The court didn’t rule on whether Trenton should allow data centers. Rather, it ruled that the city council broke the law by keeping the question off the ballot in the first place. That distinction is about to matter across the state.
Barry Blankenship cried when he heard the news.1
He hadn’t won the underlying fight over whether Trenton should allow data centers. He’d won something narrower: the right to put that question to a vote. For months, Blankenship and a group of his neighbors in Trenton, Ohio, a small city in Butler County outside Cincinnati, had been trying to do something simple: get a question on the ballot. They wanted voters, not the city council, to decide whether Trenton should allow massive data centers to be built inside city limits. So they did what the Ohio Constitution says citizens can do. They wrote up a charter amendment banning data center construction, and they went door to door collecting signatures. They got 336 of them.2 Trenton City Council said that wasn’t enough, and refused to send the measure to the ballot. So Blankenship’s group sued, and in September 2026, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that the city was wrong, with all seven justices agreeing on the outcome.3 The measure is going before voters at a special election.
On paper, this looks like a win for direct democracy. Look closer, and it’s a preview of a fight likely coming to other fast-growing suburbs and townships in Ohio.
By the Numbers
- 336: valid signatures Blankenship’s group submitted.2
- 7-0: the vote count when the Ohio Supreme Court ruled against the city.3
- 128: signatures the Ohio Constitution actually required, based on 10% of votes cast in Trenton’s last city election.4
- 820: signatures Trenton’s charter demanded instead, based on 10% of all registered voters.4
The Fight Was Never Really About Signatures
The legal question in State ex rel. Blankenship v. Trenton City Council sounds almost boring: how many signatures does a citizen petition need to qualify for the ballot? Trenton’s own charter said petitioners needed 10% of “all registered voters,” which came out to about 820 signatures. Blankenship’s group said the Ohio Constitution actually requires 10% of the people who voted in the last city election, a much smaller pool, which meant they only needed 128.4
The Ohio Supreme Court agreed with the residents. Citing its own 1996 precedent,5 the court held that the constitutional formula controls over anything a city charter says, and Trenton’s council had, in the court’s words, “disregarded applicable law” by refusing to certify the petition.6
That is a real legal holding, and it matters for every city in Ohio with a charter that tries to set its own, higher bar for ballot access. But the reason this case made the news wasn’t the math. It’s what the signatures were for.
The Real Fight: AI’s Physical Footprint
Data centers used to be boring, unremarkable, out-of-sight infrastructure. That changed once companies started racing to build the massive computing farms that train and run AI systems.
Ohio, in particular, has become one of the most sought-after states for this kind of construction; Columbus alone ranks among the nation’s top data center regions, and dozens more facilities statewide are proposed or under construction.7
That is good news for the companies leasing the land and the counties collecting tax revenue. It has been much less popular with the people who live next door.
Residents near these facilities describe the same complaints showing up across the state: constant humming noise from cooling systems, worries about water use, and fear that the enormous electricity demand of an AI data center will strain the local grid and drive up power bills for everyone else. Tracking by the Heatmap/MIT Electricity Price Hub has found Ohio electric bills climbing sharply in recent summers, and data center demand is a major reason why.8
Blankenship has pointed to reports of low water pressure near data centers in Georgia and pollution complaints tied to a large AI-focused data center in Tennessee as the kind of future he doesn’t want for Trenton.9
His group isn’t alone. The Ohio Supreme Court separately allowed a similar referendum fight over a data center project in Ashville, Ohio to move forward in August 2026,10 and other communities have passed or proposed their own local bans and moratoriums, including a permit moratorium in Clearcreek Township.11 It isn’t stopping at the city level, either.
A statewide campaign called Conserve Ohio tried to put a full ban on data centers over 25 megawatts before Ohio voters this November, but it fell short of the roughly 413,000 signatures needed from at least 44 counties by the July 1, 2026 deadline, having collected only around 70,000. Organizers say they now plan to aim for the 2027 ballot instead.12
A Narrow Ruling With a Wide Shadow
The part that can get lost in the celebration: the Ohio Supreme Court did not rule that Trenton’s data center ban is a good idea, a bad idea, or even legal. The court only ruled on the process. It said the city council broke the law by blocking the vote, and ordered the question sent to voters. Whether the ban itself survives, especially against a data center that was already under construction when the petition was filed, is a fight for another day, and possibly another lawsuit.13
That reflects a greater pattern showing up across Ohio right now. Courts and regulators are being asked to referee a fight that state lawmakers have mostly avoided. A bill that would have cut a major tax break for data center projects from a full sales-tax exemption to half went nowhere in the legislature, even with support from House Speaker Matt Huffman.
