Ohio House and Senate Select Committees on Data Centers - 6-8-2026

Thank you. Chairman Holmes, Chairman Chavez, members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify before the Select Committee on Data Centers. My name is Jennifer Kreisler, and I've been honored to serve as the Director of Community Development for the City of New Albany for the past 21 years. I'm also here with my colleagues, City Manager Joseph Stefanoff and Economic Development Manager Sarah Ziegler. In the past 21 years, I've managed staff across all disciplines of economic and community development, including planning, zoning, economic development, engineering, and building. I am again honored to be here and share the City's experience with data center development and explain how the City of New Albany specifically has partnered and benefited from this industry I not saying that this is an appropriate industry for every community but we think that we figured out how to make it work within our community and we want to share that message with you today and with others in the state of Ohio that may be interested. The first part of what we want to share is about planning and transparency. The City of New Albany is a strategically planned community. This means that for the past 30 years, our residents and businesses have been involved in creating a shared vision for the community, which now includes 9,000 acres in our New Albany International Business Park. The community knows where residential and business development will occur, and because of these public engagement efforts and investments, there is minimal public objection when economic development projects are announced. This is an open process which minimizes risk for the city and for the developers. In 2005, the business park was anchored by one major industry cluster, corporate headquarters and R&D. One company in particular accounted for over 90% of our operating budget that supports all of our general fund revenue and activities. Our team was tasked with growing the business park through industry diversity, which included the attraction of economic-based industries and also the creation of new revenue streams. The very, very first data center investment occurred in New Albany in 2010. The original data centers were enterprise data centers or data centers that serve a specific company. The city pursued data centers because the property was valued at three times that of corporate office. We realized that we could help our schools by bringing data centers in, and in fact, we kept the New Albany Plain Local School District off the ballot for several years because of that investment. Several of the data centers we attracted served companies with national footprints, and we quickly landed on the radar screen of site selectors for large-scale Fortune 500 companies. By 2015, the central Ohio region became the focus of large-scale hyperscale data centers spanning different communities with Amazon Web Services being the first announcement followed by Meta in 2015. We needed to quickly pivot and try to figure out how we could gain economic value from these hyperscalers. We always viewed incentives as a tool for leveling the playing field to compete for economic development opportunities and to infuse new investment in Ohio. So to achieve this goal, the city created a formula that calculates a minimum payment for the data centers in New Albany that are in the amount of what that property would have generated if it had been developed as either corporate office or advanced manufacturing. And the streams of revenue that we use in order to qualify those minimum payments are income tax, TIF payments, New Albany Community Authority charges, and we do accept cash, cash payments in the form of pilots instead of taxes. Just to give you an example, one hyperscaler in 2024 had a minimum annual payment due to the city of $3.7 million. Through these qualified minimum revenue streams, they were able to generate $3.9 million in revenue. If you use our 2% income tax rate, that is the equivalent of a company with a payroll of over $165 million. All of that with not as many impacts to our safety services and traffic on the roads, yet we were able to get value from these data centers because of this formula that we developed. Also with respect to water and sewer, we do real-time monitoring on all of our water and sewer. We went out in 2015 and had the City of Columbus approve a water service plan for 16 million gallons of water usage within our community. We had about 1,200 acres in Lincoln County in our business park at that time. We grown to 9 acres and we still have not exceeded that level In fact we using a little over half of the original anticipated water that we would use in 2015 as we were growing our business park We work with the City of Columbus as well and the EPA on all real-time monitoring for affluent that's coming from the data centers. None of the data centers in New Albany or the state of Ohio that we know of have ever been flagged for this type of issue. Thank you again for the opportunity to testify. We are open to answering any questions. We would love to share New Albany's experience and our written testimonies on file for you to review as well.

Senator Reineke. Thank you, Chairman. Thank you for being here. have visited the new Albany plant and know that they were doing a template for a plan that they put together in Marysville, which is in my district, and obviously planning makes a big difference. When you mentioned the... Can you elaborate how you work with all of the data centers to agree that your value-add point of purchase type of thing is the right way to go? Chairman Holmes, Chairman Chavez, as Senator Reineke.

Yes, you described how you do that real estate tax

Thank you. One of the issues that I think has been really hard for listening to all the testimony when this is the fourth hearing is that there is a lot of control locally. So when you have people visit your plants and your offices, how do you convey to them that there is a lot of control at the local level and that you've exercised it where you are? And how do they ask you those questions and how would you respond to that?

Senator Wilkin.

I can. Chairman Holmes, Chairman Chavez, Senator Wilkin. Thank you for that question. I can speak to New Albany. I can't necessarily speak to other communities and other systems, but I can specifically speak to how water is used in New Albany. We are a contract community to the City of Columbus, which means we buy our water as a part of a regional water system that the City of Columbus provides to us. The same with the sewer. All of the Columbus water and sewer projects and pipes and plants are monitored very, very closely by the EPA and state agencies. We have to present a water service plan to the City of Columbus every time we expand in our business park. And so in 2015, that was pretty much our largest expansion into the business park, which at the time was 1,000 acres, which has subsequently grown to 9,000 acres. And we have to give them a plan for how we're going to build utility into that park and what amount of water we're going to need to serve it. The reason that's important is because then Columbus has to plan for upgrades and how they're going to manage their water. This plan is a 40-year plan, so we're looking ahead 40 years at what the build-out of the entire community is going to be. The initial plan that we submitted to them was for 16 million gallons of service, and this is a lot of numbers that I'm throwing at you, but the reason I'm doing it is because the data is important. We have right now 40 data center facilities that are completed within our community, and they're part of 15 companies. So 40 data center facilities, whether a mix of hyperscalers, colo facilities, or enterprise facilities is a lot of data centers. We have about 28 more that are either announced or under construction. With all of the data centers that have been built and operational, and we do real-time monitoring of all of our water usage because we want to be able to monitor how much we're actually using compared to the desktop modeling that we're using to provide Columbus for their calculations. And so we know, based on that data, that most of the year, the data centers are not operating any differently than any other industry. We're less than 7 million gallons of water usage on most days of the year. There's about six times a year, sometimes it goes up to 10, where there are peaks, we call them, and that's when oftentimes the data centers in particular will be draining their on-site tanks. See, we tell them through economic development agreements how much water they can have. They don't tell us how much water they want. And so whatever they do on their site in order then to accommodate the amount of water we're giving them, they might have tanks underground, they might have above storage tanks, but they have to do certain maintenance items on their systems. They'll let us know, we'll let the City of Columbus know, and everybody will usually do maintenance on those days together. Usually six to 12 days we might get those peaks. The highest peak that we've seen in year 2025 just took our entire system a little bit over 8 million gallons. So we're still not even halfway through that original service plan. And just to maybe say it a different way and a little simpler than all those words I just spewed, our service plan goes for 40 years. We just recently revised our service plan because we're annexing additional territory into the community, and so we needed to make that revision. Our original service plan said that at the end of our build-out we would be at 24 million gallons. Our revised service plan says we'll only be at 27 million gallons. So we haven't, even though this industry was something we hadn't contemplated necessarily on the hyperscale, we haven't necessarily negatively impacted our water service plan as a result of it.

