SUNBURY — About 20 people attended Sunbury City Council’s second special data center meeting in the Big Walnut High School auditorium, the room can seat around 800.
Thursday’s turnout was a far cry from the amount of concerned residents who showed up for previous planning and zoning committee meetings, council meetings and the first special informational data center town hall.
This attendance drop-off comes after council enacted a moratorium on data centers in April, and after council voted in July to put an amendment to the city’s charter on the November ballot.
That amendment, should residents vote to approve it, would add an article to the charter that prohibits the construction of a data center.
On Thursday, council and city staff heard about the history of data centers from Sinclair Community College cybersecurity professor Kyle Jones, and reviewed land uses and the city’s zoning code as they pertain to large development with MKSK Principal Chris Hermann.
Both speeches were followed by questions from council and attendees. This matched the format of the first special data center meeting, which did not feature an open mic for public comments.
Data centers have been around longer than you think
While Jones has been teaching technology for 12 years, he said he worked on cyber defense programs for a Dayton-area data center for 10 years in the 1990s. That center stored all the mortgage underwriting for every major bank around the world.
He explained that data centers have actually been around since the 1960s and called these centers “mainframes.” Centralized computing is what was inside these mainframes, meaning any data processed, calculations made or information stored happened in one massive computer.
What came next were what Jones described as “enterprise rooms” in the 1980s to 1990s.
“As things progressed, we starting having our own enterprise data centers within a company,” Jones said. “This is before cloud and cloud services were really a thing.
“We needed to host everything locally, everything needed to be at the center itself,” he said. “Especially when email and other things came up, we needed to house our own data because cloud and cloud infrastructure wasn’t even an option.”
The 2000s brought “colocation,” or shared facilities with shared computer racks. Essentially, larger companies rented rack space to smaller companies who couldn’t compete by having their own center to store or process the data they needed to. Jones said this still takes place today.
Around the 2010s is when cloud services entered the picture. Jones described the cloud as an elastic service that both businesses and consumers use.
“[Cloud services meant that people] didn’t necessarily need to host their servers, buy them, maintain them, keep them and they didn’t need to rack it next to everything else,” he said.
Instead, the cloud did all of that in one place. The cloud hosts all the data, but technology has advanced towards a larger need to process all that data. This is how humanity has gotten to the data centers of today, or hyperscalers.
Jones explained the following items are services data centers support today:
- Phones & messages: Texting, photos, maps, app data
- Banking & commerce: Payments, records, online stores
- Healthcare & public safety: Patient systems, dispatch, alerts
- Education & work: Cloud documents, learn management system (LMS), video meetings
- Entertainment: Streaming, games, social platforms
- AI services: Training, inference, automation
A standout question for Jones came from Mayor Joe St. John, who asked if these data centers ever become obsolete.
“No, just talking about the history of it, going all the way back from the 1960s and on, we’ve never seen any gap or reduction of needing a type of data center,” Jones said. “It’s always just more different types and more of a change.”
That data center from the 90s where Jones worked? He said it still operates as a data center today.
Land uses and zoning codes around big development
When considering a technology park, Hermann displayed seven things a municipality should consider with seven corresponding zoning tools.
However, he only discussed the two considerations bolded and italicized in the table below:
| Consideration | Zoning Tools |
| Siting, use and scale | Use classifications; development standards |
| Visual appearance | Buffers, street/landscape requirements, design standards |
| Water & sanitary sewer needs | Disclosure requirements, use agreements, required studies |
| Power needs | Disclosure requirements, utility coordination, generator standards |
| Fiscal | Development agreements, tax incentive criteria, community betterment funds |
| Noise | Noise limits and testing requirements |
| Construction | Traffic plans, road use agreements, temporary use permits |
For siting, use and scale, Hermann commended the city on its zoning code overall. However, a key point he explained was that the city has to be able to adapt when different developments come up, especially with its zoning code.
Hermann compared a large user, like a data center, as something the city may want to push towards the center of a site and screen it using various berms, landscaping and sloping techniques to make it blend into the area without making it appear as if the city is hiding something back there.
But if there’s a restaurant that’s built near this large user that the employees of the large user would frequent as well as other community members, then Hermann said these techniques would be different from the large site’s.
St. John and Hermann agreed that the word “dynamic” fits how local municipalities need to be when approaching zoning codes, development plans and more in terms of projects that would intertwine with a large user project like a data center.
Hermann detailed all kinds of methods to these techniques that MKSK has utilized for different projects around Ohio, but he focused on New Albany and Dublin as examples for council.
He laid out how each city has done some good and bad things in terms of how far a site is set back from the road, or how much of the building is visible through a coordinated tree line. He clarified that there are a lot of pieces to a data center that council can have laid out in a possible development plan.
For example, if council wants this possible Amazon data center to be fully water-cooled, Hermann said council can push for that in a development plan.