“We don’t think we should be granting tax exemptions to multibillion-dollar corporations, especially when many of them are already coming here to build these data centers anyway,” Huffman said.14
Meanwhile, the state’s largest utility spent roughly 14 months negotiating a special billing rate for big data center customers before regulators approved it in mid-2025, all while cities and townships tried to use zoning, moratoriums, and now ballot initiatives to slow down projects on their own.15
What to Watch Next
Three things will decide whether this case matters beyond Trenton. First, the Ashville referendum, moving forward on a similar timeline, will show whether other Ohio communities get the same result Trenton did.10 Second, the statewide Conserve Ohio campaign, which fell short of the signatures needed for this November’s ballot, has said it will try again in 2027.12 Third, the special election itself: if voters approve the ban, the city will likely face a second legal fight over whether it can apply to a data center already under construction when the petition was filed.13 Together, those three fights, one referendum already in motion, one statewide campaign regrouping, and one city about to vote, are a rough test of how far Ohio voters can go in overriding a legislature that has so far declined to set clear statewide rules for data centers.
So when Barry Blankenship sat down and cried after the ruling, it wasn’t relief that the fight was over. It’s that his community finally gets a say in it. What Trenton voters decide, and what happens to the data center that’s already under construction there, will be an early test of whether local control can stand up to an industry with this much money and this much political momentum behind it.
It will not be the last test.
Endnotes
1. Attributed to Blankenship’s own account, reported in WCPO, “‘They are afraid’ | Tri-state vote on data center ban depends on Ohio Supreme Court decision.” Full link in the accompanying source list.
2. State ex rel. Blankenship v. Trenton City Council, Slip Opinion No. 2026-Ohio-3406 (Sept. 1, 2026). The opinion states petitioners submitted 336 valid signatures.
3. Note: The ruling was not unanimous in full. All seven justices agreed on the outcome (that the council must certify the petition), but two justices, Fischer and DeWine, concurred only in the judgment rather than joining the full opinion. “Unanimous” as used here refers to the 7-0 result, not unanimous agreement on every point of reasoning.
4. Blankenship, 2026-Ohio-3406. The opinion states Trenton’s charter required 10% of registered voters (about 820, based on 8,197 registered voters) while the Ohio Constitution requires 10% of votes cast in the last election (128, based on 1,277 votes cast).
5. The controlling precedent is State ex rel. Huebner v. W. Jefferson Village Council, 1996-Ohio-303, with a secondary reference to State ex rel. Wilen v. Kent (2015).
6. Blankenship, 2026-Ohio-3406, quoting the opinion’s finding that “relators have shown by clear and convincing evidence that the council disregarded applicable law.”
7. OCW could not independently verify “sixth-largest concentration of data centers in the country” as an exact ranking. OCW did confirm: Columbus is reported among the nation’s top 10 data center regions (see, e.g., the Yahoo/commercial real estate coverage in the source list).
8. The specific “55% between July 2021 and July 2026” figure in the Heatmap/MIT Electricity Price Hub coverage is unconfirmed. Reporting does confirm: Ohio Capital Journal (July 7, 2026) reported a 17% year-over-year jump in typical summer bills (from about $682 to about $800) and cited the same Heatmap/MIT tool as the source.
9. Attributed to Blankenship as his own comparison; not independently verified against Georgia or Tennessee reporting for this piece. Framed correctly in the draft as his claim, not as an established fact.
10. Ohio Capital Journal, “Ohio Supreme Court allows Ashville referendum against data center project to move forward” (Aug. 14, 2026).
11. Sourced to WDTN’s Clearcreek Township coverage in the original source list.
12. Ohio Capital Journal, “Ohio proposed constitutional amendment to ban data centers will not be on this year’s ballot” (June 19, 2026). Confirms the 25-megawatt threshold, the roughly 413,000-signature/44-county requirement, the July 1, 2026 deadline, that organizers had collected only about 70,000 signatures by mid-June, and their stated plan to target 2027.
13. General framing point; not tied to a single source.
14. Daily Kos, “Candidates run against data centers, but Ohio legislature didn’t get the memo” (Aug. 31, 2026). Confirms the bill would have cut the data center sales-tax exemption from 100% to 50%, names House Speaker Matt Huffman as a supporter, and quotes him as shown.
15. AEP Ohio press release, “AEP Ohio Proposal on Data Centers to Protect Ohio Consumers Adopted by PUCO.” AEP filed its proposal in May 2024 and PUCO approved it in July 2025, about 14 months.