Chairman Holmes, Chairman Chavez, Senator Wilkin. We had not planned on hyperscalers at the time. We knew about enterprise centers. What we originally thought was that we knew we would be competing nationally and internationally. That was the goal. No longer poaching around the central Ohio region, no longer arguments about who's stealing what jobs. We knew that we needed to compete for projects outside of the state of Ohio and bring new income into the state We were successful with that with manufacturing so we kind of thought it would be manufacturing The very very first project that we got in this area that we planned for was actually a semiconductor, believe it or not, for Samsung. And so we knew it was going to be high tech, and we knew it was going to be something extraordinary, but we didn't necessarily know it was going to be hyperscalers. I think what happened is that we also had $65 million worth of infrastructure to build in order to realize that service plan. And so we couldn't unlock any ground in the business park to attract any companies. We had plans sitting on a shelf because of this master plan process that we go through, and we talked like it was in the ground, but it really wasn't built yet. And so we needed a big project to finance big infrastructure. so the first hyperscaler which was really meta helped us unlock that we took that 65 million dollar plan off the shelf we went to owda we got a low interest loan and not only were we able to build that plan for for meta we were able to unlock thousands of acres within the business park that wouldn't otherwise be available for development so amgen which is an international biotech company never would have been able to locate had we not been able to unlock that that PharmaVite, which is a company from California. Again, so we used the data centers in a way, and we kind of thought the hyperscalers might be a lost leader for us. And we said, okay, look, if we can use this data center to fund infrastructure, to build all these other things, then maybe it's a lost leader. But it turned out to not quite be a lost leader. It turned out to generate enough revenue to cover our debt service and much, much more.

Yeah. Chairman Holmes, Chairman Chavez, Senator Wilkin. Thank you for that question. While we don't do the specific testing ourselves in New Albany, we do rely on the City of Columbus to do that testing. In fact, they have a report that they issue every year, and it's in their City of Columbus Water and Power. It's the 2025 Drinking Water Consumer Confidence Report, where it actually does show the testing that they do at all of the plants so that you can see everything that's within the water system. We also have testing that's pooled testing in different places of the business park. Again, to monitor what's going into the system, but also so that we can be keeping track of how much super capacity we have as well, right? Because we want to be monitoring the water capacity and the super capacity at the same time. never once has any plan that's been submitted by a data center and to the city of Columbus for approval ever raised a flag for them with respect to the constituents that they look for and the affluent that's put into the water, nor has there ever been any calls from the city of Columbus to the city of New Albany saying that they've tested and found any sort of chemical that they would think is not in accordance with the approved chemicals that are allowed to be in the water.

One more?

Okay. And then we'll move, and then we'll give everybody three shots and then go to a second round.

Chairman, thank you. Yeah. Chairman Holmes, Chairman Chavez, Senator Wilkin. We have had in the business park as a whole probably, not probably, about since 2010 about six complaints of noise overall in all industries within the business park. Four of them since 2010 have come from data centers. Three of the four data center complaints have been resolved within a matter of one to two days. Usually it was a malfunction in a generator specific to something that they were aware of and changed the part and it worked. We do have an ongoing noise issue right now with one of our data center partners. It is a hyperscale partner. We found out about it on September 17, 2025. Within two weeks, that company had already mobilized a group of people from across the nation that were mechanical engineers and experts in noise and sound. And they deployed onto the site. They met with our staff. Some of those folks came to council and talked to our city council about the noise complaint. They tried some mitigation efforts for about three months, and then by January they had committed that they would deconstruct the cooling towers. it turns out that the problem is with the fans. They went to a different manufacturer. They already had half of the site built with no noise. And in fact, a brand new, they started construction in 2018, and a brand new residential subdivision was built just about two football fields away from them on the south side of Morris Road. And the residents that built there walked around that site and realized that they would be a good neighbor. We actually site data centers in transition areas from heavy industrial to residential because they've been such good neighbors in our master plan. So this company, they did go out, they've ordered all of the parts. Unfortunately, it's just a situation of procurement. They've secured the procurement, and they have committed $20 to $25 million this summer, as soon as the parts arrive and the cranes arrive, to deconstruct the towers and reconstruct them with the quiet parts that they used for the original towers. I will say that there was never a question of there's no noise. there was never a question of prove it in your code. Our code is not written on a decibel level because that can be industry standard for decibels for data centers of 65. Our code is written so that no project that zoned general employment, which includes all of our industrial data centers and industrial, can have a noise level higher than the street at the closest residential neighborhood. So the expectation isn't a decibel. the expectation is that the street level at that residential neighborhood that's the closest, that will be what you hear at the property line of that data center. So those are pretty high standards to meet. And not only have the data centers met it up until now, but the data center that's not meeting it is working very, very hard and is acknowledged on their own letterhead, we understand the problem, we've secured the funding, this will be resolved by September. Thank you.

Senator Blackshear.

Chairman Holmes, Chairman Chavez, Senator Blackshear. We have not heard any complaints from any residents during the time of rezoning going through any sort of planning or public hearings that we done for anything within our business park I think it goes back to that idea of having a strategic plan in place. And so as agricultural ground is not necessarily being farmed anymore, and as it's being transferred into hands of developers, we know because of the strategic plan that's already been taken through an extensive public process, what that property can be rezoned to, and it's very specific about what it can be rezoned to and what it can't be rezoned to. So I don't think that there's been any complaints about how the business park has grown. What we are hearing is not necessarily complaints, but questions from people, because there's a lot of noise out there right now about pollutants, air pollution, water pollution, and people are wondering why it is that we have all these data centers in New Albany. So we've given presentations to our sustainability committee. We've given presentations to residents. We're now creating a website similar to what we did with the Intel project, and we call it the Repository of Truth, because there's so much noise out there right now that is just not substantiated by our experience that we think that we need to come up with a common place, which is this website, which we'll launch tomorrow, in order for people to have truthful information. They don't have to like it, but it's going to be the truth and it's going to have information on whether or not there's an EPA violation. You'll notice with the Intel site, on one of our own road projects that we did in order to support the Intel project, we had an EPA violation. We put it up there and we put up our remedy and how we fixed it and we put up our notice of resolution from the EPA. We want to be as transparent as possible with the public because the noise is not transparent and there's no data to support the noise that's out there right now.

