200 Feet Away: One Family’s Unexpected Fight Against a Data Center
What do you do when you discover a $4 billion data center has been approved 200 feet from your home?
Jessica Sharp, Ohio Organizer with Wilmington Residents for Responsible Development, thought she was entering her stay-at-home-mom era. Instead, she found herself learning zoning laws, uncovering secrecy and NDAs, organizing neighbors, working with experts, hiring a certified planner, responding to shifting state legislation, gathering petition signatures, engaging with the media, and helping build a movement.
“I thought this was my stay-at-home-mom era, until I found out about this data center in my literal backyard.”
Jessica closed on her home the day before zoning for a proposed 4-million-square-foot Amazon Web Services hyperscale data center campus was finalized, without knowing it. What started as concern over one project quickly evolved into a community-wide effort involving multiple data center proposals, legal challenges, referendum campaigns, and larger questions about transparency and public accountability.
Joining Jessica will be Quintin Koger Kidd, a community advocate who has helped analyze the technical and policy dimensions of Wilmington’s proposed projects. Quintin has become a leading local voice on issues including tax incentives, zoning compliance, utility impacts, and the long-term community impacts of large-scale development.
Together they’ll share the story behind Wilmington’s fight and the many unexpected turns along the way.
Topics we'll explore:
• Discovering a proposed project after the fact
• Challenging zoning decisions and procedural issues
• Working with a certified planner and technical experts
• State legislation and changing rules
• Petition and referendum strategies
• Transparency failures and NDAs
• Community organizing and media strategy
• Advice for people just beginning their own fight