Lorie Blankenship has lived in Trenton since the 1970s. The elementary school she walked to every morning as a kid is still around the corner from her house. Down the road, her neighbor farms the same land that's been in the family for more than a century.
Blankenship says the city of about 15,000 has changed in some ways over the years.
“When we moved here, it probably had about half the population, but it still, no matter when it grew, it kept that same small-town atmosphere,” Blankenship said.
Now, she's worried a new neighbor could hurt her quiet hometown.
Under construction
Diggers move dirt and dump trucks drive into a fenced construction site on 140 acres in the industrial park on the southern edge of Trenton. The former farmland is being prepared for a nearly 1-million-square-foot data center for Amazon Web Services by developer Prologis.
The city agreed to sell the land to the developer in spring 2024. But Blankenship and most residents didn’t find out until the sale closed a year later, in fall 2025.
“We immediately went, ‘What?,’ and then we started looking back through things, trying to get people involved,” Blankenship said. “November is when they had a city council meeting. A lot of people came to the city council meeting, and they were questioning the data center, and that's when the transparency issues came up.”
People worried the city was keeping the project a secret. They raised concerns from water use to noise because neither the city or developer had revealed specific plans or studies at that point.
In other communities with data centers, residents have reported negative impacts from constant humming noises to air pollution from diesel backup generators to strain on local water systems.
Trenton City Manager Marcos Nichols says the city anticipated the data center would operate differently from the traditional industrial developments in town. That’s why council voted to create an I-T zoning district.
“The building is further back from the property line, as well as has an 8-foot berm, and then there has to be trees on the berm to allow for light, noise, sound, all of that to be buffered by those things,” Nichols said.
Business as usual or backdoor deal?
The city says the developer has done its due diligence. Prologis has said it will pay for water, electricity and power system upgrades. And it estimates the project will create more than 100 full-time jobs.
Blankenship says she's still not convinced. And learning a city official signed a non-disclosure agreement for the project only adds to her concerns about transparency.
“Now nobody has any faith in their own government,” Blankenship said. “People go and they vote for people and they expect that they're going to represent them, and then they feel that backdoor deals have been done.”
Nichols says with projects like these, there’s a fine line between openness and staying competitive.
“If they put out that they're coming to town six months ahead of time, a year ahead of time, what does that mean from a competition standpoint? Does that mean that someone else is going to come in and try and get land and move through the processes faster than them and get built faster? It's a balance,” Nichols said.
Statewide debate
This debate about transparency in data center development is playing out around the state, from Piqua to Coshocton.
Molly Bryden is with the nonpartisan research organization Policy Matters Ohio. She says the pace of data center expansion is making it hard for communities to keep up. There are more than 200 existing and proposed data centers in Ohio.
“There's kind of a patchwork approach developing where communities might hear some murmurs about a potential project, and then they have to start making public records requests, digging through public documents available on their like local government's website.”Molly Bryden, Policy Matters Ohio
“At the same time, we don't have strong enough reporting requirements at the state level, where we would have a centralized database or clearinghouse for information about planned projects,” Bryden said. “There's kind of a patchwork approach developing where communities might hear some murmurs about a potential project, and then they have to start making public records requests, digging through public documents available on their like local government's website.”
Locally, Bryden recommends people talk with their neighbors and ask questions.
“[Get] people out to public meetings to share their concerns and just have that conversation with their elected officials to help them better understand what the community's real concerns are,” Bryden said.
That's what Lorie Blankenship says she's trying to do with a group she helps organize, Woodsdale and Trenton Environmental Resistance.
They're continuing to push back on the Prologis project. At the same time, they're getting an early start demanding transparency from the city about its plans to annex 600 acres for another Amazon Web Services data center.