Chairman Holmes, Chairman Chavez, Senator Blackshear. Most of them do not. We are just now entering a new phase of development where that's probably one of the lessons learned for us, and we're always learning and evolving as a community. In fact, I'm so honored by the hundreds of people that we've met from across the state of Ohio as we've shared our story with other communities, commissioners, because we're learning from them as well. We were a little surprised by the fact that some of the newer facilities that are being built right now will have on-site generation. And a couple of things that did surprise us. We did not realize we would lose local control and that control for those would go to the higher power sighting board. I can't say enough about how well the Hyo Power Sighting Board has treated us, and we've been able to take our zoning regulations and the things that are important to us and our master plan and put those into the hearings for those generation facilities, and they've been included within the approvals. We did have to hire an attorney to do that, though, and so if I was a smaller community or this was my first opportunity to have a data center, I wouldn't know that I needed to hire an attorney in order to go and join that case in order to be a party to that opportunity. So we don't necessarily think that they're a bad thing. We just think that there maybe needs to be some guardrails or something out there that's an education piece for communities that don't necessarily have the experience that we do. There are two different ways, and if we were going to recommend guardrails, there's two different ways that these are built. One way is that they're built by independent entities that are selling power to the hyperscaler. In that particular case, they're considered a utility, and under tax law they're taxed as a utility and they have to pay tangible personal property tax. That translates to millions of dollars for all of the taxing entities, the counties, the schools, the townships that would not otherwise receive incentive or receive value. The other way to do it is if you are owned by the data center company and you're generating your own power, then it's just part of your manufacturing process and it's not taxed. So that's an opportunity lost, we think, for communities. We have both of those within our community. So there's two projects that are under construction right now. There's two more that have been announced or that are at the Ohio Power Siting Board. And I think the lesson we would have learned is maybe in our development agreements ahead of time with the hyperscalers, we would have said that if they're going to use on-site generation or alternative forms of power, that they're structured in a way that, number one, the city would be able to, or community would be able to include our zoning regulations and design regulations as a part of their submittal. And then number two would be that they were taxed, they were structured in a way that they were taxed as a utility so that the taxpayers aren't losing out.

Chairman Holmes, Chairman Chavez, Senator Blackshear, the number one thing we would have done is put a website up earlier with all of this truthful information, because the noise is just distracting, and it's taking our attention away from our day-to-day tasks, and it's taking the attention away from a lot of the people across the state that we've met with that are really struggling with this opportunity. And again, it's not the right opportunity for everybody, but when the conditions are right, it is an absolutely fantastic opportunity to either unlock revenue for your own community or unlock infrastructure for additional ground in order to attract other economic development. And so I think we would have got ahead of where we are now and maybe put some information out there similar to what we did with the semiconductor industry. There was a lot of misinformation about semiconductors, and we would have done that. Otherwise, I think the other maybe issue we would have handled early on is utility corridors. There's a lot of fiber that needs to be built into communities in order to support hyperscalers. It actually has turned out to be an amazing benefit for our residents and residents of adjacent communities because we are on the fringe community of 270, and so there's not a lot of opportunity for fiber to the home for our residents, and now because of these big construction projects through the community in order to serve the hyperscalers. Now we're having opportunities where we can get fiber to the home where we couldn't before. It's just where do you place all that utility? And so we would have worked to create some utility corridors and made that process a little bit easier.

What do you mean by the noise? Can you describe that a little bit?

Thank you. Representative Workman.

I appreciate that. Chairman Holmes, Chairman Chavez, Representative Workman, thank you for that question, and again, thank you for the opportunity to be here today. We are just blown away by the impacts, the positive impacts, that the data centers have had within our community. So the first piece of that is that that $3.9 million is just one hyperscaler project, and that doesn't even include all of the other projects that we have within our community. And that was tax year 2024, so that doesn't even capture what's happened on that particular site even in the last two years. What we know is that these funds are coming in, and some of them are through TIF payments, some of them are through community authority, which are both restricted type of funds. Community authority is a statutory entity that enables communities to do really creative things through a board, like levy a community charge. And so we have a 9.75 mil charge that we put on all of the property within Licking County, not just data centers. And you can use it directly for public projects. And it's a little bit broader than TIF dollars, wherein that it can be used for schools. It can be used for fire departments. It can be used for parks. It doesn't have to have an essential nexus back to the project itself. So we've been able to do a couple things as a result of that. But first, I want to talk about the schools. So the first hyperscaler that we landed is located in the Licking Heights local school district. Dr. Wagner, who's now going to be the superintendent of the state, and he's now with the Johnstown Monroe School District, was with the Licking Heights School District at the time. He can tell you that because of the value of the ground from CAUV value to the hundreds of thousands of dollars per acre that hyperscalers are willing to pay for these projects, that tax revenue alone that's unabated on the land kept the Licking Heights School District off the ballot for several years and generated a revenue stream for them that helped them really refocus their finances and do some amazing things within that particular school district We in New Albany also have agreements with our townships and so all of our abatements are non-fire. And so we make sure that the fire departments in the township and sometimes even the township themselves are made whole because we want to make sure that those that are providing services to us are taken care of despite the tax incentives that we may offer. When we first started to look at the hyperscaler, again we were looking at that revenue stream in order to finance debt at OWA which the community authority and the TIF and actually the minimum service payment in those agreements. We put a lien notice on the property as well so we take position in the property. Is enough that that's enough collateral in order to go out and get low interest loans at OWA which has been an amazing partner to us. So that first $65 million we didn't know that it was going to generate more revenue for the community. We were just hoping that it only generated enough so that we could build that $65 million worth of infrastructure and unlock thousands more acres for other types of developments, even if it was data centers, but just more development to come into the community. What we've been pleasantly surprised by is the fact that they're not only the minimum revenue formula that we created is not only covering the debt service, but it's now generating enough revenue that we've built Taylor Farm Park, which people in the community think is a metro park because it's visited by so many in the area. We're getting ready to go out and sell $50 million worth of bonds, all financed on the back of the hyperscalers, in order to build a new Veterans Memorial in Rose Run Park, to expand our police facility, to build a new police training facility, and expand our public service facility. And all of this is happening without burdening our general fund. So our general fund may be burdened by operational expenses, certainly in order to run all of these wonderful new facilities and parks, but we're able to do all of these amazing projects, either financing them or paying cash for them. We just recently partnered with the Plain Local School District, and they went on the ballot and approved for a new ball field and athletic complex. The site that they originally chosen wasn't going to work, and they couldn't figure out what they were going to do. We went out and took an old Discover site property, and using the money that we received from the data centers, we were able to purchase that property for the schools, and now they're building a new athletic complex. So there's different ways and creative ways to partner so that all of the community entities within the community can have a winning position as a result of them. And then last, I'll just say that because we diversified our revenue streams, for a community of our size, and a lot of smaller communities that we've spoken to know this, it's very, very difficult to get the highest rating that you can at all the rating agencies. But because we've diversified away from just income tax only, and we now have this community authority charge and TIF and obviously the payment in lieu of taxes, We now have a AAA rating at Moody's, S&P, and just recently we received, in fact last week, our AAA rating from Fitch. And so the ratings agencies are looking at what we're doing financially with the hyperscalers, and they're paying attention. Paula?

