Amazon open house draws 260 to address data center concerns

About 260 people packed Manchester High School’s gym from 5 to 8 p.m. on June 18 for an Amazon informational open house about a possible data-center campus in Adams County. Amazon Web Services representatives took questions on jobs, water use, infrastructure, taxes and environmental impacts after the Adams County Board of Commissioners announced the event and urged residents to hear directly from the company.

The meeting put one of the county’s biggest land-use questions inside one of its most familiar public buildings. Manchester High School became the local venue for a proposal that could shape how much water the area can supply, how much traffic local roads can handle and what kind of tax base a large industrial user might bring to the county and village. The open house gave residents a place to ask how a campus of that scale would fit into Manchester and the surrounding communities that depend on the same roads, utilities and public services.

Those concerns were already feeding a broader due-diligence process before the open house. Paul Worley, Adams County’s economic development director, said county officials had met with the Adams County Regional Water District, Manchester Board of Public Affairs, township trustees, the county engineer, ODOT District 9, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Ohio EPA, ODNR, the Ohio Department of Commerce, Manchester Local Schools and Manchester Fire and EMS. The former power-plant sites under discussion include a high-capacity switchyard originally built for a 2.3-gigawatt generating station, a detail that has made the land attractive to heavy electrical users.

The June 18 meeting also came against a sharper political backdrop. On March 16, the Ohio Attorney General’s Office certified a petition titled Prohibition of Construction of a Data Center, an initiative backed by Adams County residents that seeks to add Section 36a to Article II of the Ohio Constitution. Local opponents have also organized town halls in Manchester, where skepticism about data-center development has been building around former power-plant sites along the Ohio River.

At the Statehouse, the Ohio House Select Committee on Data Centers held meetings on June 1, June 4, June 8 and June 11, with testimony centered on electric demand, water demand, environmental impacts, tax incentives and nondisclosure agreements. That statewide debate has sharpened the stakes in Adams County, where a regulatory filing cited by WCPO described electricity use on the scale of about 1 million homes. In 2024, Ohio officials announced that Amazon Web Services planned a $10 billion expansion of its data-center infrastructure across Ohio by 2030, making the Manchester open house part of a much larger fight over how much of that growth should land in small communities like Adams County.