Dattilio said.