Chairman Chavez, Chairman Holmes, Representative Workman, overall the sentiment is very, very positive about development in New Albany. Other than the concerns that have been raised recently because of the misinformation that out there about how the data centers are using water and polluting the streams and things like that within New Albany Generally it been very positive We purposely do surveys every several years with all of our residents to measure our work as city staff. And we're in a survey year right now, but the last survey a year, it's every other year, showed at over 90% approval rating for where the city was going, what we've been doing from an economic development perspective, and the industry we're bringing in. Anecdotally, we do lots of planning throughout the time frame. We update our strategic plan every five years, but we do smaller plans in the meantime, and we do extensive public engagement when we do those plans. We just did a small plan for the US-62 corridor recently, and we had one of the largest public engagement efforts that we've ever had on any of our planning projects and what we heard confirmed resoundingly that people want us to continue to do what we're doing. They want us to continue to put the guardrails we do with design, the fiscal responsibility, environmental responsibility and there's still more we could always do in those areas but as long as we abide by that strategic plan our residents have been very, very happy with what we've done.

Thank you, Chairman. Appreciate you being here. One of the concerns that's been raised that we've heard something about is the non-disclosure agreements, and so I'd like for you to please help us understand how that's been done in New Albany and what you've seen in perhaps other communities as well as it relates to that specific issue.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Chairman Chavez, Chairman Holmes, Representative Glassburn. And we've had the most amazing honor, and it's not something that we intended to do, but something that we sort of fell into because my colleague, Sarah Ziegler, said it's right for the state of Ohio and we're going to do this. We've met with over hundreds of people from across the state of Ohio. We had Michigan and Indiana, but we cut them off. So we did meet with a couple of them, but just for a minute. And we've met with hundreds of people, more communities than I ever knew existed in Ohio, and they all come with a different story and a different set of skills. So we're at the end of our life cycle as far as attraction from a building perspective. And this is such a complex issue, and it's filled with so much emotion that we created a toolkit. It's not fancy. It has elements of a template agreement for our CRA, a water matrix that we use that we make every company fill out, a non-disclosure agreement, our zoning standards for noise, community authority documents if people want to create their own community authority and a news article actually from a community that secret shopped us with a reporter and came back and without anybody knowing they were here, came in and they had a certain expectation of what the data centers would be like and ended up writing an article about that which was opposite of what they had believed. And then we used the Marysville PowerPoint because Marysville has done a great job taking our toolkit and making that their own. And so we think that there's an opportunity and what we heard and this was, we had three communities come last week, and one of them was the Lakes area, and one community looked at us and they said, we have a budget of $3 million, and we have no staff, and your toolkit means everything to us, but like, where do we even go from here? So, Representative, I think you're exactly right. I think it's a matter of, you know, we had to humble ourselves in order to learn, and we had to humble ourselves to learn about data centers, hyperscalers. We had to humble ourselves to learn how to compete outside of the state of Ohio and bring investment from outside of the state into our great state. And so we leaned heavily on state agencies. We leaned heavily on our regional economic development partners, right? And I think that's partially where people need to step up, right, in these regional organizations. One Columbus, we didn't have spreadsheets that showed minimum payment. You know, we asked one of their staff, who was so talented, to make a spreadsheet for us And we didn't know what the industry standard was for decibels for data centers, but somebody from Jobs, Ohio, who's a specialist in data centers, was able to tell us what that industry standard was. So I think that any work that you're doing to create an opportunity for there to be a toolkit or training or specific guidance around how to manage these projects, because it's not data centers is just today, but we're unlocking an industry that we don't even know yet what's to come. In the semiconductor world, our state codes, when we brought intel to the community, our state building code didn't even contemplate a semiconductor industry. We had to, you all had to adopt a new state code because we had nothing that we could actually compare the plans to. And that's really where we are with this IT, information technology, and mission critical industry cluster, is there such an amazing opportunity for success in Ohio if we manage it well and kind of unlock some of the guidance that necessary in order to help some of the communities that don have the resources that maybe we have

Thank you. Some of the testimony we've received has started to make a distinction between the hyperscalers, the big four tech companies, and everybody else in the data center space. If we were to restrict or eliminate incentives for either of those groups, how would that have impacted your community?

Paula? Thank you.

Chairman Chavez, Chairman Holmes, Representative Glassburn, we're talking about hundreds to thousands of jobs. We have 9,000 people right now on the Meta site alone. What our statistics tell us is that we have 25 construction workers that are coming to New Albany every day just to work on the data centers alone And then after they built those turn into thousands of jobs that come in for the refreshes And so it's somewhere in the neighborhood of hundreds to thousands of people that are employed just keeping these things up and operational.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for your testimony. Thank you for hanging in there. I was worried you were going to wear yourself out on your answers, but we need to tap into your energy source here for the state. I've taken a lot of notes. I appreciate all the great information. I had a lot of questions, and the committee has done a fantastic job of covering a lot of them, so I may kind of dive back into a couple just for some clarification, and then I'll turn it over and come back and finish up if I need to. NDAs. So you mentioned that you signed your own. In your opinion, are they necessary?

Thank you for that.

Representative Holmes, Senator Chavez, absolutely. We've created this toolkit. We're blasting it out to everybody. It's not very sophisticated, but all the information that we have can be readily available to anybody who needs it. And our staff has also volunteered man hours to go through spreadsheets with other communities to see where the formula might work for them and answer questions that they might have as they're going through the process.

You talked a little bit about the jobs, and that's something that I don't want to gloss over because we heard from one of the hyperscalers, they serve 800 meals a day in one of their data centers, and somebody's eating all those meals. But can you talk about the local benefits, the ecosystem that these projects develop, local businesses? Yeah.

Thank you. I appreciate that. I appreciate your knowledge and your passion. You're not talking in the abstract because you've lived it, right? So New Albany's been living this for 10 or 12 years, is that correct?

We want to look at all sides of it. So have you noticed or is there any kind of evidence that your constituents, your citizens around there have had increased water or sewer rates or electric rates or anything directly attributed to the data centers? Chairman Holmes, Chairman Chavez, I appreciate that question.

Follow-up, last one. Yeah, I appreciate that. Correlation does not equal causation, right? So last thing on making sure that we look at all aspects, have you considered closure or remediation plans for data centers? And would you consider that for all industries, or are data centers something different? You mentioned they're just a building, right, with servers in them. So are you concerned with closure and remediation of these facilities?

Committee, is there a round two? Yes, Senator Wilkin, thank you for your pay. This is extremely helpful. This is extremely helpful. Thank you. Thank you, Chairman. So I'm going to ask you a hypothetical.

so you move to another location hired to do same or very similar job as to what you're doing and mayor, council, whatever it is comes to you and says we have a data center that wants to locate here what do you think?

Thank you, Chairman. I know a couple of people brought up the NDA issue. And I have a question. do your elected officials sign or just people in your economic development or your position over the building department? Is that right? Correct?

Is it that or does everyone sign?

Last thing. So, thank you, Chairman. It sounds like you would say that the NDA minus elected officials signing it is an invaluable tool for economic development.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Apologies for doing this again, but I had to ask you a question while you're here with us. You're such a wealth of information. There seems to be a significant and very powerful fear campaign that has taken hold, especially on social media, and I'm not saying that concerns are not warranted. It sounds like we do have some concerns that we need to overcome and place parameter and restrictions around to make sure that these are done right. But my question is, you know, we see all across the country that the fear takes hold and it's paralyzing and there's no way to overcome it. So say, for example, a community sees the benefit and the investment as being a very positive thing for their residents and their communities, but the residents are not aware of that. How can the council, how can that community overcome the fear and correct the narrative? And is it even their responsibility?

Representative Blasman, oh, sorry, follow-up? I'm sorry. Follow-up. My apologies, Chair. Thank you. So I guess a lot of times that decision falls to the local officials, and it could mean a continued position as an elected official or being unseated, losing your job. What would you recommend to people who are in that position?

Representative Glassford. Thank you Mr. Chair and I'm going to hit the NDA question another time. Sorry. So in the city that I used to serve with, our use of NDAs were primarily around what I would call the site selection phase of economic development when the entity is trying to acquire land, but that we really didn't have a lot of use for it after that juncture. Is that the same with data centers? Is there a reason why, other than national security or very isolated trade secrets, why most of these projects can't be public information after site rights have been acquired?

Follow-up? So last year the state expanded NDAs and put criminal penalties for violating NDAs. Was it necessary to keep your local officials online online following, you know, your, your, and your staff following NDAs to have criminal penalties or were they able to maintain NDAs before that?

Any other questions from the committee? All right. Well, Chairman Holmes left at the wrong time. He gave me the gavel back. We thank you very, very much for your time, your information, your knowledge. I think this was very, very informative, so thank you very much.

Thank you. Next up, we have Tiffany Hollis from Johnstown. Welcome to committee. You may begin when ready.

minutes. So in summary, I'll just ask this question. What's a good summary for your statements? And you have good information here. Chairman Chavez, Chairman Holmes. A summary, I give the

Committee, any questions? I think very clear what you said, ma'am. I'm just going to read it again. Build frameworks that demand transparency. We've heard that word a lot. Meaningful community engagement, and those are good words. And equip and empower. Yes, ma'am, thank you.

And the written testimony was also submitted previously. We'd now like to call Mr. Brian Stewart from the Superior Group. Thank you for coming. Welcome to committee, sir.

Thank you, sir. Committee, are there any questions? Seeing none, sir. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Co-Chair Chavez. Sorry, I came in late on that one. Try to give everyone else a chance to talk. So we hear a lot about, thank you for your testimony. We hear a lot about construction jobs are just outer towners that come in, swoop in, and then leave. But you said you've been on the New Albany campus since 2018. So can you expand a little bit on how many of your folks are local folks?

Yeah. There are some contractors who may do it differently. and certainly there are inbound folks that would be in any state to serve this type of projects These type of projects we often find that they stay The longevity and the opportunity for our employees is so tremendous There is no other client base that could fill the void of opportunity created by data centers in our industry. None. Actually, not even close. Data center construction would represent the vast majority of construction today. Now, that's not particular necessarily really to Ohio. That's common across the country. But what we have is we have visibility into these jobs, working with our clients. So they're not talking about building a building. They're talking about a 10-year plan. When they build a campus, it goes on and on, and typically picking up then more locations in the same general area and developing plans for that campus build-out. So that's why we've seen so much growth, and that's why we're able to attract great people to those opportunities. Follow-up?

Oh, it is building more buildings. Sorry. Chair Chavez, thank you. It is building more buildings. So typically we have that if we're entering into a discussion with a client, we understand what their plan is for, say, the next eight to ten buildings on one single campus. Now that changes and fluctuates, obviously, given their needs, but we have general visibility into what that looks like. The additional opportunity is once a building is finished, there's service, there's maintenance, and then I think, as Jennifer discussed, there's retrofit opportunities. So we're coming back and constantly in cycle working in that facility because technology changes. So the electrical infrastructure may need tweaked or changed dramatically, and we may be back in building one two years later. And then we're constantly providing service activities.

I mean, the majority of it is bought from distributors in Ohio. We have, obviously, with Vert of the large manufacturers, very active in this space right here in Ohio. We do get parts and pieces from other areas of the country also, but we tend to work with the vast majority of our vendors are locally based. And it extends, again, it's tool rental. It's equipment that we're purchasing. It's the parts and pieces, the conduit and the wire that we're purchasing. And most all of that is running through local distribution. Thank you.

Chairman Holmes, so we're fortunate. So we're a signatory contractor. So in partnership with the IBW, we work with them on their training program that's a part of all of our employees' apprenticeship and education. But then, yes, Superior does have internal training on top of that, and a lot of it is very specific to this industry. This work is – our people love this work. That's another thing. They really love it because it is technically challenging and demanding. They love knowing that there's so much opportunity out ahead. but because it's technically demanding and challenging and each particular their client has their own requirements, we have found ourselves developing our own supplemental training that is very client-specific in how we do things on sites. Yes.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And following up on Chairman Chavez's question, if the incentive packages remain the same but sales tax was no longer a vehicle, Would that change your buying behavior in terms of where you procured materials and equipment?

Co-Chair Chavez.

No. That would be the clients, the ultimate clients, so the end user is making that choice in what they're doing. Our primary services, we're providing all of the electrical work from, say, the substation in on these sites and inside the buildings, all of the conduit and wire, all the equipment and the infrastructure required to power the facility, and oftentimes, say, the communications cabling that goes to the server. Our work as the electrical contractor generally stops at the server rack, and that's all done by the client. Thank you. You're welcome.

Thank you so much. Appreciate the time.

Thank you very much. Chairman Holmes, Senator Chavez, committee members. I just wanted to show up today. You have my testimony that I've supplied to you all, but just really tell Van Wert's story. We recently just signed a data center in our community. It's a $10 billion plus project. QTS is the end user that is coming to Van Wert. And I wanted to talk about our experience over the course of the last two years. We were identified as a site of interest by one of the site selectors and have been since working with the developer for the last year and a half, two years. And we all along made mention to our developer that water was super important to us, that we needed to be able to communicate that to our community, that were not going to be taking their water, noise and all of the things that you hearing being a problem in data centers was communicated to this group And so we been very transparent with our community A year and a half ago, I made a commitment to the developer that we wanted to let our community know that this was going to be a data center that was coming. And we shared that information. And we had very little pushback. Very little pushback. We've had 36 city council meetings in the last year and a half. We've had eight regional development meetings in the last year and a half. And we had a few oppositions and some roads that were potentially being shut down. The main purpose of me being here today is within the last three months, three to four months, there has been a tremendous amount of pushback that just all of a sudden popped up out of nowhere. And I am not one that just figures that that's just going to stay. I want to find out where it's coming from. So I started to do a lot of digging. And Facebook seems to be the primary avenue for this negative information to be purveyed to our community. And unfortunately, we have several people that were constantly reposting, reposting, reposting. And the vitriol continued to increase and continued to increase. Excuse me. And I found out, as I started to dig and find out where these posts were coming from, several were coming from one NGO out of Washington, D.C., by the name of Green America. And as I dug into their particular ideology, they believe that fossil fuels and nuclear energy is a no-go, period. That's it. So they started, what was the most way that they could get the most amount of impact? was to start to attack data centers. And in 2025, and the sources and information I've given to you, in 2025 they started a dirty data campaign. And that dirty data campaign spent millions and millions of dollars on Facebook trying to purvey the negatives of data centers to try to get the data centers to put solar panels on everybody's house, batteries in everybody's houses, to supply then the data centers with the power from solar and wind versus from fossil fuels. And I found this to be very disturbing that they're spending so much money on Facebook. And then as you start to hear other stories of a project that's going on out in Utah, where there's also exterior influence from outside of the United States that is amplifying that negative information as well. And so for me personally, that was my reason to come here today is to let you know that the negative chatter that is taking place on Facebook and the social media is not all grassroots like you think that it is. And it's unfortunate that we're in this day and age that we're having to defend ourselves because this project is transformational for Van Wert. One minute. And this is a mega site that we have had for 20 years. And now we have a really good partner in QTS coming to Van Wert and building a data center. But yet now we've got this negative information that we're having to combat at the local level. And we're just trying to come to you and make you aware that this particular issue is at hand. and I know that you experience it as well. But we thank you very much for your time and your support in this particular committee and hope that you come up with the best determinations possible Thank you sir Thank you for taking the trip Committee I start for the left Any questions

Is QTS affiliated with one of the big four of Amazon, Google?

Representative Glassburn.

Follow-up? Thank you, Mr. Chair. So if we made policies that disproportionately harmed data centers that are not in the Big Four, would that hurt your project?

Co-Chair Chavez.

So we just announced QTS two weeks ago, the night or the, excuse me, the day after the data center tax exemption that was announced. So we're in the process of bringing that to breaking ground and starting building within the county and the city of VanWort.

No, this is our, excuse me, Director Chavez, this is our first data center that will be coming to VanWort.

Chair Holmes, Representative, or Senator Chavez, thank you very much. A lot of the negative questions that have been coming up have been water-related, have been noise-related. QTS is a company that has committed to a closed loop system. That is what we've been really trying to make sure that we bring to our community, where it's basically a one-time fill and it can run for the next six to seven years without ever having additional water added to it. But the negative things that have been coming through Van Wert is that we are going to be dumping nitrates into the water Well data centers don generate nitrates They don put anything into the groundwater A data center of this size will have regular toilets and water for their inside just like any other office building would have. But that all goes back to our wastewater treatment plant is treated to EPA standards and then is released. Noise is another big issue. And every data center is not treated the same. If you have a closed-loop system, you're not doing the evaporative cooling, which are a lot of louder type of noises that are made from data centers. So people wouldn't believe us, even when we stood up and let them know, here is the process. We went to very specific lengths. we created a website that had a city council that provided 135 questions to my office that we answered, that we put on the website, so we could answer all those questions. The problem is that the noise of Facebook, they did not believe the information that was provided to them. Thank you.

Chair Holmes, Chair Chavez, Senator Blackshear, thank you. Yeah, we have done a lot of things, I think, to try to ease that chatter. We created a video, which I've provided to you in testimony, that has a lot of the people within Van Wert from all economic levels talking about how they feel that this project would be beneficial to our community. We put up a website that's been up for three months to answer any of the questions that they could potentially have. and we actually ask constituents to come into my office, sit down and have a real conversation about their specific concerns and any time that that happens, we sit down and we have at length conversations to try to ease those questions. We have people from Troy, Ohio and Toledo, Ohio and Fort Wayne, Indiana and Lima concerned about Van Wertz Data Center And we've sat down and talked to all of those people, even though they don't live within our community. We find it interesting that there are people from outside of our community so concerned about the decisions that we're making within our own community.

Chair Chavez, Chair Holmes, Senator Blackshear, thank you very much. Yeah, so to answer your question, we're kind of in the early stages. We do have a big meeting this Thursday at Vantage Vocational School for the community, and for lack of a better term, we call it a science fair. So when the people come to Vantage Vocational School, they will have the opportunity to go from this table to talk about the closed-loop system, to go over to talk to some representatives. representatives from AEP to talk about energy and what that means to them, to be able to talk to their community engagement group where they do all kinds of community engagement with different charitable organizations within the community. The one thing that is exciting to me that we've shared with our community also is the fact that Vantage Vocational School, which is a very big trade school within our county, has teamed up, is in the process of teaming up with QTS to create a customized curriculum that will allow the students to go directly from Vantage Vocational School, which, by the way, the data center is directly across the street from them, and will be able to stay in our community, learn in our community, and then go work in our community.

Chair Holmes, Chair Chavez, thank you very much for that question, because Jennifer Chrysler has been invaluable to our community. Did I feel like our community was set up for that? No. We're a small community, just like New Albany was 15 years ago. We're 11,000 people. We made sure that we were going to cover ourselves by hiring excellent counsel, by hiring Vores and Brickner, to make sure that we were covered and they have dealt with this type of process before. but Ms. Chrysler and her team invited us down. We kind of swept in maybe a little bit bigger group than normal. We brought in an entire bus full of people, 57 people, and had an opportunity for them to take us on the tour. We stopped at Edge facility. All of our folks got out of the bus, and they thought that the facility was under construction. because it was so quiet. It was, in fact, running. It was a closed-loop system that was running. That's what we wanted them to hear. So the fact that she and her group spent that time just with our community, and Lord knows that they do it multiple times a day, every day a week, to help the whole state of Ohio without any benefit to themselves, I think is very, I just can't speak enough to just how much appreciation goes to their group. But she provided us with that whole packet. That whole packet resides with our council. And we've taken, I would say, most of that information and used it, and then we've added some additional information that's more specific to our county. Thank you.

Welcome to committee, sir. Thank you, Chairman Holmes, Chairman Chavez, members of the Joint Data Center Committee, thank you for the opportunity to be here today. I appreciate it ACT Ohio represents 100 men and women who work under the umbrella of the Ohio State Building Construction Trades Council Our collective intent here today is to cut through the BS that data centers in Ohio do not create jobs We are here to emphasize the thousands upon thousands of building trades jobs that have been created and maintained by the 50-plus billion dollars invested in Ohio over the past five years to build and regenerate data centers. To provide some scale, this level of investment dwarfs the total investment to date in Ohio's two largest construction projects in its history, Honda LG over in Fayette County and Intel Fab One. Now opponents will say, well, these are temporary jobs. and completely discount the impact that our members in the construction industry have on the state of Ohio's economy. It's offensive. Tell these folks, tell our members that their jobs don't count or that they don't matter. Talking about this begs the question, what's in it for the building trades? What's in it for construction workers across the state of Ohio? Pretty simple. the opportunity to work. Our members want to go to work every day and provide for their families. The trades are an hourly workforce. We don't work, we don't get paid. On an annual basis, 75 to 80 percent of our work is private sector work. The results for working class people in the state of Ohio speak for themselves. Because of this investment, Ohio is reestablishing its middle class with both career paths and wage growth. You'll see in my testimony apprenticeship growth over the past 10 years has risen almost 70% in the state of Ohio, according to Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. Wage and benefit growth, we attribute almost a 61% increase in the number of apprentices, and you will also see in there what we attribute in just the past five or six years in terms of wage growth in the state of Ohio as well for construction workers. And again, we attribute much of this upward arc in wages and benefits to data center construction here as well. Demand for workers in the trades is skyrocketing. Applications to our apprenticeship programs are skyrocketing. Wages and benefits are increasing. We have four times as many women in our apprenticeship programs today than 10 years ago, an increase of over 280%. Ohio was number two in the country last year in the number of veterans joining the trades, with almost 900. One of these proud veterans is here with us today, Dylan Marple, U.S. Army, 173rd Airborne Brigade, 1st Battalion, 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment, and proud IBEW Local 1105 Electrical Apprentice. One of, as I mentioned, hundreds upon hundreds of such examples in the state of Ohio. And you'll also see written testimony from Samuel Ramirez, Brett McElfresh, and potentially others. Our message is, don't fall prey to the false reality being perpetuated by social media influencers that data centers don't create jobs. This is the reality. In 2025 the building trades had thousands of members working on or in data center plants across the state of Ohio Great middle jobs for Ohioans with good wages health and dental insurance top retirement and investment in apprenticeship safety and journeyman skill upgrade trading. The bottom line is the legislature has done incredible work, exceptional work, creating a world-class business climate here in the state of Ohio, as Ms. Chrysler mentioned, and what a rock star she is, by the way. We're winning. Ohioans are winning. Blue-collar workers in Ohio are winning. And we point at data center investment and that private sector investment as one of the root causes. But in order to keep winning, we have to stay competitive. We cannot go backwards. We cannot go backwards. Thank you for your efforts to learn more about this incredible opportunity. We have to continue to transform the lives of working-class Ohioans. I'd be happy to take any questions if there are any.

Representative Glassburn. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Mr. Slasey, for being here. So as I see this, there's two different questions going on. There's the impact that data centers have had on our utility rates, specifically electric. And then there's the question of data centers themselves. Are they good for communities? Are they impactful? Your members, let me address a second. Your members work in all kinds of facilities across the state, factories, I mean, all kinds of operations. Can you give us some perspective as to these data center jobs, both the construction and operation, where they rank in terms of environmental and how clean of a job it is, so to speak? Thank you.

they need to get there and see that because this is what we want to promote, not what we want to chase to other states. So the work sites themselves, Representative Glassman, are phenomenal. Follow-up?

Where were they working before all this started?

Again, through Chair to Representative Glassburn, I can also say that great question. In our industry, the investors, the owners, want one thing from the trades and our partner contractors, and that's certainty. They want certainty in cost. They want certainty in terms of the timeline for completion. They want certainty with respect to the quality of the workmanship. in construction when you see it's a cyclical industry we are on an upward trajectory which we're very very profoundly thankful for profoundly thankful in construction you have to have the ability to scale up and scale down that's just to meet demand supply and demand that's the nature of it we invest $40,000 to $50,000 on average in an apprentice. Getting an apprentice, he or she, through four years of apprenticeship training, depending upon the craft, that range differs. But we like to have that certainty, too, because if we're going to invest that kind of money in a young man or young woman, we want to know that there's going to be a place for that young man or young woman to go to work here in Ohio. Do we, in times of very significant sharp scale-up, does that draw members from out of state? Of course it does. But it's supplemental. It's not primary. It's supplemental. Our ultimate obligation is to meet the needs of our partner contractors and our owners to make sure projects are completed on time, on budget with the highest degree of workmanship. That is our ultimate goal, and we will scale up and scale down as needed based on project supervision. Follow-up?

impacted. Through the chair, Representative Glassburn. We work for them all, and we appreciate the opportunity to compete for their work. We are not in any way, shape, or form interested in any policy that makes it more difficult for Ohio to attract this investment. And if regulation has to occur, I mean, we trust that you will do so and you will do so responsibly. But for us, the bottom line, the equation starts and stops with jobs. Our members' jobs are paramount to us. The opportunity for our members to go to work every day, and they may not be all over Facebook. They're not social influencers. You don't have time for that. Our members work. But the expectation and the hope is that our leadership, our legislature, will continue doing what you're doing, which has been phenomenal. Is it any interest that the world's top companies want to invest in Ohio with what you've done on income taxes? scaling back the cat tax. Phenomenal. What you've done is absolutely phenomenal. And at the end of the day, of course, companies want to invest here. We don't want to see the state of Ohio go backwards on this level of investment. If you need to put some guardrails on it, make sure, you know, in terms of local communities, we want them to get every penny. That's easy for us because our members live in those communities. Get every penny for them. Help them. I mean, it sounds like it's already happening, but we're all for that. We just don't want to see any disincentives put in place that cause projects to go elsewhere.

Chairman, it is an incredibly accurate statement. You'll hear testimony from our president of ACT Ohio and the state building trades that makes mention of the fact that southern Ohio, down from Portsmouth, workers have been driving hour and a half, two hours for some time, you know, to Columbus, central Ohio, where the bulk of this work was located. We love the idea of Piketon. We love the idea of Marietta. We love the idea of Van Wert and Wood County and northeast Ohio for this level of investment, and we're seeing it. I mean, we're fighting those battles with some of the misinformation out there, but we'll win on those. We will win on those. But the idea that one of our members doesn't have to drive two hours to and from work every day or make the investment in a verbo for eight months, nine months, ten months, and spend Monday through Saturday away from their families or Monday through late Friday away from their families that very attractive to us and our members So yes very much we want to see that investment widespread throughout the state

Through the chairman, in response to your question, construction is ultra-competitive industry. Our contractors compete for work every day, compete with other union contractors, non-union contractors, out-of-state contractors. Competition is inherent in what it is we do. It's ultra-competitive. We also understand economic and industrial development and fully understand what happens if Ohio puts a specific industry in a competitive disadvantage with other states. The reality is we lose projects. We lose the opportunity for our members to go to work, as explained and described. That's not in Ohio's best interest. I understand that there are a lot of challenges out there, a lot of misinformation. I think this committee has done exceptional work and has asked exceptional questions. I've listened every minute. But the bottom line is we're asking you to do what's right for Ohio to remain competitive against other states.

Chairman, you know we do. Enormous, enormous market for us is energy generation. And I know that there will be a series of hearings and a lot of attention paid to energy generation in the state of Ohio. We can't wait. our approach is all of the above we've got a ton of ideas on how to accelerate permitting how to accelerate energy generation or production in the state of Ohio a ton of ideas starting with let's look at every oil combined cycle oil generation natural gas generation facility double its capacity let's do it Let's get some of these permitting challenges and appeals on utility-scale solar ironed out so that we can get some of that generation on the grid. We know what we have to do. We have to iron out the wrinkles with respect to these challenges and appeals and permitting delays and all this stuff. We have the authority and we have the power to do it, and I know we have the insight and the desire to do it. It's just a question of now the time We need the energy generation Rather than put up obstacles to future users let focus on generating more capacity to the point where we're not only meeting the needs of large-scale and every residential user in the state of Ohio lowering bills. I mean, we'll get to a point where we're, you know, a massive exporter of energy. We have the capacity to do that. So I look forward very much to that discussion, but you hit the nail right on the head, Chairman. Energy generation is key. Thank you for that.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you so much for being here. Always great seeing you. Just two quick questions. You sort of alluded to it in your testimony, but how many construction jobs does the typical data center create in, you know, for how long are those jobs held?

Do you have a follow-up?

Through Chair Holmes and Chavez, permanent union jobs by the owner varies. Typically what happens, Senator, is you heard from the CEO of Superior Electric. The more likely scenario is superior electric as they have in New Albany just using them as an example They stay in contract with that owner and provide those maintenance services and ongoing regeneration work at those facilities So the replacement of racks, the replacement of servers, all the retrofitting to make the new systems applicable. and obviously time is money, you know, in terms of whether it would, it doesn't matter what industry you're talking about, you don't want downtime. So having a contractor and a workforce that has familiarity with those systems obviously makes a big difference in terms of achieving those goals. Thank you.

Thank you, Chairs. Thanks, Mr. Salazi. This has been kind of touched on, But first of all, I want to thank all of your members for coming today because we really do appreciate what they're doing. You have pretty much taken advantage or your industry has taken advantage of a lot of the workforce programs that we put in place. And I think that's really helpful for the people, you know, in schools trying to find out what their purpose is in life. So I guess the question is, so how Ohio is prepared, then we have the workforce to keep us going with all of Ohio's growth.

Thank you.

Through Chair Chavez, Chair Holmes. I don't have the specific number. I would defer to David Mondalowski on that up at the Cleveland Building Trades or Sean Enright at Northwest Ohio Building Trades. but it's hard to put in words the enormity of maintaining those two nuclear power plants. I mean, from a building trade standpoint, the amount of work generated, the hours generated at each of them, particularly in years where there's a retooling or a shutdown, the capital improvements there, phenomenal work opportunities I mean and they have sustained generations of building trades workers at this point So particularly Perry. I mean, you mentioned it in a hearing. What was the decommission or closure date of it? This is absolutely outstanding. We have the president of Cleveland Building Trades here in attendance, Terry Joyce. I'm sure he can speak to it. His members at Labor's Local 310 have benefited from Perry for decades. Teresa Moore is here representing Labor's Local 500. Same thing in Toledo and Davis-Bessey. I mean, we want to encourage more of that, and we love what you did with House Bill 15. hey, let's incentivize and let's get everybody rolling in the same direction with respect to generating more electricity, more power in the state of Ohio. We're all in. Let us know what we can do to help. Yes, sir.

Ladies and gentlemen, we've gone for, okay, two hours and 20, so we're going to take a recess right now at 2.20. We'll reconvene at 2.50, so 30 minutes. The committee stands on recess.